This week’s Shared Topic comes from Spinks over on Blog Azeroth –

Cataclysm is coming! The old world is going to be destroyed and remade.

Which town, quest, NPC, or zone really needs to be purged with fire, in your opinion? Will you enjoy dancing on the ashes of a particularly hated quest giver? Or is there some zone you avoid like the plague (plaguelands excluded) where being nuked from orbit could only improve the experience? And why do you hate it/them so much?

The Barrens.  Hands down. That zone makes me twitch.  Always has.  As someone who plays mostly Horde characters, I’ve spent what can loosely be considered “quality time” in the Barrens.  Let me tell you, I’m about as anxious to enter that zone as I am to play Rochambeau with a guy wearing steel-toed boots.

You never want to let the other guy go first.  It’s Unamerican.

I really don’t like this zone.  Why?  Funny you should ask!

• Size:  The Barrens is a huge zone to move around in.   While there are bigger zones in the game, the Barrens is a Level 10 – 25 zone.  Since you don’t get a mount until Level 20, you’re  forced to run everywhere you need to go.  And those damn developers made sure you need to go all over the zone.  It takes forever just to run to Crossroads when you first set foot in the Barrens (assuming you don’t get ganked by Alliance, who love to wipe out the town on a regular basis, regardless of server).  Plus, it isn’t like it’s the most scenic zone to cross.

Looks like somewhere good times go to die.

• Quests:  This goes hand in hand with the size of the zone.  Crossroads, for example, has an obscene amount of gathering quests – “Bring me X number of heads, claws, beads, etc”.  The drop rate for these are horrible (the raptor had a head when I killed it, but I can’t loot it?).  When you finally gather up the number of whatever it is you need, you hand them in and are told “Okay, now run even further away and grab Y number of heads, claws, beads, etc.”  Plenty of running back and forth without a mount, and those runs take forever.  Even exploration quests are sequential – “Check this oasis, okay now go check the one on the other end of the zone.”  I mean, did some Dev get shut down by his girlfriend the night before and decide to take his frustration out on the players?

In the Barrens, this shirt could get your knifed.

• Barrens Chat:  Chuck Norris does your mom with anal fisting.  It’s like Trade Chat but with twice the stupid.  This is what new players get to be exposed to, nice and early in gaming life.  From this point on, players end up a little broken inside.

Nuff said.

I don’t care what they’re doing with the Barrens in the next expansion.  Split it, dress it up, put a hat on it.  Anything has to be better than what it is.

This is Herc the Merc, who once played Russian Roulete with a fully loaded gun and won.  Beat that Chuck Norris.