Lil Timmy and the White Kitten

The very first non-combat pet I bought was a White Kitten, which is sold by Lil Timmy, who occasionally wanders in Stormwind. Coriel was only level 12 or 13 at the time. This was over two years ago, way back when I was still new, before I knew about such options as Instant Quest Text.

I remember running across Lil Timmy, and clicking on him, and reading his story about how his family's cat had kittens and they couldn't afford to keep them. So he had to sell them, or they would have to be drowned. But the kitten cost about 60 silver, which at level 12 was pretty much all the money I had.

I've never been a big non-combat pet collector, as they tend to take up too much inventory space for my tastes. I think I spent several minutes deciding whether or not I should spend all my money on something that had no obvious value. But what sort of paladin can pass up a kitten in distress? So I spent the silver, got the kitten, and it's been in my inventory ever since. That kitten has been all over Azeroth, and has gone to the Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Outlands, and many other places where kittens were not meant to go.

Yesterday, I ran across Lil Timmy again. This time when I clicked on him, there was no story, as I was taken straight to the Vendor screen. It seemed unusual at the time, but I chalked it up to not correctly remembering an event that happened two years ago.

However, later I realized what had happened. Several patches ago, there was a change to NPCs. If an NPC only had one option, for example a windrider asking if you wanted to fly somewhere, the game would automatically open that option, rather than making you click through a screen of flavour text. Lil Timmy was one such vendor. The only option you could pick after the flavor text was the option to buy the White Kitten, which opened up the Vendor screen. So like all the other NPCs, the flavour text got skipped.

I really liked the change when it was first implemented, and I still do. 99% of the time, it's an extra annoyance to click through an NPC's initial screen, especially when it is an NPC that you interact with again and again, and when you haven't found out about Instant Quest Text yet. The windriders were the worst for this.

But almost all changes are trade-offs, which can have unexpected ramifications, and Lil Timmy falls in that 1%. Without his story text, he's just a random boy selling a somewhat rare pet. And the game is slightly diminished for that.