Makeb's Staged Weekly

Another comparatively minor change that was announced last Wednesday is that the achievements for the staged weekly on Makeb will be removed in 4.0 and that those who actually completed them will receive a special decoration as their reward. The reason they are being removed is that the whole Makeb weekly will be revamped to "be more consistent with the other planetary weekly missions".

I actually meant to write about the Makeb weekly when it first came out, but then I rarely ever did it because it was so boring and eventually I kind of forgot about the whole thing again. It is still worth writing about however, simply because of how unusual it is.

Most good daily hubs give you a bunch of quests which you can complete in short succession since they are all in the same area or at least close to each other so that they can be done in one circuit of the map. By those standards, Makeb was a terrible daily hub. The staged weekly would only allow you to pick up one quest at a time, and it would be long and annoying to boot, often requiring you to traverse a whole new mesa and kills dozens of mobs. Once it was finally completed and handed in, you'd be allowed to pick up one other quest... and then had to repeat the whole thing six times to complete the weekly.

The question I always asked myself was: Why? It seems like a very odd design choice, unless you're intentionally trying to draw out the questing as long as possible, even at the risk of boring your players. To this day I can only guess what Bioware wanted to achieve with these dailies, and I suspect that the crucial hint lies in the aforementioned achievements. Certain quests would unlock other missions, and doing them in a specific order would unlock various achievement steps. From their description, it sounds like they are supposed to tell a story. It seems to me that the idea behind the Makeb weekly was to create a set of dailies that would tell a story, and one that would be slightly different each week based on the player's picks.

It actually sounds like a cool idea in theory, but the implementation just didn't work out. The "stories" were so bare bones as to be almost non-existent and there was no clear indicator of which quests were connected or even that they were supposed to be connected at all. I did the staged weekly this past week, following TOR Community's guide to unlock "endings" I hadn't seen yet, and there was just no obvious logic to which quests were connected. A quest about the local mercenaries was supposed to be followed by one about the Imperials on Makeb, then another one about the mercs. The ending had nothing to do with the Imps, yet you'd never reach it without that random mission focused on them in the middle. Why? Without a guide, it pretty much would have come down to trial and error.

So I can definitely see why Bioware wants to clean this content up. It was obviously an experiment, and not a very successful one. It didn't succeed in telling any real stories, and people just avoided doing the Makeb dailies because they took ridiculously long compared to any other daily hub and felt terribly unrewarding. I was actually surprised to see some players express annoyance about the change in the official forum thread, but as Wilhelm always says, such is the rule of MMOs - it doesn't matter what you change, it will have been someone's favourite feature.

While I'm not a huge furniture collector, I'm planning to get myself those achievements before 4.0 simply because I know that this content is going away and even if I approve of the coming changes, I want to see it one more time as it was.

I don't think that trying to make a set of dailies with a changing story was a bad idea, but I think Bioware has learned a lot since Makeb. Bounty Contract Week is a good example of how to mix things up on a daily basis and make each day a little bit different, even if it achieves the variation through RNG instead of player choices. Also, Bounty Contract Week's different story steps flow smoothly from one to the next so that you can complete the whole chain in half an hour instead of spending over an hour hopping back and forth between different locations.