Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Do I Look Like a Walking Encyclopedia?

I've discovered in the course of playing WoW that any character of mine looks like a fountain of knowledge to all other players. I'm not exactly sure why players flock to me for answers, but it seems as though everyone else in the game believes that I can answer their questions.

If I am questing in an area and there are other players doing similar quests, invariably someone asks to team up (especially if the quest is a "kill a certain number of mobs" type of quest). Doing this makes sense, as you can complete the quest in half the time that it would take you to do it solo. Since many quests are chain quests, where finishing one quest immediately leads to another quest, both players know that the other has the quest and often we choose to continue on to that quest. Usually this lasts for a while, as some chain quests have a lot of follow-ups.

I've been playing WoW for a long time, so I have a good knowledge of the world. I know how to get to pretty much any location, and my Quest Helper add-on helps me know which quest is closest and where it is so I can go directly there. I no longer wander the world looking for the location of my quest. I've played a lot of characters and I remember where a lot of their class-specific quests were located and what needed to be done.

Due to this knowledge, when someone I've teamed up with says "Hey, do you know where to find...", I can almost invariably say, "Why, yes I do!" and lead them right to it. If I don't know where to find it, I alt-tab out to my browser and search Thottbot or Allakhazam for it. In less than a minute, I return to the game and relay the information, at which time the player asks, "Can you take me there?" and off we go again.

During travel to a distant location, most players like to plan their quest strategies and I will be able to tell them the best order to do their quests in and where each is located. Sometimes they have a quest that they assume is located in a given location. For instance, there's a quest you get from Feralas that you perform in Felwood, then return to Feralas to turn in, so the quest log shows the quest under Feralas. If I know that a given quest isn't really located where the other player thinks it is, I tell them that we should ignore it for now since it would take too long to detour for it. The player is astounded that I would know this and never hesitates to let me know their amazement.

When playing with friends, they generally just leave all navigating and planning to me. When I ask them what we should do next in the game, they just say, "How do I know? You're the expert!" and leave me to my work.

I don't understand it. The game is an MMORPG, requiring that players have an Internet connection. The Internet is such a fascinating thing, allowing people access to even the most obscure knowledge. Why don't players search for their answers themselves? If they ask me a question to which I don't know the answer, I simply look it up, just as they should. Every time I look up information I remember more and more, so the vast knowledge base that I am just grows larger. It seems that I'm just digging myself deeper and deeper because I'm too nice to players to tell them I have no clue and move on to my own activities.

Based on the constant requests for information that I get from others, I can only assume that Blizzard has screwed up every single one of my character's avatars so that I no longer appear as a sexy blood elf hunter or tiny gnome rogue but rather a walking encyclopedia.