Welcome, and forward:

I'm normally not one for blogging-- but I have decided to share my experiences while striving for one of the biggest (in scope, definitely) achievements in the World of Warcraft: The Loremaster.

For those who may not know, there is an MMORPG called World of Warcraft that has been running for almost 5 years now. Henceforth referred to as WoW, the game has attracted over ten million subscribers and is, by far, the largest massively multiplayer online RPG in the western world.

A couple years ago, Blizzard added an achievement system to the game, which should be very familiar to anyone who is familiar with Xbox360 games. You unlock these achievements by completing certain tasks in the game. Many are fairly pedestrian and require no real effort to obtain, some require you to perform difficult tasks in boss encounters, and many are for going above and beyond the level of dedication of the typical player.

Some achievements reward you with titles that appear next to your name in-game, some give you nice-looking tabards to wear over your armor, and some reward mounts. Typically these are flying mounts, many of them various kinds of drakes or proto-drakes.

Glory of the Raider for example, was one of the hardest achievements to obtain before Patch 3.1.

The quest I am embarking on, to achieve Loremaster status, isn't particularly difficult. It just involves questing... LOTS of questing.

World of Warcraft's world of Azeroth is currently represented by three continents, Kalimdor, The Eastern Kingdoms, and Northrend. The world of Outland is a diffrerent planet entirely.

These zones break down into two main categories: Old-World, and New-World. Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms are what I call "old-world" continents. These are the original two continents that were in the game when it launched in 2004. There are no flying mounts, flight paths are more scarce, the zones are larger in size, the terrain isn't nearly as pretty, and the quest structure is--- not good. There will be plenty on that as we continue.

The Loremaster is a meta achivement, meaning it's requirements are other achievements. These are:

Loremaster of Kalimdor
Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms
Loremaster of Outland
Loremaster of Northrend

Both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms Loremaster achivements require that the player complete 700 quests in each continent.

When I started I was about halfway there-- with over 300 quests completed in each continent.

What follows is my experiences knocking out the remainder... what a long, strange trip it will be.