old-quests
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Breakfast topic: Quest detritus
Anne talked recently about all the bits and pieces that tend to accumulate in a packrat's bank vault, and I'm one of the guilty parties. I'm a hardcore collector of feral staves, tier sets, tabards, and assorted items that I just can't bring myself to delete (Seal of Ascension -- seriously, why do I still have this?). Unfortunately, the tendency carries over into quests as well. Over the course of doing Loremaster, I knocked off most of the older quests littering my log, and now I'm left with two. One's a nightmare to finish -- The Good News and The Bad News, which is part of the Scepter of the Shifting Sands line and an enormous pain in the ass due to the 10 Elementium Ores required. I've resigned myself to the quite-likely possibility that it'll be there for months to come. The other one, much like the stuff clogging my bank, is something I can't force myself to drop. Echoes of War sent people to the original version of Naxxramas, and was required for the tier 3 questline. Incredibly enough, it was even shareable when Wrath came out, and our early Naxx raids at 80 had a good laugh over it. But I'm afraid to turn it in -- not just because the follow-up quest probably isn't there anymore, but also for some reason I don't think I can articulate very well. If I turned it in, I guess I'd feel like another little piece of old Azeroth was gone forever. Do you have any quests like this sitting around in your log, and what keeps you from turning them in?
Out with the old
In response to a what I'd call a troll on the forums, Zarhym gives some thoughtful insight to a problem that's been raising its head more and more often as the game gets older and older: items and achievements that once required lots of time and/or skill to obtain are becoming easier than ever to get. Usually, when this topic comes up, we're talking about epics, but that's not always the case. Here, the item in question is the Warlock mount. It used to require a long quest chain to obtain, but after a series of decisions on Blizzard's part, you can now train it right away from the trainer as soon as you hit the required level.Zarhym says that it's just part of the game's evolution -- originally, the dreadsteed quests were part of the endgame, and just like the Hunter Rhok'delar quests, were designed to show that players had reached the pinnacle of the class. But nowadays, level 60 isn't what it used to be, and the best way to do those quests is to have a higher level character tag along with you. That's not how Blizzard designed it (and it definitely doesn't fit within the "lore" of the quest), so they ditched it.That questline is still in, just not required, but some questlines and rewards are obviously removed from the game completely -- their achievement no longer represents an equivalent challenge, so Blizzard decides to take them out. And that really seems the best way to do it -- though it's always a shame when today's players can't experience the quests the same way veteran players did back in the day, the alternative would be to have them play through content that makes no sense, and no one wants that. As Zarhym says, there will always be new challenges to take on.
