Sep 7, 2008, last modified on Oct 8, 2008 
In his excellent book “Man in the High Castle”, Philip K. Dick talks about items and historicity:
She said, ‘what is “historicity”?’
‘When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing .… You can’t tell which is which. There’s no “mystical plasmic presence”, no “aura” around it.
[The Man in the High Castle, pages 65–66]
Why can’t our World of Warcraft items have that aura?
We as players already do hang on to items for non-game reasons. Every time you hear someone say: “I’ll never get rid of my full MC raiding set”–that’s exactly what they’re talking about. I have far too much of my bank taken up by items that won’t be used anymore, but I would never destroy or sell (examples: for me, the Halo of Transcendence, which only dropped after six months of farming Onyxia; for my wife, her Molten Helm, which was the guild’s first one, and all of her friends farmed the mats and gave to her as a big surprise).
Blizzard has an extremely small step in this direction already: “crafted by”. Go farther! Give us some in-game support; pay attention to the details and show them to us on call.
Think of those Sunday mornings when you’re poking around the bank, wouldn’t it be great to ctrl-rightclick a favorite old item to get a little window with the following:
Pauldrons of Wild Magic looted on 2008÷04÷10. You were in the guild X of Y. It was your second time defeating Quagmirran in Heroic Slave Pens. You were grouped with Yourbestfriend, Theguildmaster, Drunkbutfun, and Someonesannoyinguncle.”
I know I would love this. Is it just me?
4 Comments 
kikidas says: 
