Oooh shiny thing! Thoughts about Hoarding in Games
We’ve all done it. Hoarded that one special gun right until the very last boss fight, and even then felt like it wasn’t a “good” enough reason to use it. What if there’s DLC with a harder boss in it?! Or that poor little assault rifle gets kept in your inventory without ever realising it’s purpose, because you insisted on using the combat knife the entire game through. (In Resident Evil: Code Veronica on it’s native Dreamcast, if anyone is wondering) However my hoarding tendencies got a bit more interesting when I went to World of Warcraft. Everyone knows trash is just there to get you a little bit of gold, but then they started putting really cool descriptions in or they were just neat little doodads. I have 2 bank tabs full of grey items. Please send help.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a magpie in real life too. My house looks like a little Aladdin’s cave with trinkets, ornaments and collectibles from anywhere and everywhere. The difference is in my real life house all these items are on display and well loved. Whereas in the game they’re stuck in my bank vault, just taking up space. Really valuable space. This is partially due to the fact there is no player housing in WoW (Blizz pls).
So why keep them? Well most of my reasons are sentimental - like my friends sent me the item as a joke and I like remembering it so I kept it. (Why else would I have a dismebered hand in my bank?) Some are letters sent to me by other players, some are just things that made me laugh, like the “Very Precious Orc Treasure” that’s just a rock. I keep things for roleplaying reasons too, even though I’m on a PVE server. I always keep any grey item toys or dolls Daldria finds because I say she never had them as a child. I like sending random gifts to my friends too, so sometimes they get consigned to the bank and I forget to send them entirely.
I guess it feels a bit odd to keep these things, after all what are they really? A collection of pixels arranged into something even more useless than the other game items. But they’re important to me. I like finding new bits of neat items to add to my collection or send to my fellow guildmates, or to look back on a quest I particularly liked. However with limited bank space sometimes there is very little room for sentimentality. It may not be the most efficient way to play the game, but efficiency never mattered too much to me. Sometimes you just have to make the space - that blue ragdoll looked awfully sad with no one to take care of it.










