The Problem with Night Elves

| Saturday, December 20, 2014
A giant crytals space ship crashed into Azeroth a while back. It irradiated a nearby lake and mutated the wildlife. The alien survivors set to work understanding the damage they'd caused. At times this was a violent process, gathering blood samples to study them. As they learned more, they found a way to clean the lake. Moving outward, they worked to inoculate nearby wildlife from the remaining radiation. In further stages they sought to understand the damage and limit further harm.

Contrast this with the night elf method:

Quest Giver: Demons have corrupted the poor widdle bunnies! You have to kill them!
Me: Sure thing!

I go off to kill a dozen demons and return, looking for a reward.

Quest Giver: Demons have corrupted the poor widdle bunnies! You have to kill them!
Me: Huh, must be bugged.

I go off to kill a dozen demons and return, looking for a reward.

Quest Giver: Demons have corrupted the poor widdle bunnies! You have to kill them!
Me: Third time's the charm?

I go off to kill a dozen demons and return, looking for a reward.

Quest Giver: Demons have corrupted the poor widdle bunnies! You have to kill them!
Me: Could you clarify that pronoun there? I think we're having some problems with the "them" that you want me to kill.
Quest Giver: You have to kill all the bunnies!
Me: Sure thing!

I go off to kill a dozen bunnies and return, looking for a reward.

Quest Giver: Demons have corrupted the poor widdle bunnies! You have to kill all the demons. And also some more bunnies.
Me: Why didn't we just kill the demons in the first place, then decurse the bunnies?
Quest Giver: Because I'm not secretly an ambitious demon using you to kill bunnies and my rivals.

Archaeologists should fight only three things: Snakes, Nazis, and Unimaginable Tedium

| Monday, December 15, 2014
Since I can't fly in Draenor and I keep forgetting that I can fly elsewhere and the ores there aren't worthless, I've stopped using mining as my chilling between missions/queues activity. Archaeology has filled that gap. I go somewhere and press a bunch of buttons on my mouse. Sometimes I press my keyboard. My screen fills up with various colors marking off where things might be. It's the world's slowest laser show.
In case you're wondering what prompts the grats in that shot: someone has an auto-grats addon, and I think the other person is being sarcastic about it. Also, I spelled you're wrong the first time. And while trying to write that. I am filled with shame.

But do you see that other thing? Over there. Left. Not my character portrait. Right of that. Up. Those are the words above the picture, not that far...

That's an elemental fighting another elemental. Not a problem, right? Except sometimes they have no one to fight, so they fight me. It's little more than a momentary distraction, but the whole point of this archaeology expedition is chilling. I'm just not in a mood to hit things with my sword.

Most days I don't have to fight to get my artifacts. And I don't even thing I'd mind, but implementation matters. I don't want to fight some over-sized bird or rocks that don't know how to sit still. If I'm going to fight, it better be a Nazi, crypt filled with snakes, or the crushing boredom which is slowly, very slowly, digging up a giant plot of sand, only to find a few bits of pottery from the early 21st century and a taunting note from Dr. Evelius, my archeological arch-nemesis.

Get back to where you once belonged

| Tuesday, December 2, 2014
I have a love-hate relationship with the timer on missions. The missions themselves are fine, good even, but that timer...

On one hand it can make me feel rushed. I have some quests that I want to to, and I have half an hour to do them, otherwise I feel like I'm wasting valuable clicking on followers time. But then there's the travel time, so I don't want to rush out and rush back, or in all my hurry I'd be wasting even more time.

Then they decide to switch it up, they being the mysterious forces that manipulate small events against us. They steal our socks and give us hat hair. This time it's a 45 minute quest. I go out and do a fishing daily and some fishing fishing and a kill everything daily. I have a few minutes to spare. The archaeology site is across the zone, so I'd use up half my time just getting there. So now I wait. Or do I go farm? Maybe hit a few mining nodes? Or just wait.

On the other hand, it can be nice to have that out and back again feel. I'm going on my own mission and I have a particular amount of time to complete it. Having that timer means that I have to think about what I'm going to do. I define a goal, figure out whether I can complete it, and set out to do just that. That can be a welcome change from wandering off and wondering what I'm going to do, only to end up doing nothing because I had all the time in the world to figure out what to do.
 
The endless outdoor nature of leveling, of chaining quests back to back, doesn't fit well with missions. Either the missions break the flow or there's this glowing reminder during the quest that you're missing something. At the more free form level cap, where activities aren't so often lines of quests, having some sort of structure to the time is to be appreciated.

Brb, phone timer is going off; my alt's missions are done.
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