Breakfast Topic: Game notes
Maybe it's a girl thing. Back when we started playing World of Warcraft, my wife had a small journal that contained her notes on the game -- crafting materials, costs of vendor items, best-in-slot gear, etc. It helped guide her through the game and was especially helpful back then before we discovered helpful sites like WoW Insider (before it became WoW.com). I found it funny, then, to discover that a friend of mine used to do the same thing when she uploaded some pictures of an old journal that she'd found detailing all her goals for the game, her macros and other game notes.
In hindsight, I used to do similar note-taking, albeit without using an actual paper journal. I surprised my wife one time by firing up a spreadsheet program to list down my gear upgrade path, listing the honor I needed as well as the honor I had currently. I listed the slots and the priority of upgrades, allowing me to plan my purchases ahead instead of going to the vendors willy-nilly and buying whatever suited my fancy. I calculated item values and my resilience totals, planning the most efficient upgrades before the GearScore addon messed up the game became popular. She knows how much I detest using the program and how much I couldn't keep a proper diary, so she found the lengths I went to regarding my gear quite amusing.
How do you keep track of your game progress? Do you write down your goals somewhere like a journal? Do you list down your gear upgrades and plan the dungeons you visit, or do you just roll on whatever seems like an upgrade? Do you research the best items available and plan on how to get them? If so, where do you keep those notes? With so many changes coming up in Cataclysm, it seems like a fine time to start taking notes again. I think, maybe, I might just keep an honest-to-goodness notebook this time.
