The One Where A Gamble Paid Off

When I first started playing WoW, The Burning Crusades was already live so my first experience with an expansion launching was Wrath of the Lich King. By the time Wrath was ready to be launched, I had already fallen in love with the game and recognized that a new expansion was a big deal. I took the night off work and stood in line at a local Game Stop to purchase a copy of Wrath at midnight. Because I was one of the first 100 through the door (number 12, to be exact) I got a free poster of Arthas. Regrettably, I did not purchase the Collector’s Edition because I had not reserved one 8 months in advance and they had no extra copies available at that store at midnight. I blame this on my noobness. As soon as I realized how cool the Collector’s Editions are, how much this game means to me and how (at least it seemed at the time) uncommon the CE’s are, I vowed to never make that mistake again. I have the Collector’s Editions of both Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria because I was smart enough to put my name on a list well in advance for both of those launches, though it does seem now they are easier to come by.

Over the years, I have always stared longingly at Amazon and Ebay as Collector’s Editions of World of Warcraft (vanilla), The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King were listed for hundreds and hundreds of dollars each. Even though I could technically afford them, I just couldn’t allow myself to pay such large amounts of money for a game. Especially a copy of a game I already own a version of. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to never getting a chance to own the original game (vanilla) Collector’s Edition because of it’s extreme rarity, but I did decide to do a quick search for TBC and Wrath every few months just in case I found someone who didn’t realize what they had. Over the past year I had even allowed myself to consider buying a used copy with an already used game code as long as the box contained all of the other items that were originally included. But those would have to cost even less to justify purchasing them.

Cut to two weeks ago when I happened to think about doing a quick eBay search at work and found a deal that seemed too good to be true. A mint, unopened, factory sealed version of The Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition for a buy it now price of $165 and free shipping. Oh the agony. It’s a bit much to spend but it was an amazing price for that product IF the product was actually as described. To make matters even scarier, the seller had only 2 reviews… he was basically a noob seller, an unknown. Both of his reviews were positive, but still that’s a big risk. After a quick question posed to Twitter and a few hours of agonizing over it, I decided to take the risk. It’s tax return season so I had more extra money than usual and I knew PayPal offered a buyer’s protection for purchases that weren’t shipped or advertised correctly. I clicked the button and bought it.

I didn’t receive any type of confirmation from the seller himself, just the email from eBay letting me know my purchase was successful. It was several stressful days before I got an update the item had shipped and then a week of waiting for it to arrive. But finally, last Friday, The Burning Crusades Collector’s Edition was in my hands. Unfortunately, I was rushing out of town for 3 days and while I could have taken it with me, I decided to wait until I was back home to break it open and see if it was truly an unused game code.

I’m happy to report it was exactly as advertised. I am now the very proud owner of all the items included in the box (all still completely wrapped and unopened, as was the box itself) and I have a new Netherwhelp pet in my collection. I still don’t know that I’ll ever get this lucky with a copy of the vanilla CE, but after a few months have passed I will start watching again for a copy of Wrath. I just hope I get as lucky as I did this time around.

After attaching the code to my account last night, I knew that as soon as I opened the pet in the mail I would get the achievement. I positioned myself to capture the perfect screenshot but as you can see, at the moment I grabbed the pet from the mail, Elfi turned around and put her back to the camera. Grrr. Oh well, it’s not like I can get a redo, so it is what it is. I’m still super excited. And yes, the seller got excellent feedback from me.

The One Where I Got An Amazing Surprise!

Okay, the most amazing thing happened on Saturday. Well, I suppose technically it happened on Thursday, but since I didn’t login to Elfindale on Thursday or Friday, I didn’t know about it until Saturday. However, none of the technical details are important. What is important is that when I did login to Elfi on Saturday and checked my mail, I found an in-game mail had been sent to me from someone named Keevy and attached was a Festival Lantern, the Horde side version of the Lunar Festival pet. Squeee! How freaking cool is that. It had been sent on Thursday, but I had been so busy running alts around all over the land to collect coins and gain experience from the elders, I just hadn’t been logged in on Elfi for a couple of days. The letter accompanying the pet simply said “From someone who has read your blog. <3" and of course, when I looked up the toon name Keevy with the Battle.net armory, it was a level 2 toon. So I have no way of knowing who sent me such an amazing gift.

I had mentioned in my last post that I wasn't enjoying tracking down the elders very much, but trying to get the pet was why I kept going. Then I closed with a mild, mostly sarcastic complaint that I would also have to repeat the painful process on the Horde side so I could get that version of the pet too. I had no idea such a silly little statement would prompt someone to actually purchase the Horde pet for me and roll an alt on my server to get it to me. What a great bunch of people we have in this community. I am so shocked/flattered/excited and very appreciative of such a gesture. I do wish I knew who the anonymous gift-giver was, but if they don't want to reveal themselves then that's their prerogative. But whoever you are, Keevy, you should know 3 very important things:

1). I am very, very excitedly appreciative of your kind gesture and I thank you very much
2). I have replied to your in-game mail and attached a Lunar Lantern (Alliance side version of the Lunar Festival pet) for you to have. If you already have one, you're welcome to sell this one for money or send it to someone else as a gift and make them as happy as you made me.
3). I named my lantern Keevy in your honor and if you wish to reveal yourself to me by another name, I will gladly rename it to that.

