What a Short, Familiar Journey It Was

I completed Long, Strange Trip over the weekend. I already had a 310% mount, but I do like how the violet one looks better. :)

Another ballast released.

What's kept me playing WoW consistently are these virtual goals I've set. I felt like getting Loremaster would expose me to just about everything Blizzard created for us. I set a "skill" goal of getting one of the dungeon drakes. And I felt any self-respecting longtime WoW player would complete long, strange trip, amirite?

Loremaster would have been much easier if I hadn't changed mains along the way. Had I stuck with the character I created back in 2004 I might have some rare things to look back on. But eventually I didn't enjoy playing my frist or second main, so who's to say I would have stuck with it if I had stuck with them. And actually the character I play now, kinda sucked with how things used to be. Hats off to anyone who chose a character at release and managed to enjoy playing it in all its incarnations throughout these years.

Anyway, after Loremaster I still have 25 quests in my log. Some dailies, some old quests that I fear if i drop them I won't be able to pick them up again. I might finish some of them, I might not. But if they add a "Master Loremaster" or "Loremaster: The Questening" with 500 more quests to complete? I have no desire to go through it again. Overall I enjoying completing Loremaster, but at the end it became something I was just trying to get finished.

I have never been a hardcore raider so many of the raid achievements were beyond my reach. But due to crossing paths with some great players with casual schedules (the only reason our paths did cross) this past spring I managed to get a raid proto-drake. But in the end the experience was so unsavory (guild drama), I decided I would never set a goal like that again. The journey was not worth destination.

And lastly Long, Strange Trip. As I've mentioned many times I've played since release. For some reason, knowing that fact and not completing Long, Strange Trip felt wrong to me. It's like going to Arizona and not visiting the Grand Canyon. So I made it a point to get the meta requirements done, although I had taken a break last October. Many of them I really enjoyed, but once again (see a pattern), in the end I felt like I was doing something because of the goal, not because I was having fun with it.

I want to learn my lesson here. My only goal from now on should be "have fun".

I have one last thing I said I would do, play a horde character. I made this goal fairly recently, with the announcement of Cataclysm. I found myself doing battlegrounds instead of the questing like I said I would. My old goal "complete horde quests" has been replaced with "have fun". If I get back around to doing quests so be it. If they remove some quests and I never get a chance to do them so be it. I'll live.

I've reached a fork in the road. One path is structured with checklists and achievements and endless milestone markers of virtual goals and raiding schedules. The other is unmapped.

I've traveled the first path long enough.