Project Lore

I'll admit it, Icecrown Citadel is already starting to wear a little thin. No, my guild hasn't conquered it yet. And we haven't even started Hard Modes (which seem to be a mixed bag in terms of difficulty themselves), but we're sort of at that point where everything is on farm except for one or two fights that we continually butt our heads against week after week.

Progress, at this point, is being made at a snail's pace. So, with little else to do when I log on and we aren't raiding, I've been turning my eye towards earning old world achievements once again. At the top of my priority list have been those associated with faction reputation (like Timbermaw Hold or the Argent Dawn) and the notoriously frustrating Loremaster title.

For those of you not in pursuit of such goals, finding and completing every quest can be quite maddening. You can't always depend on quest hubs, as some start as drops from random creatures, or can only be found in the farthest corners of a given zone. The hunt only gets worse the more that you complete, since the remaining ones are all that much harder to discover.

But if there's one thing that makes this journey far more annoying than it needs to be, it's all the absolutely useless junk that finds its way into your bags! Isn't there an easy way to solve this problem?

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Wishful Thinking is a column for the theorycrafting behind World of Warcraft.  No, not the number crunching madness perfected by the folks at ElitistJerks, but the features, abilities, and design ideas that the Project Lore writers conjure from their squishy pink stuff. Well, readers. I don't know about you, but I've been working on that old Loremaster title for some time now. It was easy enough to complete all of the Northrend zones, perhaps because they were freshest in my mind. But the old world? Not a chance! On my main, Amatera, I must've leveled through those areas at least three or four years ago. And if you're like me, then you know the real pain isn't necessarily doing all the quests you missed, but finding them in the first place. Why, just the other day, I decided to pick up the torch again and make some progress on the achievement. I flew over to Tarren Mill and found a whole bank of quests that I had never actually finished. I'm talk at least six or seven missions that I apparently didn't touch on this character. Of course, I thought I'd done them, but that might just because when leveling up one of my numerous alts, I made sure to clear out the area before moving on. Time had fogged up my memory, and in all likelihood, I pushed Amatera forward to new zones where there were better experience-gaining opportunities to be had and never looked back. Oh, and then there's Nagrand. The only zone in Outland that I've yet to get the questing achievement for. I've heard it's a little harder to finish on the Horde side, and that I'm not the only one who's had trouble with it in the past, but at the same time there are people that have obviously done what, for me, seems currently impossible. In other words, I must be missing something. One possible candidate is this quest: I'm Saved! But the problem is that the NPC needed to complete it spawns seemingly at random. I've spent long spans of time at Nesingwary's camp waiting for her to show up and she never does. Do you know what makes it even worse, though? I need two more quests to get the Nagrand achievement. And I have absolutely zero clue as to what the second might be. This is why I'm putting out the call to Blizzard: where's my completed quest log? It seems like such a simple feature to implement that you might wonder why it wasn't included with the game when it launched. I'd love a way to easily check an online database against a list of my finished quests to figure out which ones I'm missing. Sure, there's always flying from hub to hub and picking up tasks from NPCs with punctuation over their heads, but others aren't that easy to find, like those that might require a random drop from a group of enemies. And it goes beyond achievement tracking, too. I can't count the number of times someone has asked me if I've completed a specific quest and I've had to go all the way back to the quest-giver to see if there was still an exclamation point there. It's a real shame, because they've made some significant improvements to the quest log over the years, and they're set to do it again with 3.3. The only two reasons I can think of for not implementing a completed quest tracker is because there is either some technical issue preventing them from doing so, or it's simply something they don't deem important enough to spend time developing. I'd like to rule out the former, because it seems that the game already knows what missions you have and haven't done. After all, achievements like the Loremaster ones can keep track of them numerically. They'll tell you how many you've finished, just not which ones. Currently, the only solution is to download an add-on that can do it for you, but they tend to only be able to log quests you've completed since installing them, and not any of the ones before that. I feel like I'm about to give up on my Loremaster title, but there is one shining hope on the horizon. I speak of: account-wide achievements. When Cataclysm hits, I already know I'm going to roll a Goblin alt, and I can make sure that I do everything right from the very beginning. Not to mention, of course, that the quests themselves will likely change with the expansion, meaning that Loremaster achievements will likely be reset, or moved to Feats of Strength and replaced with new ones for the old world anyway. But this is one of those simple conveniences I still can't believe hasn't made its way into the game just yet. What say you, readers? Wouldn't it make your life a whole lot easier?

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While love might be a little bit of a strong word, I can at least say that I heartily embrace the achievement system that was introduced to World of Warcraft back in patch 3.0. My enjoyment of what amounts to a small pop up and a few more points is probably evident by anyone who has looked at my WoW Armory Page or had a glimpse of Executus' page on WoW-Achievements (where, btw, I am in the top 20 on the server... no biggie, I'm just sayin'). Contrary to what many people will tell you, I don't complete achievements to inflate my online ego (that's what WoW-Heroes is for). A lot of the rewards I've been granted by achievements are sitting in my bank, and many of the titles have graced the space above my character's head for just a few seconds before they were replaced with my old favorites - namely Loremaster, the Seeker, or, most recently, the Undying. No, I complete the achievements for completion's sake. WoW has a lot to offer players, and I want to see as much of it as I can. I've completed nearly every quest in the game on the Alliance side (and a bunch on the Horde side, too). I know the monotony of grinding Timbermaw Hold rep. I know the exhilaration of the last 30% of Kel'Thuzad on an Undying run. I know where to find all of the Elders for the Lunar Festival, and I've opened every single red envelope that they sent me. With Love is in the Air coming up this week, I have a short window to get a little closer to that 310% speed Violet Proto Drake. I don't know about you, but I'll be following WoW Insider's Fool for Love Guide until that golden window comes up. Maybe longer. I didn't used to be like this before the achievements were introduced, so part of it might be an obsessive compulsion in me to see those pop ups and hear the distinct sound they make. I know plenty of people who don't want to go around /loving and killing critters, people who only like achievements that take "skill," and people who will only do the achievements that have rewards. I can see where all of them are coming from. People play WoW for a million different reasons. I'm not an AH junkie or an arena fiend, I'm an achievement whore. It's just what I do. Do you complete achievments, or do you just not care?

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