Summon Spectral Tigerzord Now!
In World of Warcraft, once you are high enough level, you get to ride around the lands instead of walking and running. At level 40, you can acquire a steed which moves at 160% of your running speed; at level 60, you can get one that moves at 200%. (At higher levels, you can get mounts that fly, but they are only good in certain areas.) When the necessities of the game force you to pass through the same area for the hundredth time, the bonus speed is quite welcome.
My gnome mage rides a large mechanical ostrich, while my warlock summons a demonic horse. Mounts are expensive, but not rare or difficult to acquire. (Poor gnome is still riding her lvl 40 ostrich because she hasn’t yet made enough money for her lvl 60, but that’s purely a matter of time.)
Like anything else in the game, there are rare and valuable steeds found only with the greatest of luck. To mirror this, the trading card game for WoW includes ultra-rare cards with a scratch-off code that can be entered into the game to provide the player’s character with a mount that few in the lands of Azeroth will ever see. This ghostly tiger is pretty keen-looking; the regular tigers of the night elves are nice enough that some players of other races work for the right to them, and this one is certainly cooler than those.
My point here? One of those WoW “loot cards’ just sold on eBay… for TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Great C’Thun, people. It’s a CGI tiger. In a game. It doesn’t even go faster than shrewlet‘s armored warhorse or snidegrrl‘s giant rhino-lizard. Someone just paid the cost of my next Mac laptop for this virtual ride.
Arrrrgh.
Tags: gaming, world of warcraft
I’m a FF-XI player, not a WOW player… I can only imagine what similar cards would go for. There is weirdness either going with a closed or an open economy, but any time you have ultra-rare items in a modern popular setting, they’ll be unreasonable on the secondary markets (Black Lotus M:tG card, Four Horsemen clix, and so on). Credit to the WoW folks for successfully melding the CCG and MMORPG rare-item crazes for great, er, profit, I guess.
Weirdly enough, I rather like the idea of the beach chair. Miuramir, my feline ranger, spent a whole lot of her early career fishing to help pay for all the ammo she was shooting away, and I still go back to it occasionally when I need something low-stress to do.
Now that’s just messed up.
And yet there are actually people in poorer countries who are doing this for a living…or for someone else who’s pimping out the stuff to get rich. Cory Doctorow made a pretty nifty short story out of it called “Anda’s Game” (or something like that–a pun off of “Ender’s Game”).
Something to note: the TCG expansion with that card in it hasn’t been released yet, people are just paying for the time to be first. It’s all about status. It’s a virtual ride that “you can’t get yet” so it’s the ultimate instant gratification.
If I had the money to spend on that…. well, I probably would just go ahead and buy the 42″ flat panel TV I’ve been eyeing… but it’s their money and if the two months of being one of three or five people in the world to have one of these things is worth it, more power to the seller, I guess…
Oh, and BTW I think the spectral tiger is ugly and causes horrible graphic nastiness with the transparency letting you see things that should be clipped. It’s an inventory slot I wouldn’t want to waste.
There was a card like that (it was a turtle mount) in the first version of the game, but that one only seemed to go for $200 at the highest. I’d hoped to get it, but never did.