One player of Blizzard’s long running MMO has taken what can officially be considered the longest route possible to reach the endgame level cap of 90 in World of Warcraft. He did so by choosing to remain neutral to the game’s two main factions, locking himself out of almost all the content in the game and into the Pandaren starting area.
The players name is called Doubleagent, and has been detailing his experience on the Blizzard forums what life is like stuck on the fence, and what he did to hit the level cap. Doubleagent chose to play as a Pandaren, the new neutral race that was in World of Warcraft’s 2012 ‘Mists of Pandaria’ expansion. Unfortunately for him, the game forces you to choose one of the two factions, Alliance or Horde, at the early stage of level 10, so that you can leave the Race’s starting area, locking you out of nearly all the content in the game, including access to dungeons, quests, and even in-game mail.
Doubleagent decided that in order to remain neutral, he would hang around in the starting area for a grand total of 173 days worth of playtime, and slowly grind to the top by killing mobs, mining, and picking herbs.
Detailing his experiences, Doubleagent cites that the most asked question he gets in-game is “How did you get back here?”, referring to how a high levelled player managed to get back into the starting pen. His reply was simple, “I never left”.
“I thought about doing this when I heard about Pandaren being neutral until level 10,” he writes. “Knowing that herbalism and mining nodes gave experience, I figured if the zone had any of them it would probably be possible to level higher than intended. And when I did finally start, one of my friends thought I’d reach some kind of cap on the isle and that I wouldn’t reach 90. So it kind of encouraged me to continue even more so than before.”