Me as an NPC

Lovely ladies Z and Cinder are doing a blog challenge and anyone can join! Topic of week 5 was “You as an NPC”. You can find other people’s posts on their website. This is an older topic but it’s an interesting one so I wanted to go back to it.

After writing this and then reading others’ posts on the topic again, Z actually wrote something similar so I might be subconsciously ripping off her idea.. Read her post here and consider this a version of Z’s idea for new players.

WoW offers a lot of different activities and I enjoy almost all of them. PvP, professions, pet battles, mounts, toys, questing, dungeons, reputations, achievements, transmog, basically everything except for raiding.

I usually know what I want to do when I’m logging on but there are days, especially on weekends, when I don’t have a plan and start going through my reputations or achievements until something catches my eye and I decide to do that. And that’s what my NPC could help with. This is how it works:

I’m in a convenient place (this expansion in Dalaran) and when you talk to me, you choose an activity you feel like doing – pet battles, mounts, reputations, … and I give you a tip what you could do. Few examples:

• mounts – “There’s Vitreous Stone Drake in Stonecore. How come you don’t have it? It’s been there for years. Go get it!”
• reputations – “Kurenai almost love you! Go kill evil ogres.”
• pet battles – “Major Payne is the only pet master in Northrend you haven’t defeated. Go to him and try your luck!”

I don’t ever tell you about something you’ve already done. I also prioritize easy-to-get things, reputations you already have on revered, mounts you can farm in an instance on normal, meta-achievements that are missing only one part, …  The idea is to get something done in a few hours (or even minutes), to finish something so that you can log off with a sense of accomplishment.

If you don’t like my tip, I give you another one and you can also blacklist the ones you don’t want to see again.

I probably wouldn’t be much useful to veterans who’ve done most of the content in game but as a new player, I’d love something like this in game. It would save me all that time scrolling through achievement/reputation/collection tab or using sources outside the game and it would help me decide what I want to do on lazy weekends because I don’t want to make decisions on lazy weekends. Decisions are hard.

The NPC would be my mage in a pretty dress with a cute cat. And she would definitely be sitting down. How can NPCs stand 24/7? That must be hell. If I needed to be a Horde, I’d choose my undead mage (well, she’s the only Horde toon I have so.. not much to  choose from but I like her).