Does WoW have too many quests?

The most achievable yet unattainable goals in the game for me would have to either be Loremaster or 3000 quests completed. Is it possible for me to do them? Yes. They aren't some ultra-hard raid achievement where I have to clear the entire instance in twenty minutes with five people missing without anyone dying and do it twenty times every night for two months. I can do Loremaster.

Except that I can't.

Quests are fun when you're leveling up because even though you know better, you kind of don't. "Doing quests is fun!" you think, like an idiot, because they are really pretty boring. They are one step above grinding. The only worst way to level would be to have it revolve around thirty hour waits for rare leveling mobs to spawn, which I think is how EQ worked.

Anyway, so this can't help but make me think : does WoW have too many quests? Now, clearly if you love quests, WoW can never have too many quests, and I sympathize with you. But, just speaking for normal, well-adjusted people, WoW clearly has too many quests.

Vanilla WoW, before they eased up the leveling curve, did not have too many quests. It actually had too few, as pretty much everyone ended up grinding at some point. Then they eased up the curve twice and there are far more than you would ever do while leveling. But that's kind of understandable.

But why do Northrend and Outland have too many quests, even when they were launched? Outland has seven zones and I think I only quested four of them before i hit 70. Northrend has ten zones and I only finished four before I hit 80. I realize you want extra quests, but do you really need that many extra?

I don't think Blizzard agrees with my assessment, but I just saw yesterday (after I had already decided I would write this) that they are going to make Loremaster much easier to get. Patch 3.3 is on the PTR and Blizzard has added two wonderful functions to the API :

• NEW - QueryQuestsCompleted() requests that the server send the client a list of completed quest ids. Once the list is received the QUEST_QUERY_COMPLETE event is fired. (There is a limit on how frequently this can be called)
• NEW - tbl = GetQuestsCompleted([tbl]) populates a table (creating one if necessary) with the ids of completed quests.

The holy grail of character information -- the one thing Blizzard has always known (even before they started tracking stats and achievements for characters in 3.0) but never told us -- is what quests we have completed. And now we're getting that. I'm not sure if Blizzard will provide a way to access this through their UI, or if that will be left to addon makers. But either way, it's Christmas in October for quest-achievement-obsessives like myself.