Illogical quest drops and the Ironforge moat need to die in a fire

Spinks of Spinksville has asked us what we think needs to die in a fire in Cataclysm. Though he asked us about towns, quests, NPCs, and zones, I have other things on my mind. Specifically, I have my eyes on two things that need to go away with Cataclysm (even though they likely won't).

I'll start with the more obvious one. It's something that has been the butt of many a joke or webcomic since WoW began. That something is the illogical nature of body parts collected for quests. You know what I'm talking about: the fact that you can see that every enemy you kill has an ear/hoof/eye/whatever it is you are looking for to complete the quest, yet only one in every few drops that quest item. The fact that this has been allowed to go on for so long has boggled my mind since I first started doing these kinds of quests, and since Blizzard has the opportunity to redo everything in Azeroth, I say it's time they addressed this farce.

But how to address it? Blizzard could address this issue by taking an example from one quests in particular: The Zoram Strand. The Zoram Strand asks you to collect the heads of the naga you kill as proof that you killed them, and wouldn't you know it? When you do the quest, every single naga you kill drops a head. I suppose Blizzard realized that to kill a naga and find out that he doesn't have a head would be too ridiculous, even by their standards. What makes this quest different from other quests is that you need to collect 20 heads, which is more than most collection quests, and thus you end up killing a comparable amount of enemies. I think every quest where the basic structure is "Go kill X and bring me Y as proof that you killed X" should resemble The Zoram Strand in this regard, since these kinds of quests are more about the number of enemies you kill than the items they drop, anyways.

But what if Blizzard wants to keep some element of randomness in their quests? In that case, they can design quests similarly to the quest Are We There, Yeti?. Are We There, Yeti? is similar to many collection quests in the game in that the quest item has a fairly low chance to drop from the enemies you kill for it, but with one key difference. Nestled away in the quest text is this little blurb: "Remember, I only want the best looking ones -- no beat up or broken horns, please!" There you go. There's the justification for the fact that you can't take a horn off of just any yeti. You ruined most of them by killing the yeti, so you have to keep trying until you can kill one without damaging its horn. If Blizzard wants to keep some element of randomness in their quests, they can justify doing so by adding little blurbs like that to the quest text of any quest where the basic structure is "Go kill X and collect Y so I can do something with it."

So that covers quests, but I did say I had two things in mind that need to die in a fire in Cataclysm, didn't I? Well, folks, the second one may surprise you, but it's one that was the bane of my existence when I first started play WoW on my old, sub-par computer with 256 MB of RAM: the moat-like depression in the front of Ironforge. You probably don't even notice it when you walk across the bridge over it, but it is there, and woe to you if you lag near it.

You see, when I started playing WoW on my very old computer, I would lag pretty badly in some places, but nowhere near as badly as I would in Ironforge. Remember how it used to be called Lagforge? There's a reason for that. It got so bad that if, for some reason, I decided to enter the city, my frame-rate dropped down to--are you read for this?--one frame per a minute. You read that correctly; my game would slow down to the extent that after I rounded that corner, the screen would stay as it was for a whole minute. A minute later, I'd be closer to that moat, and I'd have to look at that for another minute. I'd then be in the moat, and with the lag against me, I'd have to make my way out. On my first visit to Ironforge, I did this dance five times before giving up and hearthing out, fuming with frustration.

That was years ago, though. Today, I play on a computer with with 4 GB of RAM, and Ironforge is so abandoned that I could probably enter it without much difficulty on a machine with only 256 MB. Thing is, Ironforge is coming back. Blizzard has gone on the record to say that the old capital cities will serve as the central cities of Cataclysm, similar to Shattrath in Burning Crusade and Dalaran in Wrath of the Lich King. That means Lagforge will likely re-earn it's nickname, and people with sub-par machines will have to go in there again. Now, I don't imagine that a large number of players will experience the crippling lag I described above, but your lag doesn't need to be that bad to fall into the moat. And so, I ask--rather selfishly, most likely--that that moat die in a fire when Cataclysm comes. I ask that the rubble from the earthquakes caused by Deathwing's return fill it in, and that rather than trying the clear it out, the Dwarves simply cover it up and leave it as is. It may do little more than placate the anger that still simmers in my former newbie self, but for all those who still play on old machines, it should be done.