In my neverending quest to assume secret identities, I become the undead.
This was part of a quest reward I completed recently: a drink with 5 charges that granted various illusions for ten minutes each. Other than the occasional uber equipment reward (read: extremely occasional), this reward was our favorite.
Our group (it’s not a party, dammit!) drank up and started to put the hurt on some dinos: one guy was 2 feet tall, the remaining four were skellies. This Horde rogue wandered past and did a virtual double-take. He passed, he stopped, he turned around and stared.
Through the magic of /em’s, he told us that he had been trying to say hello and ‘sup for the past few minutes until it dawned on him that all was not as it appeared. He seemed like a nice enough guy, for a Horde, even with the flesh dripping off his skeleton, so we allowed him to pass through Our Zone unmolested.
I came to a realization that some of the best stuff in MMOGs is the nonsense. Not like nerf nonsense, but fun nonsense … the meaningless fluff. The goofy proc’ing weapons, the illusions, the animated emotes, the weapon graphics: everyone wants them and will pay top gold to have them.
I don’t want a game with nothing but fluff, but sometimes, in between the grinds, a little fluff is just what I need. I don’t know if game houses have a guy in charge of the fluff, but I think they should. (His title shouldn’t be The Fluffer though — that shit could cause serious psychological damage.)
Remember EQ’s Mask of Deception? The dark elf illusion mask that was nerfed to kingdom come because trolls and ogres could wantonly shrink at will? (GOD NO! Not wanton shrinkage!) It became the stuff of legends and it really wasn’t that useful — wanton shrinking aside.
I suspect, and don’t let this get around, but I suspect that people would pay real money just for game fluff. (Oh wait, they already have — recall many of the EQ expansions)
Right now, I’d pay 5 or 10 bucks just to have another 5 shots of that illusion drink.
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You can repeat that quest as many times as you like…
I agree, I think a lot of players indulge in more fluffplay than some might think.
While I haven’t given this idea much thought so there may be some aspect which is particularly mong, I think it would interesting if players could quest/pay to basically replace the model of one type of item with that of another of the same type.
Typically most players will just dump an item if it doesn’t perform as well as their current one, regardless of how cool it looked, and so a lot of hot models/animations/effects end up not being used much in favour of ye olde ubergear.
So just thinking of fluff, it would be interesting if you could convert your boring hammer of uberdamage to look like a sparkling hammer of crapastism, for a cost. That way you could change your gear without losing the performance. At the very least, players who like playing dressup (women) would find that pretty cool, and I imagine most guys still like their toons to look buff. So a bit of fluff could be a money sink perhaps.
I guess the main concern would be if it opened up dupe exploits or something. Also don’t know how altered items like that would affect the economy.
Anyways, don’t know if that was miles off-topic, but to me, how cool your char looks is very much in the fluff category.
You actually don’t even need to do the quest again to get more elixir. The quest NPC becomes a vendor and sells the elixir for 35sp a shot after you complete the quest.
Z is my daddy. Thanks for the heads up, mate.
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I couldn’t agree more. I had a blast in WoW with the snowballs over the holiday season. Also, I just recently got a skill on my Shaman that allows me to view an area far away. It causes a visual swirl effect at that spot. I was laughing at watching the affect it had on people nearby. They all gather around and wonder what it is. Taking control of my pet for a minute is also pretty fluffy. I just got a kick out of running around as my pet for 60 seconds.