If you’ve been eyeing my Armory widget to the side (I’m being hypothetical, since you don’t actually have any reason to), you’ll notice I’ve descended from level 74 to 73. What you can’t see is my complete and total heartbreak.
The act of transferring from Moonrunner to Ner’zhul has been an eventful one. My payment did not go through, though they were somehow not aware of this until several days later, at which time they put a lock on poor Calhi and sent me an e-mail.
I’ve moved about seven times over the last few years, and try as my bank and I might to keep on the same page with my billing address, it’s usually a shot in the dark over whether I’ll ever put down the same one they have on file when making card payments. Get it wrong, and I get shot down, but it’s usually pretty instant feedback, and I then take the extra effort to look up the info and get it right on the second try. For whatever reason, it took a few days for Blizzard to become aware of the fact that they never actually got their $25.
So, I called, and after 50 minutes in a lunchtime phone support queue listening to various (mostly WoW) Blizzard game tunes and an unusually peppy automated voice, the nicest human being on the face of this planet picked up to help me. For all I fault Blizzard with in my assorted ramblings, I have to thank them for the simple fact that their phone support and I speak the same language. My linguist and audio comprehension skills are fail. Try as I might to study a variety of languages and accents, it will simply never be. So, I do not fault Bob in India for his position, but the simple fact is I will never understand what he is saying and our conversations will always end with him yelling angrily at me for that.
Anyham, with my payment sorted out, I let the system do its thing and came back that evening to continue where I left off. I was about to go to the King of Stormwind and embark on my first time into that chaotic Undercity instance I’m always hearing about… aaaaaaand, no. I’d lost about a level and a half. My inventory seemed off. My macros were not in mouse-wheel-attack fashion. It slowly sank in. Calhi was in the exact condition in which she had left Moonrunner. Gone were the hours of Dragonblight questing. Gone were my Turkey Lurkey and Pilgrim’s Peril achievements from Pilgrim’s Bounty (I only needed Terokkar Turkey Time to get the title, and I had the clothes at the ready). Gone were the PvP achievements. Gone were the recipe drops and daily cooking awards. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d accomplished in those few days, fueled by the newness of the whole deal, until I sat down to assess the soul crushing damage.
I sent in a GM ticket, and hopefully I’ll have word over whether those hours will survive the encounter. Do or don’t, the whole thing has given everything a fragile feeling. I used to run a persistent world RPG roleplay type game server some ways back, and existing behind the veil where all the files and numbers were crunched, I didn’t play the actual game all that often. Progression and accomplishment lost its soul when you could see the guts of it, all numbery as they were. Now I find myself looking at Calhi as a block of numbers, and not as a creature with the soul that I’d given her, and the deja vu of it is a bit unsettling.
But, hey, if for whatever reason that time is truly lost, that means I’ll do that Dragonblight quest where I time travel back to help myself all over again, and it’ll make a strange bit of sense in my situation…
