I've been watching Giant Bomb for a little while before the whole quest thing started. I've always enjoyed their content, and the comments under the videos were always people sounding off on their opinions, whether or not they were dumb, they always at least related to the video at hand. However, with this new "First!" quest, people are being rewarded for the "First!" post, which is always a stupid, but extremely harmless thing. Since the creation of this quest, there are now several "First!" comments for each video, followed by people griping about not getting the quest, or how it's a stupid thing. Essentially this has had the opposite effect and has made the first page of comments essentially useless. I usually skip to the second page by instinct now, to avoid people griping.

This seems to be the opposite intention of the whole quest system. I always assumed it was supposed to foster genuine communication, and encourage people to explore the database and community features. Basically, it was the site version of frosh week, it's supposed to get you hyped about being at the site and let you know what awesome things are there. Even the Halo:Reach early beta quest was a clever use of the system, designed to create a fair way of doing such a giveaway. It could be argued that a lot of the quests are a double edged sword. Quests to make topics could end in interesting communication or forum spam, but we hope that the former is more valuable than the latter is detracting.  However, the first comment thing doesn't even seem to have a use. Is there anything gained from being the first person to go to a new video page for us the community or for the Giant Bomb staff?

I wish someone could explain the rationale behind this, other than "we just wanted there to be something for you to do" because many of the other quests succeed in this task and actually encourage positive interaction. This quest seems to do the exact opposite: people who are just excited about quests are being actively pissed off by their inability to beat others to the punch. And those of us who abstain*, or who have gotten it already, have to deal with their (justified?) whining. What's next, rewarding people for posting spoilers for the video above, or for creating the longest quote tree? I get that some people on the site might think it's funny in an ironic way, but in reality it's just creating less on topic discourse and communication, and I thought that was what this site was all about.

*Full disclosure: I haven't gotten this quest, and I haven't really tried, since when I am able to watch videos, they usually have been up for several hours. I will probably never get a first comment on a video, and I don't really mind.