Love Moves On

What with the new expansion rolling into the spotlight thanks to the open beta I’ve found a lot of my friends (And, uh, me. More than them. Maybe. A bit.) to be extremely nostalgic about how things were before all these new races, features and planets. It all results in a big long discussion about UBRS and Strath 45 and Core Hounds and when PvP wasn’t so gear dependent and… Thottbot.

Yes, Thottbot.

I remember very clearly a time when all the cool kids in trade would leap on anyone unfortunate enough to enquire after the proper price of an item with “lol thott it” and “obv u don’t know how to thott” and the like. It didn’t matter that the comments on Thottbot came from various different servers with various different levels of supply and demand, of course, because an understanding of the inner workings of an economy and how much it’s liable to bear has never been required to be cool. But that’s beyond the point.

I haven’t been directed to Thottbot for a long while.

There was a period in which I recall Thott and Alakhazam struggled for dominance, but it looks like Wowhead came along and blew them both out of the water. It’s easy to see why: the site has a much more finished feel to it. It’s pretty, it has nifty features like predictive text in search boxes and that much-loved code to place item links into blogs and on forums and is generally more accurate. But I don’t hear many people exclaiming about it in trade any more. Let alone ordering poor little newbies to go “head it”. Then again, I dare say that would end up getting perverse, considering Trade.

Personally, I still use Thottbot despite its obvious deficiencies. It’s chockfull of silly comments and epeen boosting and such, but I guess I’m quite attached to it nevertheless. There are some very good posts on there, of the sort you don’t tend to find so prolifically on WoWhead, if you’re willing to scroll through the find the yellow posts.

Besides, I’m cool. Gotta search in style. Retro style.