Reflections on reading quests, and community support

Some musings on a recent review of some of the postings on all the Darkshore quests by an informal WoW support community, Allakhazam, (see http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/qlookup.html?zone=38). This is definitely a community that understands social capital: they have posting ratings and karma counts for members.

There is a long-chained series of quests that is originally initiated in Darkshore called “The Tower of Athalaxx” (9 quests in all). I was following the posts about one of the quests initiated by a quest giver in Ashenvale (Delgren the Purifier). The quest itself explicitly gives the quest location, which is also in Ashenvale. But in taking a look at the discussion and Q&A about the quest, at
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?wquest=970, I’m struck by several things.

First of all, many of the players spent several hours struggling with the quest because they did not read the quest description, although it is a very short:

“Balthule's letter is dire. This Cult of the Dark Strand is a thorn in my side that must be removed. I have been dealing with some of the Dark Strand scum northeast of here at Ordil'Aran. One of their number possesses a soul gem that I believe holds the secret to the cult's power.Bring it to me, and I will be able to decipher the secrets held within.”

Secondly, posters in the forum clarified that point clearly several times, yet further down you can see people still posting about their difficulties in carrying out the quest in Darkshore.

I'm wondering if this is an indicator of what Linda's been calling a digital divide based on use of "complex mediational tools and artifacts" instead of a word based culture.

Finally, I’ve noticed that there is almost always one or more detailed, helpful posts telling players how to work the quest. I'd be very curious to know something about where these folks are on the mediational continuum. Here’s an example of one authored by a player, Tirel.

“I got pretty frustrated with this one, like everybody else I kept killing things (trying not to get killed myself) and got a lot of silk and whool-cloth but no gem. Thankfully I checked back here and read that other people had had the same problem, so I stayed and four kills later finally got the drop. Here's a tip for "under-aged" Druids going into this: Don't try taking on the perimeter mobs, since they all are warlocks with minions, so you will always at least fight tow of them if you're lucky enough to not get any add-ons from the surrounding guards. If you stay in caster form and keep nuking the warlock, the minion will shred you, if you go into bear-form, you can shred the minion, but will continue taking damage from the caster and by the time you're done with the minion , you'll be too low on life to nuke the caster from afar so you have to run up and have a big probability of aggroing another pair (at which point you usually see the little sign "Game Over! Insert Coin!"). However, if you approach from the side, along the hills (on your right-hand side if you're coming from the retreat or on your left if you're coming from Darkshore) and you watch the warlocks patrolling carefully, you can sneak through to the center section (staying somewhat up in the hills and hiding behind trees and bolders). In this center-piece there are mainly "Defenders" and "Excavaters" and you can pull them one by one fo yu're careful. Neither has ranged weapons, so they will run to where you are and out of sight of everyone else, where you can safely kill them, heal yourself and keep repeating until the frelling gem drops. The very worst that happened to me was that two came a the same time, but that is doable. Excellent use of cat and prowling if you already have the form, but it's also possible to sneak there or you can simply wait until a hunter has cleared out some of the warlocks (2 vs 2 is so much fairer ;)) and get in that way. The safest, at any rate, is to do this one in a party, though :) Love and Peace and Best of Luck! Tiriel