WoW Forever is basically my first time experiencing Blizzard’s MMO for a significant amount of time—that level 13 Paladin rotting away on my retail account for the last eight years doesn’t count—and you know what? Even as someone who isn’t rocking around Azeroth in rose-tinted glasses, I’m having a pretty sweet time.
I even surprised myself by how endeared I am to all its old-schoolness. I like that there’s no globally shared tagging, even if that means you party with a handful of randoms for 10 seconds and never speak to them again. I’ve even been fine with its archaic gathering quests, where all of its nodes are server-side instead of client-side. Want to go and pick that cactus fruit, but some other player beats you to it? Well, it’s gone now. Go and pick another one.
Well, I was fine with it anyway. That is until I arrived in Orgrimmar, the Horde’s capital city. My initial arrival was dizzying, bearing witness to its densely-populated streets and rapid-fire global chat where recruitment messages are quickly buried by folks talking about how many rolls of toilet paper they go through each day. Yeah, I dunno either.
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I was having a lovely little time exploring, picking up just about every quest I could find. And then it happened. I innocently scooped up a quest called Rocks to Rest, tucked around the back of a building where a group of troll children are gathered.
Go and get some rocks so we can have chairs and tables, I’m ordered. Okay, easy enough. Right? WRONG.
Turns out that whimsical server-side gathering nodes become significantly less so when there are at least 10 of you vying for sporadically-spawning rocks. And you have to collect eight of the damn things. I scooped up my first one with relative ease, before the rest of my quest devolved into the chaos of rapidly swinging my camera around waiting for one to spawn, before watching everybody (me included) dash off in its direction for the hopes of being the chosen one who gets to loot it a millisecond before everybody else.
Now I’ve seen queues and orderly lines form for some of these quests, but Rocks to Rest? It’s the wild west, baby. You snooze, you lose. I made the mistake of rotating my camera away from a rock that spawned directly behind me, and before I even had the chance to swing it back around and begin looting, I was beaten to the punch.
I was expecting a raid boss to be the thing that broke me. Maybe dying one too many times to a quest mob, or trying to navigate the game’s multitude of systems as someone who has barely set foot in this world before. But no, it was a freaking boulder.
