Well News.com has written a story:  Outsourcing your ‘Warcraft’ skills

I think the point is kind of missed in many places in this story, especially by the “long-time Warcraft player” quoted in the story.  People say this is lame and misses the point of the game, but I disagree.  MMORPG’s have an inherent problem:  they have to throttle forward progress.  There are always a group of people who can play almost 24/7 and get ahead.  So much of the stuff, including leveling up and especially making gold, are repeatative and often boring undertakings. 

I’ll admit I had fun leveling from 60->70 and that was generally fun.  Kudos to Blizzard for putting in enough quests and fun stuff to make it not feel like a hellacious mind-numbing grind.  But earning gold is.  Grinding for reputation is in many cases.  These things are just not fun, but they are throttles within the game.

If you have a job and a life, you cannot necessarily do these things at the frequency level necessary to be at the top of the game.  This is in no way a reflection of your skills and it in no way makes you lame.  If you like the game and you want to stay at the top I think it’s fine to outsource. 

It’s not like you’re having these services run instances for you – they typically are not capable of that.  But if during downtime you have them make gold for you (cheaper, but possible riskier than buying it), grind reputation, or level up an alt (alternate or second) character (so you can try something different), I say do it if you have the money.  Spending money on this is cheaper than a lot of other hobbies. 

I’ve done it.  I admit it.  I think it was worth it.  Anyway, there you have it. 

In World of Warcraft’s expansion The Burning Crusade you can buy flying mounts.  They are really cool and are also a requirement for many level 70 activities.  So if you play, you’ll eventually have to buy one.  There are two types:

• Normal:  60% faster than walking and they can fly.
• Epic:  280% faster and they fly really fast.

The epics are really cool.  I highly recommend them.  So here is what they cost:

Normal:

• Riding skill training to 225:  800g
• Basic flying mount:  100g
• Total price:  900g

Epic:

• Riding skill training to 225:  800g
• Riding skill training to 300:  5,000g  (requires that your riding already be 225)
• Basic epic flying mount:  200g
• Total cost:  6,000g (assuming you didn’t also buy the basic mount in the meantime for an additional 100g)

So for an epic flying mount (you’ll definitely want one) you’re in for 6,000g.  What is that in real money?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  So I looked it up today and found gold (on my server) going for $188/1000g – down substantially from a week ago when it was about $300/1000g.

At the new, lower gold price of $188 per 1000g the epic mount would cost $1,128. (Over a thousand dollars of real money!)

So your glorious new flying vehicle (which Blizzard declares that it own) is almost as expensive as a real vehicle.

Oh and if you want to know how much it costs in time, it is even worse.  My guess is that you can earn 1000g in 20-40 hours depending on how hard you try.  So figuring 30, it will take you 180 hours of gold farming (what fun) to get enough for your epic mount.  If you make over $30/hr in reality land that means the epic mount IS costing as much as a real vehicle at $5,000+.  Of course the fallacy of this argument is that you choose to spend your time here, so what is your leisure time worth?  I don’t know but this seems like it’s starting to get pretty expensive.

So I’ve been using Vista for something like four days now.  In general I am really starting to like it.  It definitely takes a while to get used to somethings… like the back arrow to go back to the higher folder rather than the up arrow.

Some minor things seem to either not quite work or to have changed so dramatically that I can’t get them to work they way I want.  Some programs seem to behave a little badly, like Quicktime seems to take over everything in IE now even when I tell it not to and the only way I can get it to let go is to uninstall it.  Which of course breaks iTunes…  So that’s irritating.

Also when I switch from a full screen application (like World of Warcraft) back to the desktop it has some glitchy refresh thing going on.  Given that my video card has 768mb I won’t accept that this is a hardware problem.  Maybe I need more new video card drivers… which frankly I’m a little afraid to install (if they exist, I haven’t checked).

So I like Vista now that it is working, except for some minor things.  My hellacious experience with the install process sucked and I would warn people about that.  But now that I have it going I like it.  I think the UI is definitely a lot better and certainly cooler and more aesthetically appealing.

As I begin to use Office 2007 apps I’ll post my thoughts on them.