coredumperror

Hey Ross. Saw your birthday video, and figured I'd give you my "favorite" MMO story. So here's how I spent several hundred thousand gold and nearly every waking hour for three consecutive weeks to get a WoW achievement. So there's an achievement in WoW called Insane in the Membrane, which (when I did it during Burning Crusade) required you to max out your reputation with the Bloodsail Buccaneers, The Steamwheedle Cartel, the Darkmoon Fair, Ravenholdt, and the Shen'dralar. Non-rogues start with 0 reputation for all of these factions (rouges earn a few thousand for Ravenholdt as part of their class quests), and you need to earn 42,999 reputation to max them out. There are several major obstacles in your way for this, though, including trifling problems like earned rep for the Bloodsail Buccaneers being subtracted (times five!) from your rep for Steamwheedle Cartel. Darkmoon Faire is the most isolated rep, as nothing affected it back then besides turning in Darkmoon Decks to the fairmaster. However, Darkmoon decks only dropped as individual cards (I believe it was 8 cards to a deck), and those cards were exceedingly rare. Thus, the only way to earn enough reputation from them was buying the cards off the player-controlled Auction House, at whatever cost the players were asking. Each card could go for anywhere from 20 gold to 2000 gold, depending on its rarity (Aces were more rare than Fours) and the greediness of the player (the cards were so rare that finding a single Ace meant you'd essentially cornered the market on Aces for a couple days). Since I needed 8 specific cards to build each deck (there were four different kinds of decks, each with Ace through Eight), and you needed 43 decks to bring yourself to max rep (1000 rep per deck), I needed to spend a LOT of gold for this. I can't remember the exact amount, but I would peg it at around 200,000 gold. That was a HELL of a lot back in the Burning Crusade days. The next straightforward reputation is Ravenholdt, but straightforward is not the same as "easy". First, I slaughtered 4200 Syndicate Rogues (mobs who belong to Ravenholdt's rival faction). They're all low level, so it simply took about 11 hours of tedious grinding. Once I got to a certain reputation threshold, though, the Syndicate Rouges no longer counted, and I had to start collecting Heavy Junkboxes to further raise my rep with Ravenholdt. I needed 1405 of them, but here's the tricky part: ONLY rogues can actually acquire them. You see, when the Ravenholdt faction was created back in Vanilla WoW, the devs never intended anyone besides Rogues to interact with the faction at all. So they didn't bother to make it possible to max out their rep as a non-Rogue. Fortunately, Heavy Junkboxes are white items, and are thus tradable (and mailable), which is what made this achievement possible for me, being a Druid and all. In order to do this, I had to create a brand new character, level him up high enough to be capable of stealing Heavy Junkboxes from the mobs that carry them (they're all in the high 50s), and then spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing but pickpocketing Junkboxes all day long (I also occasionally raided, ate, and slept). Mobs capable of carrying the Junkboxes had about a 20% chance of actually carrying one, so I had to do a LOT of pickpocketing. OK, so I'm now 200,000 gold poorer and have spent a full week on nothing but killing and pickpocketing. Now it's time for the hard rep grinds. I started with the Booty Bay Buccaneers (human pirates), since I knew that there was one way to gain rep with their rivals, the Steamwheedle Cartel (goblin merchants), without losing rep with the Bucs. So I planned to exploit that after maxing out the Buccaneers. Unfortunately, the Buccaneers are another one of those factions added in Vanilla WoW that the devs never really expected anyone to ever max out. So the quests I'd done for the Cartel while leveling had caused me to lose enough reputation with Bucs to be at around -34,000 before I'd even started. This made it kinda hard to gain their favor, because they hated my guts and wouldn't even think of giving me quests until I appeased their lust for my blood. So, I initiated a goblin genocide. I spent several hours doing nothing but killing the guards in Booty Bay, one of the Cartel's strongholds. That got me enough reputation to bring me up out of the hole I'd dug for myself with the Bucs... but it obviously tanked my reputation with the goblins. I would not be welcome in Cartel territory again until I'd made significant reparations. And that was a serious problem, because it made it both impossible to use any goblin vendor anywhere in the game, AND caused elite guards to constantly spawn any time I stepped foot in a goblin-controlled town. I needed to remedy this ASAP. Eventually, I'd killed enough goblins to get in good with the Bucs, and they gave me a quest that rewarded me with a sweet hat. Yup, I'd just murdered countless hundreds of goblins (men with families) for a HAT. Activating the hat's special feature spawned a parrot, though, so it was totally worth it. We're nearing the home stretch now. Just two reps left to max: goblins (who I'd just tanked to -42000) and the mysterious Shen'dralar. Thankfully, these can be farmed up simultaneously by clearing out Dire Maul, an old level 55 dungeon added near the end of Vanilla WoW, over and over. Unthankfully, this is the longest, most complicated, AND most annoying grind one can execute anywhere in the World of Warcraft. So let's get started. Farming Dire Maul assists