A moment to reflect on growth

Ok, first, ding, Lvl 35. Finally. I can now fly to Feathermoon village and up my alchemy potential to 300.

But getting to 35 was a much bigger deal than I expected, because I also saw growth in myself as a player, not just in my avatar.

As a night elf, the progression of growth is to go from Teldrassil, the newby land, to Darkshore, where you spend lvls 12-24 running around Auberdine, and then from there, you've got a lot of options. One of the quests you get in Darkshore, though, is the Tower of Althalaxx, and it's a tough nut to crack. I got it initially about lvl18 (though I don't remember specifically). A chain of quests, it starts in Darkshore, but then you end up running down into Ashenvale to complete aspects of it, and then finally you come back to the tower east of Auberdine to complete it. The final quest is lvl 31, and it involves going into a multi-layer tower, fighting casters and Void Walkers all the way up, until you reach the Boss at the top.

Frankly, I'd despaired of completing the task - when I first got the quest, I didn't really understand the concept of chain quests, and didn't really see the design discussion behind creating a chain that you couldn't complete alone until you'd sufficiently progressed.

In any case, after a while of futile attempts at the quest, I just left it alone. It stayed in my quest log, but I started questing more widely, in the Wetlands, and in STV. I looked at Althalaxx from time to time as I advanced, but continued to be daunted by the quest, even as I went past the levels it classified the quest at. "Yeah, right it's a lvl 28 .... I've been burned by you before..."

So I wasn't really thinking about it until Friday, when Scott, my netadmin, who's playing Cainne, said that he and his son (Bountyhunter) were on Althalaxx, and it was kicking their lvl 22 asses. I asked where they were in the quest, and when it became clear that they were in the early stages of the quest, stages that I had completed and could shepherd them through, I offered to give them a hand. I figured that I'd get them to where I was, and then through the power of numbers, we'd knock off the highest level quests. I'd be the high level character, perhaps, but their assistance would put me over the hump.

So that's what we did. We got together yesterday afternoon, and we ran them through the parts of the chain that I'd already done. They did an admirable job - I healed and did some DPS, and they hit as hard as they could, and we did all of the chain, right up to the point where the one NPC told us to go talk to the other NPC outside of the tower, to get the instructions necessary to kill the boss. At that point, I had to go to Kat's basketball game, so I logged, and said I'd catch up with them to run the final boss at a later time. While watching the game, though, I wondered whether I had the ability to run the tower solo - it's a level 31 non-elite quest, after all, and I was 34 - so after we got back, I logged in just to see.

And I killed it. I looked like a hyperskilled, clothy, squishy scythe going through wheat. I was pulling Voidwalkers away from their masters like a rogue, I never had more than two mobs on me at any one time, I was dropping Shadow Word: Pain on one mob to do DPS while I worked on another - I looked like a killing machine. The only hitch I encountered was at the top of the tower, where there's the boss, and three pairs of caster/VW combos. I'd been pulling a combo down the stairs one by one to kill them, and that had worked great but took time. By the time I polished off the third pair, the first one respawned, and at that point, I realized it was time for just a zerg rush - so I quaffed a mana potion, buffed, and then ran at the boss, laid him out, then turned back on the respawned combo and iced them. Looted the corpses, and headed out. And got a whopping 2500 XP for knocking off the bad guy of my dreams. LOL.

I learned several things from the experience. First, intrinsic to the game's design is a tool that facilitates reflective thinking about personal development, if we choose to see it that way - the quest log. What looks like just a functional tool can in fact allow us to see our own personal progress, because we can leave learning challenges on some sort of tracking device until we've become ready for it. I'm sure talented teachers have incorporated some similar structure into their teaching in other ways - a practice journal for beginning pianists, perhaps - but the concreteness of seeing the quest there, over and over, until I finished it, raised the value of the accomplishment.

Second, I thought a bit about Blizzard's designers, and why they would put a chain of quests that ended at 31 in a region devoted to lvl 13s. I can only come up with four variations. One, they're sadists. Two, they're trying to encourage the development of groups as players prepare to exit the area. Three, they don't understand the consequences, the affordances, that their level choices give to the game play. Or Four, they consciously were trying to create a milestone for characters to point at - I finished Althalaxx. I'd love to be able to ask.

The last thing I learned was really more of a question. I've still got a commitment out there to run Cainne and Bountyhunter through the tower, but now I don't know whether that's the best idea. I'll do it because of friendship, and that's how we roll, but I wonder if they'll have nearly the same sense of accomplishment as I do at this moment. It's not cheating to be scaffolded, but from the teacher's perspective, there's a calculation to be made about letting someone fail for a while before demonstrating the solution - and I hadn't considered that before. As I said, I'll run them through the tower, and we'll celebrate at the end, but I'll also look forward to seeing and hearing from them when they report conquering a different task, their own Tower of Althalaxx.

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Update:

So Cainne and Bountyhunter joined me and we went back to the tower last night, and I learned yet more.

Because it was harder. Much harder. And it was all due to managing aggro radii - with party members of lvl 23 traveling with me, the lvl 28 mobs went nuts. Pulling just one pair at a time was a real challenge, and we wiped once before I figured out what was going on. After that, we backed off a little - they hung back further, and we were able to get it done. Yet another interesting byproduct of game rules!