Project Lore

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?

Click to read more ...

There I was, running around killing Putrid Abominations to collect their oozing, purple guts and searching through Zul'Drak's Reliquary of Agony to find gooey ghoul drools, when it dawned on me. It's not enough that we've massacred villages, stuck banners through our enemies' carcasses as a warning to others, and brought back the heads of their warlords in exchange for a new, shiny trinket. No, all that's not enough. The oftentimes vile, repugnant World of Warcraft sends us hardened war heroes to do the tasks that no others dare do. And so I had been roped in to performing this raunchy You can run, but you can't hide quest, getting puked on along the way by the always-nasty Abominations. And yet, perhaps I should have been thankful. I mean, I could have been the one vomiting.  Like I was back in Outland, when Borak, son of Oronok (curse the name!) asked me to collect a Rotton Arakkoa Egg. What he failed to mention is that I'd have to search through dozens of eggs to find a good one. And all those that weren't perfect cast a disease that not only brought down my health, but also had me projectile vomiting. Of course, upon turning in that quest, everyone else started puking, too. Lovely. Perhaps a slight step up from that are all the damn poop quests that people seem to love sending us on. I've searched through the excrement of felhounds, bats in the depths of Razorfen Kraul, cliff giants and Nagrand wildlife. And from that last one, I later had to eat Nagrand Cherries created from the poo I searched through. All in the name of defeating Lake Spirits. The poop quests are so frequent that I recall a WoW Forums thread a while back that suggested there be an achievement for completing them all. One poster suggested it could be called, "I hope you washed your hands." Not a bad idea. So what would you peg for some of the nastier quests in WoW? I know there are plenty of other gross  substances we've been asked to brave other than vomit and poop - which made your skin crawl?

Click to read more ...