level-19
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Survey reveals what twinks are all about
This is interesting -- our friend Drayner over at Twinkinfo.com recently took a survey of his site's readers, and after picking up almost 1,000 replies, he's posted the results. They show a little bit of insight into the kind of person that plays a twink (a character maxed out at a certain level before 80, usually to run around in PvP battlegrounds). Specifically, they're male, under 21, play for 21-30 hours a week, think their gear rates a 5 out of 5, and are probably level 19 and in Warsong Gulch capturing flags. I'm not sure if that's suprising or not, but those are pretty safe majority votes, even given the smaller sample size of the poll.Twink players are also more likely to not have more than one account, which kind of makes sense -- they only need one account and just have lots of characters on them. 66% of twinks are actually in twink guilds, and most have at least more than one twink to play around with. Hunters and Rogues top the class choices (though not with a clear majority at all). And perhaps most interesting, over 50% of twinks say Blizzard is serving them just fine -- they're not ignoring them, and they're not giving them any more love than other players. Still, as Drayner pointed out to us, about 36% of twinks said they'd leave the game if Blizzard shut them down with an additional 30% saying Maybe, so Blizzard does have a little incentive there to keep twinking happening.Quite interesting -- twinks might be one of the only groups of players who are completely fine with how they're being handled in game. 2.3 obviously gave them lots of new items to play with, and while there is some frustration from other players, Blizzard has made it so easy to level that if you don't want to play with the twinks at 19, you can move on pretty quickly.
Forum post of the day: Try a twinkie
Seska of Ysondre has posed the challenge of twinking to players who hate this style of play. She stated that the joy of playing a twink is in planning how to get gear for the effort. To her twinking proves that gear is more important than skill. To do it right, twinking requires considerable time and effort (not to mention cash from higher level characters), but is a valuable experience. Seska is currently a level 16 Shaman, and plans to keep that character as a twink. She was met with agreement by some other twinks, but also a lot of resistance and resentment. Some people say that they have tried twinking and gotten bored with it soon afterward, like playing any other video game with cheat codes. This practice can also be frustrating for other players who would like to battleground as they level up but become demoralized by twinks.
Spellthread bug, not that I'd have noticed...
Like many guilds, my guild has a small bracket of level 19 twinks that are set up specifically to run the Battlegrounds and do nothing else. Now I've seen some of the people in guild really go overboard with their characters, pimping them out in the best blues they can get. I've heard about them running instances in raid format so as to wipe all experience points -- just so they can get certain boss drops. I've heard all manner of things. But this one just makes me go "wha?"According to Haetred on the official forums, since the patch people have been unable to apply the Spellthread enchant to any pair of legs lower than level 35. Now, originally his(her?) post wasn't saying "un-nerf this" - it was simply asking for consistency. If Blizzard was going to remove Spellthread's ability, then you needed to remove everyone's ability to have these in the lowbie brackets so as to avoid any potential imbalance. (We hear that word thrown around a lot in regards to PvP, really.) As opposed to that, Nethaera came back and let the original poster know that this nerf is an unintentional bug, and that Spellthread will once again be available to people of all levels in an upcoming patch. Now I can't speak for anyone else here (and I'm sure I'm about to get torched for this, probably) but it seems to me that Spellthread and Clefthide/Cobra armor kits are becoming the new Crusader/Lifestealing of the Battlegrounds. I can't even fathom using those on a low-level character considering what kind of money I'm going through on consumables. I'd be more inclined to sell a spare one than to use it on a character that eventually will level out of that gear. (Not that I wouldn't happily take the money from someone wanting to use it on a twink, mind.) What do you think about using Spellthread and the high-end Armor kits on Battleground twinks? Does it seem like a crazy expensive thing to do to you too, or am I just not 'l33t' enough to understand? I can't fathom spending that in the face of the cost of raid progression (well, up until now...) but maybe that's just me.
