XP for old quests?

I'm not at 85 yet. I went through Vashj'r, and to be honest considered the experience very much a mixed bag. Some of it was really gratifying and enjoyable; but to be honest, some of it was so tedious that I found it difficult to remain motivated to keep playing at all.

As mentioned before, I've never been much of a raider, and that is not likely to change with Cataclysm. The two overall objectives I still have in this game, which I've had since BC, are to get a nether drake, and to finish getting the Conqueror PvP title. Another, more minor goal, is to completely finish all of the quests in Nagrand in particular, which was probably my favourite zone in the game. Once I've got those, I'll probably quit.

Anyway, to the point of this post; once I finished Vashj'r, I went back to Shadowmoon Valley to keep doing the Netherwing Ledge rep quests. I became very surprised, however, when I discovered that at level 82, I'm apparently now getting the full amount of XP from said quests, as well as getting 200+ XP per node when mining.

My initial thought was that this was fantastic, because it means that I can get to 85, while still doing purely what I wanted to do anywayz; which I'm assuming was Blizzard's intention. Then, however, I stopped and thought about it a bit more.

One of the things that I've been worried about since probably WoTLK, is that WoW seems to have become a game where the only thing that 90%+ of the playerbase care about doing, is getting to the level cap. For some reason, the prevailing opinion seems to be that the endgame contains the only content worth doing; and that means that for people like me, who actually tend to prefer doing pre-cap stuff, (mainly because I've noticed how much people's attitudes change, for the worse, at the cap) it's much more difficult to find people willing to do pre-cap instances etc, or if they are willing to do them, to see them as anything other than something to be got through as quickly as possible, on their way to the cap.

This may, of course, have the opposite effect, because now that getting Loremaster would apparently assist people in getting to the cap as well, I might actually see more people in the levelling zones. I will mention that I actually did see one other person doing the Skyshatter flying quests at the same time I was; and that gave me cause for optimism. I guess we'll see.

In agreement with Pike

I was actually a little ambivalent about making this post. I'm going to continue to maintain the blog, but for the first time I think I actually found myself questioning whether or not to do so.

According to feedburner my numbers are constant, but it's been pretty quiet around here lately. If that's because people have seen what my recent conduct on Blizzard's forum has been like, it's then probably because they're afraid that if they do comment, they'll get their heads bitten off.

That's one of the other reasons why I sometimes feel as though Kali is a good match for me...at least sometimes, I'm quite simply not a very nice person, unfortunately. Among other people, I suspect I alienated BRK fairly early on, something which I have since sorely regretted doing. My own in game character is uncannily similar to my out of game personality in a lot of ways; I can be abrasive, enormously vicious, and very poor at dealing with people generally.

Stalking demons in Desolace with nobody but the boar for company, and nobody else to rely on but him and myself to get out of bad situations alive, is something that comes naturally to me. Having to try and interact positively and peacefully with other human beings, though; that's a lot harder. The few times I've ever really tried to get close to anyone, I've invariably been stabbed in the back, and that has included family members; so while I help people out in-game when I can, both on or offline, the word trust isn't in my vocabulary.

Pike just made a very interesting post about why she is still playing WoW. She brings up a key point; and that is that she is only going to keep playing WoW for as long as it only feels like a game, and not a job. Given that I've also seen other people write about leaving WoW for the same reason, I see that as being evidence in support of Pike's theory.

This also incidentally is the main reason why I still haven't been to Karazhan yet, in case anybody is wondering. Kara itself might be great fun, but for me, the keying part lands squarely in the "job" category, which for me isn't any fun at all.

For both mounts I've had, I've had to deliberately grind out every penny; I've never been a huge fan of the quest system either for the most part, preferring instead to instance or simply wander and hunt, so questing hasn't been a huge source of income. Also, except for food and ammunition, every other cent of in-game currency I've ever had has gone to the auction house for gear upgrades. I don't like to think about how long grinding out 1k for my standard flying mount would take me, but I do know that it's a lot more time at the bottom of Skysong Lake (or worse yet; battling legions of gold farmers in SMV) than I'm willing to spend.

Maybe I could come up with other ways of making money. For a little while I went with the idea of selling runs to twinks through such places as BRD or the Deadmines, but although less boring, that quickly became more frustrating than primal farming...and it isn't particularly profitable, either. People welching at the end of the run was generally the least of my problems; the worst thing is when one of the scrubs paying me for a BRD run in particular wants to also actually take part in fighting. They would invariably die, and in BRD I often would as well, simply because I had to focus far more on babysitting them than actually killing things myself. Even for a Hunter, repair and resupply costs after that at 70 are not enjoyable.

Also, I have an offline housemate now, who I'm levelling an alt with on Earthen Ring. ER is a good place; minimal lag, none of Jubei'Thos' instability, and it's also probably the best server I've been to yet in terms of the people, except maybe Demon Soul. Very quiet for the most part...just good fast instancing and levelling with laid back people.

I might get to Kara eventually, but it probably won't be for a while.