Lunar Festival Madness: Why Am I Doing This Again?

In-game holidays are fun, right? (Sidenote: how the hell is that dude riding his wind serpent upside down? [not an innuendo])

When the achievement “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” went live in September 2009 I immediately began doing all the things. I actually got the achievement pretty quick, though if I remember right I had to wait for the second Love Is In The Air to roll around because I missed one of the elements the first time. I was actually trying to verify the dates a few minutes ago by viewing my achievements, but I don’t believe they’re displaying correctly. If they are, then I actually completed this the first time through each event.

EITHER WAY, the point is I haven’t done the Lunar Festival in it’s entirety since then. I mean, if I happen across an Elder I will stop and get free xp or gold depending on my character, but I haven’t bothered to fly all the places and track them all down in years. However this year the Lunar Festival happens to coincide with me making a big effort to level up my DK. She’s around the lvl 64, 65 mark so when the event began I thought to myself “self, you should fly around the lands and get that free xp. It will be easier than leveling and will fit right in to your lazy lifestyle.” Of course, I still have other toons to take care of, so I’m not devoting all of my time to it but I’ve been chasing down Elders for a few hours a day the past 3 days and I’m really starting to question if it’s worth it. I mean, I’m not max level so in enemy territory the NPCs are kicking my ass. In the higher level Northrend and Cataclysm zones, any old regular mob I get too close to is kicking my ass. As a DK I basically went from Eastern Plaguelands to Hellfire Peninsula so even though we start off with a lot of flight paths already known to us, most of my maps aren’t opened up to show location names. This means I’m spending a lot of time tabbed out to look up coordinates for the majority of the elders. So between the repair bills and all the wasted time running back to my body, flying across the land and tabbing out every 3 minutes I’m beginning to wonder why I’m doing this. I am pretty sure if I had stayed in Nagrand and continued questing this entire time, I’d be leveling much faster. Although I will say I am enjoying grabbing all of the mining nodes I come across.

Oh that’s right. I’m doing it for the Lunar Lantern. Never mind the rant, totally worth it.

image credit goes to WarcraftPets.com http://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/magic/lanterns-and-lamps/lunar-lantern/

Also, I am now realizing I should do this on one of my Horde toons to get that pet as well. But I can guarantee I will use the level 90 for that adventure.

Hooray For New Mounts

My tiny little Horde guild managed to luck into 5 of us online last Friday evening and we stormed through Ulduar 10 man to collect our Rusted Proto Drakes. Achievements and mounts for everyone! Next on the agenda, finish the 25 man run we have mostly completed to get the Ironbound Proto Drakes for those of us who still don’t have them.

Sidenote: It is hard to get a good picture of 5 flapping drakes. Sorry my dragon is rudely covering your face, Morgrull.

The One Where I Do Some Bragging

As I stated in my last post, I have been running a lot of old content on my Horde toon with a couple of friends so that we can all get our grubby hands on pets and mounts. Of course, we have done Sarth 3D so I have recently acquired the Black Drake and the Twilight Drake, but we hadn’t had much luck getting any of the random drop mounts from other locations. We’ve been doing Malgyos as part of the rotation, even though I cannot strafe to save my life, and headed in there again last night to see if our luck was any better.

After only a few minutes it became obvious that something was different this time around because we were beating on the dragon and he was laughing in our faces. It took longer than normal, but we got to the second phase and suddenly my partner earned the “Denyin The Scion (25 player)” achievement. Aha! Now we know what’s wrong here. We are accidentally trying to 2 man the instance while it’s set to 25 man instead of 10. We did manage to get to the last phase, but I soon died (see previous statement about being terrible at strafing). So we run back, get our bodies and have a moment to decide … are we going to try it again on 10 man or have we wasted enough time here already? Well, we’re already standing here so what the hell.

We change to 10 man, go in and stomp all over everyone and everything and when it was all said and done the Reigns of the Azure Drake drop. Ermahgerd! We both rolled Need and I won it with a roll of 100. I already had the “Needy” achievement, but it would have been awesome if I had earned it on this mount instead. Naturally, in all my excitement I forgot to take a screenshot of the loot dropping but a few minutes later I posed outside of the entrance and included the chat window with my roll in it. Of course, this doesn’t mean we will stop our weekly Malgyos runs because there’s a Blue Drake I need to add to my collection and my friends still need to a chance for these two. But it certainly means I can fly there in style next time we go.