Questing SWTOR VS WOW

Yesterday I was doing the Aldaaran Bonus Series with my level 40 Operative and I get these 2 quests at the same area, right next to each other, both require 4 drops from specific mobs. I'm going for the first one, killed 2 of these mobs, no drops. I must be doing something wrong, right? No way I didn't get a drop twice while killing the right mob. I read the quest description, a rare thing by itself, because normally everything you need to know is part of the dialogs and built in quest tracker, couldn't figure out what I'm doing wrong, this looks like the mob I have to kill. As I'm one of these people who have to experience all the content, I wasn't about to let it go. Alt tabbed and looked for it online, turns out the drop rate is 30-40%, so I killed about 10-12 more and finished it. Went for the second quest, 4 kills, 4 drops, as usual, this is how quests normally are.



While checking online for a solution I actually found an entire thread about this quest, talking about how silly and annoying this quest is with comments like "what were they thinking designing this quest?". I swear Bioware put this quest there on purpose to remind WOW players what questing was like and how things here are better :)

I doubt they really did it for this reason, but this got me thinking about how SWTOR quests are compared to how it used to be in WOW.

In SWTOR quests constantly give you the feeling of progression, the days of grinding the same type of mob over and over again are behind us. If you kill a mob it can only be because a. You have an objective to kill it b. You need a drop from him which you'll get c. It's in your way toward where you need to go. The process of killing multiple mobs and getting nothing out of it simply doesn't exist. Until I hit this quest, I didn't realize just how much more fun and rewarding questing in SWTOR is.

The closest thing to this grind type quests is the bonus quest objectives to kill x mobs. However these are just potential extra xp makers, you don't really take and return a quest, you can skip it all together and miss nothing if you like and 4/5 times you accomplish these objectives anyway by doing the main quest objective.

Everyone, including me in previous posts, discuss how great the plot oriented objectives are, the dialogs, the depth of the quests, the cut scenes. But also the quests themselves are so much better designed and less "grindy" than WOW and the other MMOs of old. I still have WOW installed on my machine, I always thought I'll end up getting back to it one day. However, after playing SWTOR, I just can't think of myself questing in WOW again, it just feels so much like a 7 years old game.

Maybe SWTOR will never pass WOW subscription numbers or long run as the only big MMO, but what it does do, is showing us that things these days can be done better. The next king of MMO will have to do them better. The old formula of mindless grinding to make sure you keep playing and paying is dead.