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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Loremaster- aka banging my head against the wall

For those of you who don't play World of Warcraft, this might be as foreign sounding as the Sindragosa post a few days ago. But I will do my best...

In their infinite wisdom, Blizzard (the creators of the game) decided to put in something called achievements. As the name implies, these track your achievements in the game. And by "achievements," I meant anything that the creators arbitrarily decided was an achievement. Now, there is no reward (except bragging rights) for these achievements, yet. I am convinced it was just a way for Blizzard to keep people interested and playing the game once they reached the maximum level (currently 80).

Achievements vary, they can be anything from running around a whole zone and discovering every part of it (if you discover every single part of every single zone, and there are a lot in the game, you get a special "Explorer" title and an Explorer tabard you can wear, so I guess there are some very useless rewards after all), to collecting as many pets as possible (they have little "vanity" pets in the game that do absolutely nothing but look cute and follow you around, at 50 pets and at 75 pets you get a little bonus pet), to killing a certain creature or boss, to doing every single quest in the whole game.

Well, that last one, doing every single quest in the game is called the Loremaster achievement, because in theory, in the process of doing every single quest in the game you will learn a lot about the lore behind the game. Now, between vanilla WoW (the player's slang term for the original game) and the two expansions (Burning Crusade or BC and Wrath of the Lich King or WofLK) there are around 4000 quests in the game. 4000 little tasks for you to do (well, some aren't so little and take a lot of time and effort). Some are as stupid as some guy being too lazy to turn around and telling you to go talk to the guy standing right next to him, some involve killing a set number of a certain kind of creature, some involve bringing back items, etc.

There are 4 continents in the game, Northrend added for WofLK, Outlands added for BC and the original 2, Eastern Kingdom (which is technically two different continents connected by a big bridge) and Kalimdor. So far, I have completed every quest in Northrend and every quest in Outlands. I'm at 621 out of 685 in Kalimdor and about 330 out of 550 in Eastern Kingdom. Now, you might say, why the hell have you done that many quests when there is absolutely no reason to? Or you might say, but look, you're almost done. Well, folks, therein lies the problem. I still have plenty of quests left to do in Eastern Kingdom, but of those last 60 or so in Kalimdor... well, I can't find them. And even if I could find a few more here and there, somehow I doubt that will add up to 60. I'm that close and I feel like giving up. Yes, I know, it's a game. And a stupid use of my time, I'll admit that. But to come that close and feel like I'm going to fail anyway makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

2 comments:

  1. The REALLY bad part, and the main reason I have not attempted to go for Loremaster in the first place is I'm not sure what's going to happen to them when Cataclysm releases. Since most of the zones are receiving total redesigns, many of the quests on both continents will either be changed, moved, or entirely removed... and many more quests add in their stead. If they elect to make Loremaster follow the NEW quest lines, then all the existing work will be for nothing. :(

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  2. Well, in theory, once I have the achievement, they won't take it away from me. Just like they didn't take away the ones people had completed before they changed the way the World Event achievements worked, etc. So, here's hoping. I think I have 6 or 8 quests left to complete in Kalimdor.

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