A Day in the Life

You can tell that I'm a gamer from my YouTube home page. There's a ton of gamer related links, from video games to pencil and paper RPGs to board games, and in between you find some trailers, music, and some sports related suggestions. Anyhoo, a reaction video by Asmongold popped up entitled "Shadowlands Hurt WoW Forever" appeared, and I thought, "Yeah, you could make that argument. I wonder who he's reacting to?"

So I went and looked, and found he was reacting to a snippet from a Preach Gaming livestream:

I figured the smart move was to watch Preach's original (above), because I'd rather make my own impressions.*

Preach admits in the video clip that he's going to develop this into a full video post, which is something that I would very much like to see, because he's far more plugged into the WoW community these days than I ever was even back in the day.** But one focus he's been considering at this point in the video is what he calls A Day in the Life of various MMOs, as in what do you do when you login to, say, FFXIV, WoW, GW2, etc. for the day. I'd also like him to do that for WoW Classic, because I do wonder about how Wrath Classic compares with Retail in terms of what people do in a day in the life.

I know what a sizeable number of people did for lot of TBC Classic, and that was three things: a) finish a bunch of daily quests for gold and/or reputation, b) run the Normal and Heroic dungeon daily quests for badges and/or gold, and c) raid if it was raid night and/or work on their attunement quest chains for raiding. Some leveled alts, but a lot of those finished leveling up by the time Phase 3 of 6 rolled around, because my experience leveling Linna and Neve later in the expac was that the leveling areas and leveling dungeons were devoid of non-max level toons.

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But I do wonder what a typical day in the life of various MMOs does look like.

I read this with Paul McCartney's voice.
From @beatlesbeetwif and ifunny.co.

There isn't a singular "typical WoW player" in as much as there isn't a "typical GW2 player" or "FFXIV player", but I read enough blogs to get a feel for how much the Holy Trinity of Endgame --raids, (Mythic+) dungeons, and PvP-- dominates both Retail and Classic WoW. And I also know the joke about Endgame in FFXIV being "fashion" from my son, but I do wonder about what a typical day in the life is for a sizable portion of the player base of various MMOs. Alas that the only people with the actual source of truth to the matter are the game companies themselves, but I do commend Preach for wanting to try to find out. He has the visibility to make a go at it, whereas any attempt from my corner of the MMO-land would vanish into the ether.

Preach mentioned in the video that he believes that WoW needs to break out of its current Endgame grind by providing more "fun" things to do in WoW. And I do agree with him, but I suspect that most of the "fun" things that Blizz would eventually come up with involve daily quests, because Blizzard is a firm believer in providing a carrot on a stick*** (typically via daily quests) to encourage people to do those things. And if the MMO player base has proven one thing, it's that they have a knack of converting the optional into mandatory. So we'll see.

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It's not that the question hasn't been raised before, because it has in the official Blizzard forums last year, but what makes Preach's thought experiment different is how the various MMOs compare to each other. It might be a bit of a fool's errand given the complexity of the major MMOs out there, but in my experience the various MMOs do have different player bases that have unique quirks. I'm fond of mentioning the band that plays on Fridays after work on the Gladden server in LOTRO, but my oldest reminded me that there is an actual group --The Brandywine Theater Company-- that puts on musicals in LOTRO. 

Seriously.

They've put on Phantom of the Opera and Wicked, and while I can't recall what their upcoming production is, you can bet that they'll attack it with gusto.

Obviously these are a bit of an outlier to the "average" player, but they provide an insight into the differences that LOTRO has from other MMOs. 

So I'd definitely be curious about the differences between the MMOs from an "average player" standpoint. 

Good luck with that, Preach.

*In parts of the video it sounds like Preach is chowing down on dinner --which if I tried to pull that the spirit of my dead father would materialize and rip me a new one-- but once I realized it was the equivalent of talking at a bar while noshing on some food I was fine with it. Just my own upbringing coming back to haunt me.

**If Mike Ybarra said "Who?" in response to my name like he allegedly did when he was told Preach was visiting the studio, I'd have no issues with it at all. I mean, at best I was a minnow in the WoW-verse. But Ybarra saying that about Preach, when Ybarra presented himself as "one of us" as a hardcore raider and given that Preach is fairly well known within WoW hardcore/streaming circles... Yeah, I'm not believing the Ybarra "one of us" act one bit. I can smell the bullshit from Anaheim all the way here in the Midwest.

***Not the Carrot on a Stick trinket, mind you...

EtA: Made some tweaks in about three sentences for clarity.