Guide to 6.0 Pre-Patch Shenanigans by RP Your Life!

Inevitably, patch day is always a hectic and busy affair. When the servers came up yesterday, I had to get in all of the new quests, prepare my gear for raid, and then fight bosses with new spell rotations and adjusted mechanics. Over the past few weeks, every WoW fan-site in existence has published a guide for surviving the WoD pre-patch. I might be a little late now, but I have a little 6.0 pre-patch guide of my own. However, forget all of the class changes, UI improvements, and new features that are baffling everyone, because my guide doesn't address any of that. In fact, there is only one major bullet point:

Iron Starlettes

Take a page from Neopets (if it would load) and hoard a bunch of a semi-retired item. It might take seven years, but they will eventually inflate in value enough for you to get sick of them taking up space in your guild bank, and then you can sell each of them off for a MASSIVE 20g profit. Go ahead and do the Iron Invasion quest chain on every single 90 that you have. Compared to Gahz'rooki's world tour of Azeroth, it takes about ten minutes to get one of these seemingly non-sentient balls of metal that somehow know how to Pokébattle, and it will be ten minutes spent investing in your (very distant) future.

Leave it to RP Your Life! to touch upon the important issues for YOU!

-Avia.

I went to my sister's wedding and came back with a new phone.

To my loyal fans who have been wondering where I've been, I apologize for the sudden M.I.A. Last week, my mother called to give me a week's notice for my sister's wedding back home, so I had to fly out to where there is no WoW or even a computer capable of running Neopets flash games without lagging. I was hoping to find some free time to blog while I was up there, but it turned out that weddings are quite a bit of work, and the only thing I managed to fit in between dress fittings and raiding crafts stores was letting my wrist recover from playing too much D3. I supposed I should thank my sister for being the reason there's no longer a radiating pain in my right wrist despite the fact that going to a doctor would have been a lot cheaper than plane tickets and a dress.

Dr. Know-It-All says, "You could just take a break from gaming."

In other good news, I managed to upgrade my phone over the weekend, and now that I've turned off all of its amazing new features that sound pretty cool but drain the battery mad hard, it's time to do some serious decision making about what games to put on it. After all, the games on my phone are going to be responsible for keeping me fully entertained whether I'm on an hour-long bus ride or waiting two minutes on a grocery store checkout line. It needs to keep me engaged and yet not distract me so much that I'm unaware of my surroundings. There can't be too much loading time or aimless RPG-style wandering, but if my non-existent boss calls on me, I must have the freedom to put it on pause or just set it down without ruining my score. Also, it needs to have enough content to be worth the three or so dollars that I've allocated for it in my yearly budget.

By personal preference, I've already eliminated any games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled where one can ignore the instructions in lieu of swiping angrily all over the screen. There's nothing wrong with playing these games; I just don't like my gaming to start off with a delusion of strategy that then quickly devolves into frustrated button mashing to get to the next level. I'm also not a fan of anything that I suck at and thus makes me feel stupid, so that gets rid of things like Sudoku and, oddly enough, Peggle. While I love Cut the Rope and similar physics games, it ends up embarrassing in public because I always find myself leaning to one side or the other like tilting my phone or even my entire body will help that little ball get to where it's supposed to go. Finally, even though word puzzles are my favorite type, waiting eight hours for someone to make a move in Words with Friends kind of ruins the point of why I personally play a phone game, which is to fill in a window of boredom. If I'm already at home and playing D3 by the time they get back to me, they're going to have to wait eight hours for my turn too. It's a vicious cycle.

After much thought and research, I've come to a final decision about what game to put on my precious new phone, to entertain and to engage, to educate and to uplift, to amuse and to soothe my world-weary soul.
 


-Avia.

If real life were a video game, I'd still be broke.

While I'm not quite the 1% currency-wise in any of the games that I play, I'd say that compared to the Rockefellers bidding max on BMAH mounts and the few people I know who wouldn't be able to raid if their guilds weren't paying for repairs, I'm pretty middle-class. That's not to say "middle class" in a video game translates to "middle class" IRL, for it's so much easier to make money in WoW that not being ridiculously wealthy in it is actually a failure. Honestly, even with as much gold as I have, translated into the real world, I would be just as upper-middle-lower-class as I am in real life, and my in-game tactics for making money are just as inadequate as they are outside.

Unsurprisingly, the money-making lessons one can glean from gaming are pretty analogous to what we see outside of it. Sure, there's meritocracy, working hard so one can save and eventually become rich, both feasible and tantalizing mythical in either environment, for then there are the real methods of making gold/Simoleans/Neopoints/money en masse: stealing, cheating, wage slavery, etc. As much gold as one has, it's nothing compared to what Chinese farmers make teleporting to mining nodes and paying teenagers a few dollars a day to spam in trade. Nothing makes more Neopoints than running an auto-buying program, nothing is as quick and easy to earn Simoleans as good old "motherlode," and there's nothing that makes more money in the real world than organized crime, drug trafficking, and sex slavery.

It's a rather negative but realistic sentiment. I'm not promoting the use of bots nor suggesting that everyone smuggle heroin. In fact, the consequences of subversive activity can be just as harsh in-game when one equates the potential real life losses (assets, freedom, life) to the punishments for cheating (inventory, characters, life-long ban), and many people do equate them. However, it doesn't stop tons of players every day from taking those risks to get ahead, accumulate wealth, or pull themselves out of destitute situations, because for better or worse, in-game societies are a reflection of the ones in which we actually live and are full of the same stratification, inflation, and artificial prestige-laden consumerism that we experience in real life.

-Avia.

Post-Traumatic Progression Disorder

Hello. This is Barkath, Avia's voidwalker. I wanted to inform her readers that, due to a five hour stretch of wiping in Veteran Skullcano in Wildstar, there is, what you would call, a "situation." Rather than reverting back to WoW like a good little casual, she has regressed back many more years to a far earlier, far worse state of gaming docility.

She is playing Neopets.

Hi!

As we speak, she is dressing up sickenly "cute" animals in tiny hats and shoes and pampering them with spa treatments. She reads her pets books, feeds them puddings, and grooms their furry faces with pink powder puffs to make them "happy." Hours can go by, during which all she will do is watch with glazed eyes as a farm of insects obediently collects wood and pollen for her. And perhaps most horrifying of all, instead of fighting off the minions of the Sha in Pandaria with wanton bloodlust, she is playing a Neopets' turn-based mini-RPG. Turn-based!

As her enslaved yet moderately loyal servant, I urge anyone who can help to try to pull her out of this sad psychotic break and bring her gaming identity back to a more current, mature, and hardcore state. Or euthanize her in fel flames. Either is fine with me.

-Barkath.

P.S. NEOPETS! -Avia.