Seven weeks after we started our Horde side project (lev­el­ing being friendly to fre­quent pauses and sud­den stops), my wife hap­pened to walk by my com­puter while I had my char­ac­ter select screen up.

“What are all those Horde char­ac­ters?!” she said.

“Oh! Well, here’s my auc­tion house alt, and my grind­ing alt, and–”

“I thought this Horde thing was a side project?”

Blink blink. “It is.”

“Are we giv­ing up our Alliance toons?”

“No! But we’ll need sup­port for our horde mains, too.”

“Our L32 mains?”

“We’re going to need gold for epic mounts and–”

She didn’t actu­ally say any­thing to inter­rupt me, but her look cut me off. It’s the “you’re miss­ing the point” look.

“Um… yeah,” I said.

She’s right, of course. With­out even real­iz­ing it, I had begun dupli­cat­ing the entire infra­struc­ture that I have in place to sup­port our Alliance mains. Craft­ing alts, auc­tion house alts, and so on. That blink blink above is my brain sud­denly becom­ing aware of a pat­tern I hadn’t seen before.

I mean, these horde char­ac­ters are going to be left behind when the expan­sion comes out, maybe even sooner than that. And even though I know that these char­ac­ters are going to be left behind, and per­haps never touched again… I’ve learned so much about this game, how to make some parts much eas­ier by expend­ing a lit­tle effort in non-obvious ways, that I can’t help doing so. I have to apply that knowl­edge. I need the infra­struc­ture in place.

And so I log onto my horde auc­tion house alt while I’m bleary eyed in the early morn­ing, and duti­fully peck at the AH to build a reserve of gold for epic ground mounts.

Just in case these char­ac­ters ever get to that point.

After explain­ing it in this way, my wife under­stood per­fectly. After all, her rogue was a max level Jew­el­crafter on day one of the profession’s release. That was fun for both of us, from research­ing and plan­ning through painful grind­ing of mats right up to the hour of glo­ri­ous imple­men­ta­tion. When the gates of Out­land opened, every­one rushed Hell­fire Penin­sula. We rushed Exo­dar, because that’s where the eas­i­est Jew­el­craft­ing trainer is. We stood next to a cou­ple of other peo­ple who did the same thing. The fel­low crafters all smiled at each other, shar­ing an under­stand­ing of the moment with­out speak­ing. Their friends or guild or fam­ily or even just them­selves would not want for a Jew­el­crafter, not one day. Their infra­struc­ture, what they felt they needed to be suc­cess­ful in the game, would be in place.

Like­wise, my priest will be a max level Scribe (Inscrip­tion) on day one of that profession’s release.

In the past, I’ve scoffed at peo­ple who race to max char­ac­ter level, bypass­ing what I con­sider to be the beau­ti­ful lev­el­ing process. In truth, I’m just like these people–I don’t share that com­pul­sion, but I have a cou­ple of my own: the gold one, the craft­ing one.

Do you have a game compulsion?