Sunday, February 24, 2008

Shared joy

Isn't it a bit strange how happy you can get when other players get loot? As happy as you would be if it was your own. At least it's like that to me. I came to think about it the last night, when the thing I had stopped believing ever would happen actually happened. The Sun Eater, one of the best tanking swords of the game, dropped in Mechanar to one of my best game friends. And I was lucky enough to be around when it happened.

I don't even dare to think about how many runs he hade made in Mechanar before this happened. I just know that I participated in the hunt myself, half a year ago, and that w eran there so many times that we started to doubt that the sword existed at all. IT seemed to some kind of mirage, the holy graal or a bizarre joke from Blizzard.

Eventually he had had enough and gave it up for a while. But now he had started the project again with foolish stubbornness. I didn't object running for it again, being nostalgic over all those nights that we had spent in there, and quite relaxed since I had done it so many times. It was the same procedure as always.

Normally it's more fun to do unknown and challanging instances than to do those that you know by heart. But this time, routine wasn't a disadvantage. At two o clock in the night between Saturday and Sunday, you're not in top shape. We were quite silly, fooling around, walking through the corridors. Sometimes half asleep since it was too easy, sometimes wiping without any good reason when we'd just been too casual about it. We were so distracted that we even missed to loot half of the key for the chest, and thus missed one badge and a drop. We rolled about whose fault it was, shrugging at it.

Maybe that's the kind of mood you need for hazard to strike. It's in those nights that things happen, when you don't believe or expect anything at all, when you merely just exist. Or maybe it was the spirits of the game that wanted to point out a lesson to us: Never give up. And don't ever stop to play. Sooner or later it will turn up. The drop you're dreaming of.

The Sun Eater. I stared at it like bewitched where it was in the loot list, stuck between a Primal nether and Mana Wrath, that I had carried myself once upon a time and that had served me so well. Here it was, the graal. It existed for real! I was like tha sun myself, shining as much as the sword and its rightful owner. Because I knew that I had had another kind of drop now myself, an epic memory that I can take out and play with myself whenever I want to. It's all purple, almost orange. Noone else will see my epic memory when I'm running around in Stormwind, doing errands. But I know. And that's enough for me.

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