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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2491 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I played WoW circa 2008-2010, TBC-WOTLK era, and one thing you're discounting is that even back then there was a booming black market in selling characters online. Highly decked out characters were being sold online for thousands of dollars each. There were rumors of Chinese farmers, but i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

i think the bigger source was just players who enjoyed grinding up to a high-ish level and then starting over. Which I can understand the appeal of!

Or they enjoyed it more than getting a real job. Definitely lots of people with a lot of free time selling their characters then and pissing off their raid by expecting to be regeared.

Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).

So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.

On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.

I was that guy. I liked to make my gnome warlock spam cool spells and send my pet to attack things because it was fun. I think I understood some of the basics of how skills worked together, but I definitely hadn't optimized my DPS. I was pretty good at not standing in fire, though. Thanks for being nice to us normies.

As Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth once phrased it, "I mostly just picked my talents because the icons looked cool".

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