Gold Fever

Sorry, another lyrics post :)

However this time I've even outdone myself and picked a song from one of my favourite movies of all time, one that many will never have heard of, and fewer still will have seen it. This probably isn't the most famous song from the film nor my favourite but it sums up my current WoW head space

I present Clint Eastwood's rendition of Gold Fever from Paint Your Wagon

I would give the world to see. How I used to be 
When I had no axe to grind. Except for chopping wood

Day was day, and night was night. Wrong, was never right
Didn't matter where I went. As much as where I stood

I had dreams, average size.
There were stars in the skies
Not my eyes

I wasnt always a goblin. In fact I never really meant to end up playing WoW for more than a couple of months. With a raft of RPGs under my belt, it was an expectation that I would play until I reached an end point then be off to find something else to entertain me.

I'd played MMOs previously but nothing like WoW. I played a  MUD called DarkCastle when I lived in Scotland and in the time I've been with Cat we'd cleared several RPGs with our favourite being Sacred. Since then we'd been intimately involved in the hurtful politics of a Facebook game called Knighthood, and just grown relatively quickly bored of the online MMO FallenSword. WoW was just going to be another passing fad, albeit one with prettier graphics that put our minds back to the more relaxing times of questing in Sacred.

That was April 2008. Nearly three years later and here I am, logging on most every day and night since.

Then I got gold fever
No romp 'n rollin' girl and fellow stuck
Can cure the gold fever
Nothin' can help you but the yellow stuff

What can stop that itchin'?
Ain't around the kitchen
Gold, gold, hooked am I
Susannah, go ahead and cry

I dabbled with the AH in FallenSword, but in that game you could legitamately buy a more powerful currency than gold. In fact you kinda had to to get anywhere in the game. It was always going to be a real life money sink, and it gets boring pretty quickly.

WoW was different. Gold is amazingly important. Of course there are ways to be successful without it but gold just makes everything much much easier. 

I've given my money making history (one and two) back when this blog first started 18 months ago, but its worth repeating that the first realisation of how influencial gold was, was when a stranger gave Cats toon one gold. A single gold coin. She was low level wandering from Goldshire to Stormwind, quite possibly for the first time.

At that moment the game changed forever for us. Remembering this was before heirloom gear, and before any toon we had access to had more than a few coppers after training (and often not enough to train what we could learn) one gold was a fortune. One gold allowed us to train, replace some of her gear, get better ammo and most importantly buy a new gun. Questing suddenly because easier as her DPS and survivalability increased significantly.

Sometime later, when Cat was around level 40, we got a epic axe drop off trash. It was called Hurricane if I recall correctly. We sold that for 500g.

We sent 100g to the three main toons - Cat, Sardonica and Cat's son's toon - and saved the 200g gold. We felt like millionaires. Can you imagine how ridiculous that sounds to me now? These days I spend 100g on a flask which lasts an hour. Or on repairs after a wipefest in Grim Batol.

I've gifted items worth 10-20 thousand gold to people without a second thought. But 3 years ago 100g was more money than you could imagine.

Sardonica invested that 100g into mats for disenchanting. The rest really is history.

Once we all did honest work. Farmer, lawyer, clerk
Married men, and single men. And some who ain't so sure

Now I look at them and see. Duplicates of me
Cured of what we suffered from. And sufferin' from the cure

Who can say, why we came?
Where's the hope, where's the flame?
We're the same

I often wonder if any new players get the immense joy that we experienced when they get their first exposure to a reasonable amount of gold, be it just a few coins out of nowhere, or a random act of kindness from a stranger. 

I suspect its down to the person. What made the difference to Cat and myself was that we had seen the candy in the shop window, and suddenly we were able to go into the shop and buy a sweet - admitedly the cheapest smallest gobstopper in the shop, but it still tasted wonderful. It reminds me of Charlie in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as he savoured his gift of the Bar of Wonka's chocolate. 

Alas many people dont get those sensations. Perhaps its a generational thing. Perhaps its just that Cat and I are naive idiots who hadn't worked out that gold was easy to come by and being newbies for having no gold when the gift was given or Hurricane sold. It could be a whole range of things

 When you've got Gold fever
No romp 'n rollin' girl and fellow stuck
Can cure the gold fever
Nothin' can help you but the yellow stuff

What can stop that itchin'
Ain't around the kitchen
Gold, gold, hooked am I
Susannah, go ahead and cry

I've tried to stop being a goblin. Unless I went and threw it all away I dont ever need to buy and sell ever again. The vast majority of players survive hand to mouth doing dailies and surviving off of loot drops. The fact I have a huge stockpile means I would never need to scrimp and save for an item I really wanted or mats to enchant something

Its how I could imagine my life would be if I won the lotto. Stick the lump sum in the bank and live off the proceeds. Never doing something I didn't want to do. Taking up roles I wanted to, and if I stopped enjoying it walking away without looking back.

Unfortunately life isnt kind enough for me to walk away with the 20 million dollar jackpot. Therefore I keep working and keep taking the crap that any job causes.

But life in WoW has been kind to me. Through hard work not luck I admit, but although I could walk away I dont. This bemuses me because some days the grind annoys the hell out of me. Then on other nights (two nights ago for instance) I invest the best part of 100,000g into a new venture, knowing full well I'll be investing hours of my time into increase my wealth once again. But its like a drug to me. And once you're hooked it's very hard to give up. Perhaps I should invest time into Goblins Anonymous instead but I wouldnt know where to start on the 10 part plan!. Meanwhile I need to go and scan the Auction House. See you tomorrow :)

Gold fever, gold fever, gold fever, gold fever, gold fever.........Deal!