What a chore

People are complaining about WOW.  This, it should be noted, is not new.  According to the forums WOW is over, done, awful, and abandoned by Blizzard... and this has been true since about 2005 if I recall correctly.  The current crop of complaints looks something like this post describes with people feeling like doing their garrison maintenance is a chore and there is nothing fun to do.  Let us consider these complaints.

First off, there is an issue that people feel like the garrison chores are... well... chores.  They are things you need to do regularly and you miss out if you don't log in.  In my case I need to buy ore and herbs to fuel my research, shops, and trading post.  I need to collect quests and do a heroic or two to actually complete those quests.  Then I need to constantly log in to send my followers off on missions.  This all takes at least an hour a day though I can easily spend a lot more than that.

Fundamentally though this isn't anything new when you compare it to old expansions and the daily quests that were rampant there, especially the rep grinds.  Every day that you do not do all the daily stuff you lose out but you can quite easily do all kinds of things without ever paying attention to those dailies.  There are definitely people out there who don't like the daily gating of things and who want to be able to grind up any one thing for 16 hours a day.  That way they never feel obligated to do any one thing on any one day.  That is fine and all but because there are so many things in the game you can grind to your heart's content I don't give this complaint much credit.  Sure, there are a few things you are limited in how much you can do them, and if that is all you have to whine about things seem pretty good.

However, I do think that there are some legit complaints out there.  Garrisons aren't all that customizable and it seems like it wouldn't have been all that hard to allow players to add in features themselves and have more control over the exact layout.  They don't need quite as much control as say The Sims allows but even if you could choose from a subset of layouts for various parts of the garrison that would be good.  Choosing banner colours, trees vs. rocks, chairs vs. couches, or fireplace appearances would have made people feel more like their garrison is their very own.

The other thing you can't deny is that it is lonely at the top.  While running a garrison and being a general is fantastic and all there aren't other players hanging around with you.  In the good ole days we sat around Ironforge chatting and kvetching and wasting time in piles.  Just like all player housing garrisons have the issue that you sit in your house alone because everybody else is in their house alone.  Unless you want to have a situation like the Spice Wars in Glitch where people battled over how communal space would be organized you just can't allow players to both have control over their environment and share environments with one another.  Battle is inevitable in such cases.

So if anyone complains that chores in WOW are too much like chores then I say just don't do them.  Set yourself free from the crushing oppression of yellow symbols on maps and just do what is fun.  If you don't find pet battles, dungeons, raiding, open pvp, competitive pvp, exploring, questing, running a garrison, collecting mounts, doing achievements, or any of the many other things available in WOW to be entertaining anymore then definitely the solution is to quit.

But you needn't go off about how WOW has nothing to do.  It has a bazillion things to do, you just don't want to do them.  Embrace it without assigning fault and move on.