The Stack

One immediately noticeable change to the capital cities happened during my time away from Azeroth: more of them have their own Fishing and Cooking daily quests. In addition to Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff (the Tauren capital) and apparently the Undercity (Undead capital) now have them, and each of these cities has its own Achievement for doing them. Apparently the the same has happened on the Alliance cities.

I’m close to getting the Fishing one for Thunder Bluff, which is easy for me to go to: despite all my roaming, I still keep it as Oleari’s designated “home base”, the place that I can teleport back to by using my “hearthstone”. It would seem almost traitorous to change that now. I’m less close to the one for Cooking, not because I’ve been doing it less often, but because the random number generator seems to always pick the same one: a quest to grind bowls of corn located in various buildings. Like most of these quests, it’s just a little window dressing on the task of finding the sparkly things to click, but the fact that the bowls are all behind walls gives it a slight hide-and-seek aspect.

The cooking and fishing dailies in Thunder Bluff are basically similar to the ones in Orgrimmar, but I’m finding them a lot quicker to complete. The reason: lack of competition. When the chef in Orgrimmar sent me to collect cactus pears, I’d have to run around the whole city trying to spot a cactus that was ready to be harvested before anyone else noticed it. In Thunder Bluff, I’m generally the only person doing the quests. Well, Thunder Bluff has always been a less crowded place, something of a backwater really, whereas Orgrimmar is the capital of the entire Horde side, the central point that all zeppelin routes converge to, and sometimes crowded enough to seriously interfere with graphics performance. Probably most Horde players set their home base there when they don’t have a compelling reason to do otherwise.

But then, perhaps there’s less competition in Orgrimmar as well, now that the people looking to do cooking and fishing dailies have a choice of three places to do them, and now that the real die-hards have maxed out and cooked everything, and now that the player base is definitely shrinking. Blizzard recently reported a reduction in the number of subscribers for the first time, from 12 million to a mere 11 million, the poor dears. I suppose it’s the beginning of the end.