your goblin reputation through a quest you can turn in repeatedly that involves freeing a goblin who's been captured by the Ogres in the dungeon. The ogres occasionally drop a key to his shackles when killed, and freeing him gives you 350 reputation with all four goblin factions. Since you need 82,999 reputation with them, that's 238 completions of the quest. Which means no less than 238 clears of the instance. But it's not just 238 clears, because the key is not guaranteed to drop on each clear. It usually does, but not always. Fortunately, while you're spending several dozen hours executing 238+ clears of Dire Maul (I developed an efficient route that made a clear take only about 10 minutes), you're also going to be collecting the rarest of the group items required for raising your Shen'dralar reputation: Librams. Librams are extremely annoying, because there are three different types, but each individual type is unique (for some unknown reason), meaning you can't have more than one of each type in your bags (or your bank!) at any one time. Thus, every time you find a Libram, you need to either leave the instance to mail it to your alt (any number of them can be in a mailbox all at once), or take the risk that the next Libram that drops is the same kind you already have, thus making it impossible to pick up. I ended up living on the wild side, and only took the time to mail them once I'd found two different Librams. This caused me to waste maybe a dozen Librams over the two weeks I spent doing this. I got fairly lucky. Unfortunately, I don't have precise memories on the total number of Librams I needed, and they've been removed from the game since I did this, so the WoW databases don't seem to have those numbers either. Suffice it to say that, even with buying Librams off the AH whenever they appeared (very rarely), I actually finished maxing my Goblin rep before I got enough Librams for Shen'Dralar. That's how bloody rare those fucking books are. Oh, but that's not all, folks! Now that I had enough Librams, I had to go out and farm the other materials needed for the Shen'dralar reputation quest. That included Blood of Heroes, Skin of Shadow, and Frayed Abomination Stitchings: special quest items only obtainable in the Plaguelands (which is on the other side of the planet from the Shen'Dralar stronghold, so why the hell did they want this stuff?). It also required Pristine Black Diamonds and Large Brilliant Shards, but those dropped in Dire Maul pretty frequently, so I had most of what I needed already (bought the rest off the auction house for yet more precious gold). The Stitchings were relatively easy, if annoyingly time consuming, because they only drop off of the fat, lumbering Abomination enemies that appear at the very end of the Stratholm dungeon. There are about 15 of the things on each run, and you'd usually get 1 or 2 stitchings from killing all of them. The Skin of Shadow was similarly annoying, spawning as a pickup at the back of another dungeon. But it wasn't always there every time you ran it. The Blood of Heroes, though, was the worst. This crap was only obtainable from special pools of blood that would spawn in only a handful of seemingly random locations throughout the entire Plaguelands (the largest zone in the game). Gathering all of this garbage was another several-day-long chore, because you need 2 of each of them for their associated Libram. But since I'd already gathered the number of Librams I'd need, I knew exactly how many Stitchings, Skins, and Bloods I would have to farm. So at least I didn't waste any more time than was absolutely necessary to waste. Finally, FINALLY, I was ready to turn in all hundred and fifty or so Librams (and associated garbage) I'd farmed for Shen'dralar reputation. But here, on the last lap of the race toward insanity, the game found yet another way to annoy the crap out of me. Remember how Librams are unique? That meant I could only carry 3 Librams at a time into the Shen'dralar stronghold from the closest mailbox. Well, see, the closest mailbox is a TEN MINUTE ROUND TRIP FROM THERE. I spent an hour just turning in the first 10% of my Librams, then said FUCK THIS and paid an engineer in my guild to bring a portable mailbox to the stronghold. Even with that, I still needed the engineer to stick around and re-deploy a new one after the first expired, since it took more than 5 minutes to turn in all the damn Librams. And that was it. After three solid weeks of non-stop grinding (as only the unemployed can truly accomplish), more than 200,000 gold of expenditures, and a SHITLOAD of Mountain Dew, I'd finally completed the Insane in the Membrane achievement, earning the much-desired "Insane" title to apply to the nameplate that hovers over my head for all to see. I become "Hibernicus, the Insane", and boy was that an apt fucking title. Did I also mention that it took me almost 3 hours to create this writeup? And I started writing at 3am... hah.. hahah.... help me... Aaaanyway... Here's a guide that explains how to do the new version of the achievement, which is many dozens of hours faster since they removed the Shen'dralar requirement a few months after I completed it (yeah, that pissed me off something fierce). The guide also mentions some things that make it even EASIER to complete, due to recent additions to the game (reputation modifiers) which were added after I quit back in 2011. http://www.wowhead.com/guides/achievements/reputation/a-guide-for-the-insane TL;DR: My name was Hibernicus, I hailed from Bloodscalp, and I went Insane the hard way.