Get Off My Lawn

I didn't blog during Mists of Pandaria. For much of the expansion, I wasn't actively playing.

So much has changed.

My go-to in-game title is "Crazy Cat Lady," and sometimes I feel like shaking my cane and yelling "GET OFF MY LAWN" at everyone who's gotten into pet collecting since the introduction of WoW-Pokemon. I collected pets long before it was the cool thing to do! There was a time I prided myself on having every pet in the game and being on warcraftpets.com's Top 50 Collections (not for the server, for the whole game) list.

With the introduction of pet battling, it became too impossible to keep my collection complete. The sheer volume of new pets added to the game has been staggering. Many of them are incredibly difficult for a casual player like me to acquire. I didn't belong to a guild that could access the elite raid or challenge mode pets. I'm allergic to pugs (pick-up-groups, not cute wrinkly dogs), so running LFR was out of the question. And the large number of rare-drop pets with massive time-consuming eye-bleeding grinds required was just depressing.

Hunter pets haven't been too exciting either. The only spirit beasts they added this expansion were glowing porcupines. And despite how un-cool porcupines are, I probably still would've camped them if they had actually been rare spawns, but after all the time and adrenaline invested in my old-school pack of 18+-hour-spawn-time beasts I just couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for these readily available ones.

So I took a lot of time off. I got married and we bought a house. I've been getting established in my career. I adopted a cattle dog puppy to be my partner in the fun sport of canine agility. I quit the game and gave away a ton of my minipets to a friend, hoping that if I decimated my collection I wouldn't be tempted to come back. But then some friends from my beloved guild got excited about Warlords of Draenor, and several who'd quit during Cata or Mists returned, and now I'm getting jazzed about raiding again, and my friend insisted on returning my menagerie, and so I'm back!

And for all my griping, I actually do love the pet battle system. I love storing my pets in a journal rather than having bags and bags stuffed full of them. I love how they're account-wide. I especially love being able to name them! Pet battling is pretty fun (except when it gets grindy or frustrating). And it's neat having so many cute critters to collect, even though it's a pain trying to "catch 'em all." Tonight there are 23 in-game pets I don't have. That number is about to go through the roof when Warlords drops tomorrow. I'm trying to let go of my completionist urges and just be okay with that and learn to enjoy pet collecting as a side hobby to the extent that I'm reasonably able.

So um... who wants to give me a Viscous Horror? ;)