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Quests are an important part of World of Warcraft. Apart from anything else they stop the game becoming boring too fast by adding to the immersion into the WoW world. But even the quests become a necessary evil after a while. The first time you run through them they are all new and shiny. The next time you do them you may try a different option or two, but after that it starts to become about efficiency.At a certain point quests become about the most efficient way of completing them, and there are two approaches to developing that efficiency. The first is the route most people take. I call it the headless-chicken approach. This is where you stumble into a quest, say something along the lines of “I remember this one, I think I need to go over there…”, and bumble through the thing in roughly the same way you did last time. The real problem with that approach is you often find yourself saying things like “Oh, I actually needed to go THERE”, “Hmmm…this guy doesn’t have the Muffin of Doom at all, it must have been that other guy” and unfortunately “Where’s my corpse?”The second route is the efficient one. It involves recording your moves, refining the strategy each time until when you start a quest you follow it from A to B to C to completion.I learned this lesson long ago in a long forgotten game called Pools of Radiance, and it holds true to any game with any sort of replay value at all. If you think you’ll be coming the same way again – make notes on the route. If you think you’ll be doing the quest again, make notes on the quest. Travel a different route for variety by all means. Try different options in the quest, but if you don’t record what you do, and you don’t have a great memory, failure to record these things will lead to walking around in circles and mucho mucho frustration.How much? Let’s go back to the game where I learned the lesson. Pools of Radiance was a forerunner to the likes of WoW. I look my group of heroes out of the walls of Phlan and journeyed up the river to a lake. In the middle of the lake was a big pyramid spewing all sorts of pollution into Phlan’s lovely clean river and my heroes had to investigate. To cut a long(really long) story short, the pyramid contained a maze of the most frustrating type. Not only was it twisty and turny and impossible to see any landmarks, but it also had teleporters which randomly jumped you all over the place. I wandered that stupid maze for hours before I finally took out a pen and paper and started to map my exploits. When I ran through the game again with a new group I did the entire quest in ten minutes.So Map, record, refine. It may sound a little dull to start, but when you carry it to it’s natural conclusion and you’ve leveled 4 times faster than everyone else the dullness doesn’t hurt so much.
Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com
Rob confesses to spending far too much time playing games, exploring areas, quests and propping up virtual bars. After initial focus on power-leveling and item collection his attention is now devoted to www.warcraft.gumptiongames.com - a resource to help players get the most out of their WoW experience
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