MINE!!!

One unintended side effect of Blapril has been that I get this twitchy feeling that I should be writing when ordinarily I'd be relaxing or gaming.*

So, this post is the result.

And its all about understanding patience.

No, really.

You see, I've spent the past couple of days grinding both Timbermaw and Argent Dawn rep, and even in the best of times it's a long slog. Maybe not nearly as bad as Cenarion Circle rep in Silithus, but it's up there.

But what I've witnessed is how people approach grinding, and whether they really have any patience or not.

For example, today I spent some time grinding because I simply didn't have the time to fit an instance run before work. There I was, getting feathers from Felpaw Village, and for about 15 minutes there was nobody around.

Quiet, there was.

Slow, the respawns were.

Then an Orc Warlock arrived and started killing mobs near me.

"No big deal," I thought, so I moved to another section and began there. I wasn't going to complain about this guy killing "my" mobs because I didn't know how to share.

The Orc finished his side and then swam across the lake (?) and started killing the mobs on my side.

I shrugged, said okay, and then moved back to the side he recently vacated and began killing the mobs that were now respawning more quickly.

The Orc came back and started killing the mobs again.

I moved back to the other side and began the process again.

Rinse, repeat.

After about the third time he did this I wanted to point out that he didn't have to come over to my side because mobs were already respawning on his side, but the Warlock had it in his head he had to get ALL OF THEM, which mean crossing over to my side.

Now, to make this perfectly clear, there was no time where I had to stop killing mobs at all, because there were plenty of respawns happening all the time. But it was the approach to things, where the Warlock simply couldn't run back to the end of his area and start all over, that got to me.

I'm pretty sure I could have devised an Aesop's Fable about this, called "The Warlock, The Rogue, and the Felpaw Village", except for what happened in Winterfall Village afterward.

***

I'd set myself an internal clock of gathering 25 sets of feathers before crossing through to Winterspring and acquiring the quest to go kill eight of three separate Winterfall Village groups, and by the time I left Felpaw Village the Orc had been joined by a couple of like minded rep farmers who spent more time running around than actually farming at that point.

So when I arrived at Winterfall Village, I noticed almost immediately that every single Winterfall Villager had been killed. It would have been the site of a mystery, "The Winterfall Massacre", were it not almost immediately obvious who'd been doing the killing. While I stealthed around, investigating, I was passed by at least four other toons, riding around and hunting for available Winterfall to slay. At the top of the ridge, I found some Winterfall Ursa with nobody around, so I began work on the quest at hand. I got about halfway through killing the first Ursa when a Dwarf Paladin rode up, got in my face for a half second, then rode around, drawing aggro of all of the remaining Ursa nearby.

I wouldn't have been shocked to have seen him yell "MINE!!" on top of it. (He didn't.)

Really, dude?

He could have just as easily whispered if we could group up for faster rep grinding (or in my case questing), but he chose to be an ass about it.

And I could have been just an ass by pulling Winterfall firbolgs near him when I saw him working on some Winterfall a couple of minutes later, but I chose not to. I simply worked around everybody else, stealthing as much as I could, and getting my quest completed the hard way.

***

As much as the previous post was about how reaching out to others worked, this post ended up being about how greed slows everybody down. It would have been better in the long run to share, because a group could easily have covered a lot more ground and gathered a lot more rep than a person working alone, but nobody took that chance. In fact, people were so wrapped up in "me" and "mine" that it worked against everybody's goals.

Funny how WoW mirrors real life like that. Aesop would have been proud.

*Or doing anything other than writing, I suppose.