Wheely cool, my (virtual) life is in chaos, busy

When I was messing around with the AWESOME Craigslist search aggregator, searchtempest.com, a couple weeks ago I stumbled across a guy in Jacksonville that was selling a rear SSR factory chrome wheel for a SUPER cheap $75.  Although the guy was way too far away for me to go pick up the wheel and my being pretty sure it was sold anyway, I sent him an email expressing my interest.  I was surprised to hear it was still available.

Let me back up a sec.  My SSR, although incredibly awesome, has a few warts.  One of them are it’s wheels.  The prior owner evidently took a set of factory painted wheels and had them chromed.

Well either the chrome job was not good or this is just normal for 7 year old rechromed wheels, but the finish on the wheels has started to pit.  Some wheels are worse than others.  They are 15 footers, looking good from a distance but not so sharp as you get closer.

I saw some ridiculous prices for a set of new factory SSR chrome wheels, somewhere in the neighborhood of $2500, f that.  So anyway, you can understand why picking up a factory chrome wheel for $75 made my eyes light up.

Now normally with a Craigslist transaction, at least every one that I ever participated in, delivery of the item is handled in person as a local transaction. Obviously driving to Jacksonville and back for a $75 wheel would be rather silly, probably costing me upwards of $100 in gas and 10 hours of drive time.

I asked the seller if he would be open to my paying him with Paypal and him shipping the wheel to me.  Of course I would pay all shipping costs.  I was mildly surprised he said he would do it, cool!

The wheel arrived yesterday, packed with care.  Other than a small nick in it which I already knew about, it was in really good shape.

My plan is to swap this wheel with my driver side rear which has the worst pitting of the four.  Hopefully I can score similar deals to eventually get factory chrome on all 4 corners.

MMORPG alert, next few paragraphs are about WoW, something many of you will not care about or understand.

I have talked a few times on here about how surprised I was that once I became separated that my time gaming and specifically playing WoW fell off a cliff, the exact opposite of what I expected.  I figured a life where my only considerations were me, myself and I would include plenty of recreational time to do something like play WoW, my prime source of gaming enjoyment for over 7 years.

There was a long period of time where I was spending up to 30+ hours a week in the game, not that it was a good thing.  I just found it so engaging and enveloping, feeding into my need to always have something to do, even if those tasks are virtual. There were some nights where I didn’t crawl into bed at a ridiculous time early in the morning as I always had just one more goal to accomplish.

I found the game to be fascinating, not just because of the game but because of the dynamics of the millions of people playing it with you.  In many ways WoW felt like a real society upon itself, your interactions in game relied on many of the dynamics of human nature.  You ran into all types, the asshole, the bully, the coward, the whiner and even the occasional all around good guy.    I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it was these interactions that made the game really interesting.  Fast forward to 2013.

Over the years the game developers have made a number of improvements to the game to make many functions in the game significantly quicker and easier.  For example, to do an instance (a challenge where 5 players work together to accomplish a goal) you used to have to do a lot of work.  You would announce in a town that you were looking to get a group together and then wait until you could find enough people to fill the various group roles.

Once you had that group together you literally had to travel to the area where this instance is located, in some situations this could have meant doing 10 minutes or more of virtual travel until you arrived at the location.  This situation was indeed laborious and time consuming.  But there is something else it did, it committed you to accomplishing the goal since there was a lot of work involved in both assembling the group and getting to the instance location.  Many times you would create in game friends during this process and going forward would often seek out these friends to do other instances since you knew them and they knew you.

One of the game improvements was making this process basically instant.  You no longer had to assemble a group, you simply joined a queue to do an instance and it would pair you up with a bunch of strangers.  In addition you no longer had to travel to these instances, it simply pulls you to the instance magically and pops you back to where you were after it is complete.  For sure, it made this sort of in game activity dramatically more convenient and less time consuming. There were many areas of the game where this type of streamlining was done, making tasks that took longer and required interaction with other players, into quick hitting items that required very little else of others.

So the end result of this tweaking has been a game that is much more convenient but much less engaging.  Many times you can do an instance without a single word being exchanged between the 5 players involved.  The player to player engagement in all areas of the game is dramatically less than it once was.

Once again, in a way, the game is reflecting real life where convenience is king. Fast food, 140 character thoughts, quick weight loss, instant credit and other sorts of instant gratification are what our basically lazy society demands.  Very few people take the time to think about what falls by the wayside in the process.

I am not sure how I got on this tangent as my main point was that I hardly play the game anymore. Perhaps this is just part of the reason why.  Although there has been an expansion out for 6 months I still have 10 virtual me’s that have not made one step towards progressing to the new level cap of 90.  At this point I’m not sure if it will ever happen as real life and lack of interest consistently gets in the way.

This weekend I have a Sunday race to time.  It is a warm up for two more busy upcoming weekends.  The followiing weekend I wil be heading to the east coast to hang with Randall and Tracy, attend a Marlins game and attend a SSR meet up.  Then the following weekend Troy comes down to spend a few days which will surely be a good time.