And she was moving very slowly… rising up above the earth
Could a techno-magical item in an online computer game be a sign of personal growth in real life?
At level 70 in WoW, players unlock the ability to ride flying critters (for a substantial training sum of 800 gold pieces). At this point, a player will usually spend an extra hundred gold to buy a flying mount, but engineer characters may build their own. (Unless one’s second profession is mining, one’s going to spend much more than a hundred gold on the necessary materials.)
There’s a single part to the flying machine that my miner/engineer didn’t know how to make on her own, and it’s only taught by one NPC – who would teach her the blueprint if she achieved “Revered” diplomatic status with his organization of dimension-hopping smugglers. The good news is that she could gain 250 reputation points every time she turned in 10 certain emblems that certain slain enemies would drop 33%-50% of the time. The bad news? She needed about 18,000 reputation points to reach Revered.
The good news is that in the process, my engineer looted enough gold to pay for the flying training. In fact, about 14,000 points in, she had enough to just go and buy the griffon flying mount. But, despite temptation, I didn’t do so. Enough of the enemy characters had died to populate a small village by this point, and the whole thing had become fairly tedious, but I’d started this job, and something inside me wouldn’t take the easy route. I dug in my heels, and little Mirandala collected another 160 emblems.
Now, Mir has her Gnomish Flying Machine (a magical steampunk rattletrap in which the engine misses a few cycles every five minutes or so). And, funnily enough, I’m proud of myself. Sure, it was only a game; but I find it easy to fall into the trap of procrastinating about things, taking shortcuts where offered, or being distracted by shiny things that catch my attention. Here, I chose a task and stuck to it, and now I have something different than the griffon buyers do. Not too shabby.
(Yes, I did much other cool stuff this weekend, including a good party and some general housecleaning. It really is still just a game.)
Tags: philosophy, world of warcraft
YAY!! gratz
When i went to obtain mounts, I used my warrior to mine the ore and herb the flowers and sold them on the AH to obtain 2 epic flyers, one for the warrior and one for the Paladin.
5200 gold takes awhile let me tell you. But with time and perservance, it is obtainable
I’m trying to decide now whether to start grinding the 5200 gold, or just go ahead and get back to questing in Northrend – the Consortium grind got me practically to 72, so Borean Tundra should be pretty easy at this point.
I’ll probably do the latter.