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NPC pathing and the living virtual world
In the early days of vanilla WoW, I played Alliance. It wasn't until after hitting 60 that I began playing Horde in earnest. Although I appreciated the bare, rough-and-tumble primitive nature of Orgrimmar, I always felt there was something missing -- namely, the NPCs that happily wandered Stormwind all day long. Orgrimmar didn't really have much of that sort of thing, back then. And of all the NPCs that wandered the human capital, none captured my attention so much as Ol' Emma. Emma was at the time part of a quest chain that took place in the Western Plaguelands -- a ghost in the upper level of a house in Felstone Field asked players to deliver a package to her. But Emma's charms weren't just wrapped into that quest. Ol' Emma spent her days -- and still spends her days -- walking the streets of Stormwind. I first found her walking to the well near the flight path in Stormwind, griping about how nobody respects their elders. Laughing, I moved on, but months later on a whim I decided to follow Ol' Emma to see exactly where she takes all that water she's been supposedly hauling. To my surprise, Emma walking into a building near Cathedral Square, went up the stairs, and ... stopped, facing a wall, still talking to nobody in particular. Unfortunately, this was kind of par for the course for NPCs back then.
Breakfast Topic: Who's your new favorite NPC?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. Maybe it was helping Tirion in the Plaguelands; maybe it was helping Mankrik find his wife. Everyone had a favorite NPC in the old world long before any of the Cataclysm changes took place. But now that Azeroth has been shattered and reformed, we have seen not only new faces but old favorites in new and strange ways. Questing recently (if you haven't taken the time to, you should!) has been a strange mixture of familiarity combined with entertaining surprises from characters we've never met before. Our guild has been abuzz with people having long discussions over who is the best, as most of us have been rolling up new low-level alts to poke, prod, and explore, or even just taking our mains out to do more Loremaster achievements. Some people love various quirky characters (or outright hate them), and other people like the more serious lore figures. All in all, we've had a lot to talk about regarding the people in the new Old World. If you've been out and about doing the new quests, who are your favorite new NPCs? Is it Zen'kiki in Western Plaguelands? Or Lunk from Searing Gorge and his adorable pacifism?
Breakfast Topic: How do you tag necropolis mobs?
It was an interesting time in Azeroth yesterday. Thousands of people on each server showed up to fight against the scourge invasion. The masses were tagging mobs left and right, all in hopes to get some elusive Necrotic Runes.All this open PvE fighting has brought up an interesting question, one that many people have some strong feelings on. What is the appropriate way to tag mobs? Is it okay to camp spawn points and AoE immediately in order to grab some scourge? Is it okay to take away another person's Shadow of Doom? What about if you accidently tag something you shouldn't have? Do you give them some gold in exchange?I have to admit, after trying for over two hours to summon a Shadow of Doom and tag it, my group decided to go a different route. We went to a new spawn point, summoned all four, and threw out as much AoE as possible. Our thought was that doing this would mean we'd at least be able to get one Shadow (we ended up getting them all). This of course upset everyone else that was there – but we had tried for a while before hand to get a single one. And we did summon all the Shadows ourselves.While this might be a questionable activity to some, it's what we did. But what would you do? How have you handled, and will you handle, tagging these mobs?
