In Anatomy of a Quest – part 1: Objectives we talked about the 3 guidelines of  a quality goal, how to set them, and also how Blizzard uses these goals to keep players playing World of Warcraft.

So now that we have the Guide Lines for Setting a Quality goal, lets get to the best part of the achievement process: The Rewards! These are your reasons for accepting the quests in the first place… because let’s face it – without some kind of reward, getting covered in boar’s blood isn’t very appealing (to me anyway).

The Need To Improve

Rewards vary from quest to quest and typically the more risk, the greater the reward, this is usually true IRL as well! Say you want to gain money IRL, the safer the investment is, the less reward gained. Sure a Certificate of Deposit is safe, but 3% interest rate hardly keeps up with inflation much less creates a profit. The quests in game that reward you with epic or legendary items tend to require more time, effort, gold and risk than a quest that rewards with uncommon items. Killing 12 boars isn’t as risky as bringing Onyxia’s head to Orgrimmar so the reward shouldn’t be as great!

The first thing I do is open my quest log, compare the quest rewards to what I have already and see if the reward is an upgrade for me. If it isn’t the chances of me doing that quest are greatly diminished. Why achieve a goal that doesn’t move me in a positive direction?

Need Motivation?

Look no further than the rewards! Compare the reward to what you currently have and if it’s significant enough you will find that motivation becomes an easier task than before. Any time you feel unmotivated to do something, ask yourself three things:

1. What is the reward I want to achieve?
2. What will I gain from achieving this?
3. How will this improve my character?

If your answers to these questions don’t compel you to action, either your goal isn’t worth doing or you are using the wrong reasons. In order for these questions to spark a burning desire to achieve there must be emotion behind your reasons, not just sound logical decisions. Once emotion enters the equation an interesting thing happens – it’s no longer working towards your goals, its achieving them!

Feeling Great

When you finally complete all the objectives in a quest, turning the quest in and receiving the rewards is… well, rewarding! Achievement breeds an incredible feeling of accomplishment, self esteem and helps to develop your power for making decision and accomplishing more! The truly amazing thing about quests IRL is that the rewards continue! Each time you work out for instance, you increase your stats, the next time you accomplish a goal you don’t lose the previous stats to get new ones, its cumulative!

What are some rewards that motivate you?

In the next of this mini-series we will cover following through with the quest!

<< Anatomy of a Quest – Part 1: Objectives

In his latest blog post, Steve Pavlina talks about the personal and financial devlopment lessons he has learned IRL and compares them with the MMORPG world. The post is well written and contains some paradigm-shifting concepts for developing financial wealth that Steve is famous for.

Check out the post entitled: Your Wealthy Avatar (stevepavlina.com)

For those of you who don’t know who Steve Pavlina is… He has a unique understanding on the whole field of personal development that I find refreshing. He has been one of my biggest inspirations for blogging and for personal development! Definitely check out his site!

This is the first post of a series on Blizzard’s quest creation strategies and how to use them to succeed IRL.

Anyone who has spent even a little amount of time in World of Warcraft (and most other MMO’s) has experienced quests. Quests are the bread and butter for leveling, for gaining new armor, and making money in the online world. But what is a quest really? What about a quest has caused millions of people to spend countless hours working away at them? What can we learn from these quests and apply IRL? That’s what this series aims to answer! Let’s get to it.

Objective

The first part of a quest we will look at is the objective. The objective is what you are actually trying to accomplish. When you talk to someone with that familiar yellow ! above their heads, you are given an objective to complete. This can range from anything like kill 12 wild boars to return with the head of a dragon in your backpack! All physical limitation of size aside, Blizzard does a great job of creating tons of quests to keep people motivated and happy. So what can we learn from this? How to set a quality goal.

Quality Goals

There are certain aspects of a goal that make it quality and more likely that the goal will actually be accomplished.

1. Specific – Goals that are specific in objective are much likelier to get done. Imagine if instead of “Kill 12 wild boars and return to me.” Farmer Ned had said “Go kill some boars and come back to me” you might have gone out, killed a few boars, came back to Farmer Ned and wondered why in the world you couldn’t turn the quest in! This would lead to some frustration and many of players would have quit playing all together (or at least given up on quests). So it then makes sense to make your goals specific.
2. Measurable - Another important aspect is the ability to measure the goal. Could someone other than you track your progress? Without seeing any results or any progress we don’t gain momentum and momentum is HUGE for accomplishing your goals! Remember the phrase from high school physics: Objects in motion have a tendency to stay in motion while objects at rest have a tendency to stay at rest. In game, when you take a step towards completing a quest it tells you and alerts you on your screen. 5/12 Boars Slain. Hey, I’m making progress! This isn’t so bad, let’s keep going!
3. Attainable - In WoW’s Quest Log, quest names are typically colored according to the difficulty relative to your current level. A Gray is a trivial quest, Green is an easy quest, Yellow is on par for your level, Orange is a bit harder to attain, and Red is difficult! Then they take it even further by adding ‘Group’ and ‘Raid’ to alert you in advance it will be difficult to do this solo. Imagine trying to solo a Red group quest! It’s probably unattainable for you in the current moment but that doesn’t mean abandon the quest and give up, but that’s what most people do. They set unrealistic and unattainable goals, fail to meet this huge expectation, then abandon the goal and give up trying to improve. Set attainable goals IRL and as you accomplish them you will begin to develop momentum and ‘XP’ in accomplishing your goals.

By creating quests that follow these guidelines for Quality Goals, Blizzard is able to keep you moving towards the long term goal of hitting 80 and playing the end game, where a whole other set of goals and quests that follow these guidelines keep you playing and paying!

Next time you go to set a goal remember these guidelines for setting the goal and use Blizzard’s secret formula for goal setting success. If you don’t think it really works, check out this link: World Of Warcraft Players Racking Up 16 Million Quests A Day (kotaku.com)

In the next post of this mini-series we will go over everyone’s favorite part of the quest: Rewards!

Read on: Anatomy of a Quest – Part 2: Rewards >>