Breakfast Topic: How far will you go for WoW?

A few weeks before Icecrown Citadel was released, the officers of my raiding guild had this brilliant idea that we should all faction transfer to Alliance, and then — because our server was terribly imbalanced toward Horde — server transfer as well. Their reasoning was that Alliance racial abilities were better for PvP… Which, as I understood it, would be crucial to our future success as a raiding guild. As you might guess, I wasn’t keen on spending the money to server and faction transfer for PvP racials, but wanting to stay with my guild I opted to level a second priest on the new server, hoping that I could gear up sufficiently before the new tier.

40 or so levels into my new priest, I was stricken with the most dreadful and debilitating cold I can remember ever having. My entire body throbbed with ache, my coughing fits were so violent I would frequently choke, and my nasal congestion felt as if a gnome rogue was relentlessly dagger-ing me in the face. The worst of it all was my fever, which even with antipyretics, was so high I could barely sit up in bed, much less at a desk. I called out sick from work, but for some reason the thought of taking a break from leveling wasn’t acceptable to me. I knew if I didn’t reach 80 in a few days I’d miss out on a reset worth of gear and valor points, which could make all the difference between being under geared in ICC and being a handicap in ICC. “No,” I thought, “I’m not going to let my guild down,” so I dragged my laptop into bed with me and forced myself to level through the pain and exhaustion.

I was reminded of this story recently because last month, when the Mythic Blackrock Foundry progression race began, my beloved windwalker monk took deliriously ill and forced himself to play through it. (The bowl of in-game soup pictured above is the only comfort I could provide him, being in one of those newfangled long distance relationships.) This got me thinking about how different WoW is from other games; with League of Legends or StarCraft I never feel like I can’t make up for lost time and I never feel obligated to play when I’m under the weather. With WoW though, I cannot stand the thought of missing a raid, even now as a more casual player, or even if I don’t particularly like my guild that much (which was the case in the story I told earlier). This made me wonder if other players had similar stories, and what they felt their motivations were. Let’s hear ‘em!