Burning Crusade longevity

My main character, the undead priest, did all the quest of Hellfire Peninsula, then moved to Zangarmarsh and is now close to having done all the quests there. Then I’ll move to the next zone, Terokkar Forest, and do all the quests there, and so on. Mixed in between the quests are all the guild groups to instances I can get an invite for. So I’ve already seen the first two instances of Hellfire Citadel, Coilfang Reservoir, and Auchindoun, and the first Caverns of Time instance.

The result of all that is that my level is advancing faster than the level of the quests I’m doing. The quests I’m doing now are two levels below my level. This has the advantage that I could solo some of the quests that were marked as “group". But from an efficiency point of view this is probably not the best way, I would gain more xp and better quest rewards if I skipped some quests and moved directly to the quests of my level. So why am I playing the Burning Crusade in this systematic but inefficient way? Because my goal is not to level up the fastest, but to see everything. I’m an explorer, more than an achiever. Having more quests than absolutely necessary is a plus.

Of course by defining my goals for the Burning Crusade, I’m also defining the point where I have “finished” Outland: It will be when I have done practically all the quests and visited all the dungeons. Not necessarily vanquished the last raid dungeon, but at least visited it and experienced how it is working. For comparison, I consider that I have “finished” Blackwing Lair, because I got up to Nefarion, even if I never killed him. So at the current rate of about 2 weeks per Outland zone, I’ll be done sometime in April with all the quests and 5-man instances.

That doesn’t mean I couldn’t play World of Warcraft after April. There will be raids for months to come. I could level up my warrior from currently 61 to 70, playing the same content again with a different character. Or I could play my blood elf mage, currently level 10. But while these modes of play are all certainly possible, they would all imply a certain degree of repetition. Repetitively visiting the same raid dungeon until we master it, repeating the Outland quests and dungeon with another character, repeating old world content with the mage after level 20. I could still achieve lots of things, but the exploration value of that will be lower.

Now it just happens that end of April the Lord of the Rings Online will be released. And I will have to take a decision then, of which I’m not quite sure right now which way it will go. One option would be to stop playing WoW and play LotRO instead. LotRO wouldn’t have to be better than WoW, as long as it is good enough the big advantage of switching would be to open up tons of new content to explore. The other extreme option would be to keep playing WoW and not play LotRO at all until I get totally tired of WoW. And then there are intermediate solutions, where for example I play LotRO solo, but still log into WoW on some evenings to participate in guild raids. How the decision will end up depends on many things, how much “fun” World of Warcraft subjectively still is to me then, and how things are going with my guild and raid organization (which isn’t a trivial problem).

So please keep in mind that this is not a “World of Warcraft blog”. Technically I’m calling it a “MMORPG blog”, for which me starting to talk a lot about LotRO would fully qualify. Even more honestly this is the “blog about whatever Tobold is playing at the moment”. That usually *is* a MMORPG, but I’ve written about other types of games as well. And as long as which game to play is my biggest problem in life, I’m considering myself to be a very lucky guy.