Patch day is always an exciting time in World of Warcraft, and today's patch 7.3.5 brings a lot of new content that'll help bridge the gap between Legion and Battle For Azeroth. While most players are going to be diving into the new questlines or trying out the Ulduar timewalking raid, one player is doing something absolutely insane: speedrunning to level 60 by killing only boars.
Yesterday, Ian (or 'ianexplosion' on Twitch) made a terrible bet. In a post on WoW's subreddit, he said that if Blizzard released patch 7.3.5 on January 16 he would speedrun a character all the way to level 60 by just killing boars. Well, yesterday Blizzard inadvertently called his bluff by announcing that the patch would indeed be arriving today. And now Ian has no choice but to make good on his promise. You can watch his soul-crushing journey to massacre all the boars on his Twitch stream (as of this writing, Ian is live but still waiting for the WoW servers to come online).
Killing boars is a callback to South Park's Make Love Not Warcraft episode, where the boys are continually killed by disgustingly high level player and must hide in the forest killing pigs in order to level up and fight back. But what the episode doesn't evoke is the sheer mind-numbing tedium that will come from such a pursuit. It will likely take Ian dozens of hours, if not days, to reach level 60, and boars aren't even on the top 1,000 list of World of Warcraft's toughest creatures.
Initally, Ian planned to only kill boars in Elwynn Forest, the human starting zone featured in South Park, but that was never possible. With 7.3.5, level-scaling is being applied to all the old zones, making monsters and quests automatically adapt to your level within a certain range. The problem is that Elwynn Forest only scales to level 10, so Ian will have to venture out into a higher level zone to slaughter millions of boars from level 10 to 60. Hopefully the change of scenery will keep him from succumbing to boredom.
But why would someone ever do this? "My life kind of sucks right now," Ian says in a video he uploaded to YouTube. As he explains, he lost his job and his girlfriend after having an emotional breakdown weeks earlier and hasn't been handling it well. "But when [my Reddit post] took off the way it did, I got excited for the first time in a long time," he explains. "I got to try and find my happy." It's a sad story, but the community is rallying behind Ian, with many offering to join his party in-game to assist in the boar slaughter.
Ian isn't the first Warcraft player to embark on such a tedious mission. Perhaps the most famous is Doubeagent, a pandaren monk who reached the max level of 110 by only picking flowers. Still, my hopes are high that Ian's livestreamed speedrun will lead to some kind of weird shenanigans. With enough of the WoW community excited to tune in, I'm sure something good will happen—even if it's just helping someone find some solace in a rough time.
