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Friday, November 5, 2010

Wasting time in game is wasting time IRL

Just a quick thought here and a piece of advice. First, the piece of advice: don't be stingy, especially when you are sitting on a shitload of gold.

I've just realized that because I'm a scrooge in real life, I'm also one in WoW, and I've been sabotaging my real life as a result. How, you ask? Well, after my warlock hit 80 a long time ago, I just parked him in Dalaran and logged on him daily but only to do the jewelcrafting dailies.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Of course not. The problem arises from the fact that I never bought epic flight for this character because I figured that I wouldn't play him much after he turned 80. That's fine and dandy when you character is rooted to a spot and engages solely in crafting professions but the thing with jewelcrafting dailies is that you have to fly some place, every single time.

Having a slow mount will waste a few minutes every day. Multiply that by a few months and you'll find that you've probably wasted several hours of your life.

I've been very bad at this. Here I was, with over 300K gold, lacking epic flying on my warlock who needed to fly daily to some location or other. And then it hit me like a brick: I was being stupid. I should have bought epic flight on the warlock as soon as he was eligible. My philosophy had been why waste 5000 gold on something that won't be used anyway? My philosophy was wrong, because my warlock was flying on a more frequent basis than even my main.

So I went ahead and bought epic flight for this guy without a second thought. At that point I had about 316K gold and the purchase brought me to 311K. A week later, I'm at 317K and business hasn't even been that good, meaning that I wasn't even trying very hard to make gold.

Conclusion: don't be stupid like I was. When you have more gold than you can use, furthermore it's just sitting there gathering dust, use some of it to invest in your characters. Anything to make their questing easier and quicker is not only a better use of your in-game time but also saves on your real life time.

3 comments:

Bloodshrike said...

Agreed. While I'll probably hold off on 310% flying for most of my toons, except gatherers, I buy regular flight at 60, tome of cold weather flying at 68, and swift flight at 70.

I can't STAND flying at slow speeds

Echo said...

My 2 cents: in a way or another, you will still "waste" your time on something else. If you complete your dailies in less time (due to the new mount speed), you will probably log on another toon, spend more time on the auction house, whatever.

It's not like "hey, I will stop playing earlier and go out for RL stuff" :)

Darth Solo said...

@Bloodshrike I'm not sure I'll get 310% either but I just might, for the hell of it, since I'm sitting on more than enough gold.

@Echo true to a point. Depends on each person. During the week I have a gaming schedule that I'm trying to stick to. I don't like going over so I limit my game time fairly strictly.