The Hook

Blog Azeroth – Shared Topic for the week of June 6th, 2011
Shared Topic Idea: Premium Services

Despite a well-publicized dip in subscriber numbers, most WoW players have stuck around. But those folks didn’t leave for no reason, so what keeps you coming back and still playing? Is it the friends? The new content? Old content still to explore? Alts? PvP? Roleplaying?

– Ringo Flinthammer

I’m hopeless. 100%, no-holds-barred, absolutely and totally hopeless. No drug can right my brain, no therapy can retrain my thoughts. I am doomed to forever walk this Earth as a broken and, well, hopeless individual.

You see, I’m a completionist.

I have talked about this before, so it will likely come as no surprise that some part of me gets a huge thrill from doing extremely esoteric and arcane things in order to get little bars full of green or make fractions go from 0/1000 to 1000/1000.

With World of Warcraft, my completionist itch has plenty of room for scratching. My main, Aliera, just recently got up to 40 exalted reputations and still has a few old BC ones to churn through. (Unfortunately, I am not currently in a position where I can work toward getting the raid factions knocked out.) Furthermore, I went through and did Loremaster before Cataclysm, but will soon embark upon completing it again for all the achievements in Cataclysm. Mount collecting, pet collecting, and profession recipe collecting all feature in to-do list as well.

But I don’t just have one character to deal with. No-no, I am a Pokemon master through and through; gotta have one of each class at or on their way to max level. Add to this having each profession at or nearly at max. Oh, and did I mention that I also want to gather up every recipe for all those professions too?

Some of those professions are especially despicable when it comes to gathering up all the recipes. Witness jewelcrafting. Wrath and Cataclysm each have vendors with daily quests for picking up recipes over time. The bad news is that only one token can be (reasonably) earned each day. The double bad news is that each recipe costs at least a couple, probably three, and maybe four or six tokens… and there are scores of recipes. I am finally getting close-ish with the Wrath-era recipes, but still have months to go before I can bid the Dalaran dailies a fond farewell.

So, long after my questing is done for my main and primary alt (or two), after I tire of running heroics and picking up gear, the thing that really keeps me coming back day after day is the desire to have complete sets: of classes, of recipes, of achievements. Someday I will even break down and learn how to pvp well (or at least passably) so that I can get as many of those related achievements as I can.

Here’s to hoping that Blizzard continue to put out an amazing game full of thoughtful stories, engaging quests, beautiful artwork, glorious music, and lots and lots of things to complete.

~ by Aliera on June 8, 2011.