The Stack

The Lunar Festival has begun in Azeroth. Apparently this is an annual thing, and lasts for at least a week. You really can’t escape noticing it: in all the capital cities, people are setting off fireworks, because doing so starts a quest chain and a suite of Achievements involving a special festival-only zone, a hidden elfin glade where Horde and Alliance alike mix peacefully. There, you can turn in festival coins for special goodies. The festival coins, in turn, are obtained from guides who appeared in the various cities and towns, each guide giving one coin per customer. So ultimately the festival is a way to encourage people to travel around Azeroth, revisiting all the places you’ve been to already.

The thing is, I’ve already been doing a fair amount of that lately. Completist that I am, I decided a few days ago that Pleasance really should be availing herself of all the opportunities that the greater Undercity metro area affords, particularly those that help with achievements down the road. There are “exploration” achievements, for visiting every named area in a region. ¹I’m probably getting the terms wrong here. Continents are divided into what I’m calling “regions”, which are generally what you see when you pull up the world map. There are achievements for sampling the different kinds of food and drink, and for interacting with the non-hostile wildlife. Just from following the quest tree, Pleasance was essentially on her third region, but I sent her back to deal with the previous two more thoroughly. I wish I had waited until the Festival to do this.

Then there’s the deal with Oleari. At a certain point, the quests in Mulgore (the Tauren starting region) dry up, and you get assigned quests to go to other places — specifically, Orgrimmar and Silverpine Forest. Up to this point, I had been thinking of quests as divided up by race: there’s the Orc quest chain and the Undead quest chain and the Tauren quest chain. This is true at very low levels: each race’s starting area has its own set of starting quests. But after that, it’s more like there’s a quest chain for each of the two main continents. Pleasance and Crumbcake started on different continents, so I didn’t notice this from leveling them up. But the moment Oleari landed in Orgrimmar, she started getting offered quests that I had already done with Crumbcake. My fault for trying to run three characters simultaneously, I suppose. I should just pick one and run with it.

And if I pick one, it’ll probably be Oleari, because she’s got more potential to be useful in a group than Crumbcake, and because she still has the opportunity to not make some of the mistakes I made with Pleasance. (Oleari is trying out the fishing holes and sampling the local cheeses as she goes.) But I’m growing weary of treading old ground, and that’s a good sign that it’s time to stop this obsessive daily play. I’m not done exploring this game, and still have things to say about it, but I’m not married to it, and I think it’s time I started seeing other games again. We’ll be revisiting it by and by.