If you’ve been on World of Warcraft for very long, and especially if you’ve been in a guild or been into the battlegrounds, you’ve probably heard the word “twink”.
A “twink” is a player whose equipment far exceeds what that player would be able to get on its own with no outside help, at the level it’s at. Meaning, they’ve got higher level toons to supply them with equipment, cash and professions materials to allow the “lowbie” character to advance more quickly than a lone player working on its own with its first toon.
Twinking is a natural outcropping of the fact that it’s perfectly legal for players to have multiple toons on a realm and for those toons to be able to, still legally, share money and equipment and other goodies. In fact, even in games where it isn’t legal to share things between your own toons, some kind of “twinking” is pretty normal and natural. After all, when a player suffers through with their first toon and learns the tips and tricks to gaining wealth and levels quickly, why would that player want to suffer through the same trials and tribulations with each and every toon?
Twinking is most noticed in the battlegrounds, and especially in the brackets below level 30. When you head into a 10-19 battlefield and see a whole bunch of toons running around with glowing weapons who kill you in one or two shots, you know you’re facing twinks.
Twinking in PVE is quite prevelant as well, but NPCs don’t squawk about it so folks don’t think about it the same way.
Personally, while my non-60s toons have nice equipment, they’re far from being truly “twinked out”. True twinks exchange favors with other high levels who have twinks, and get run through low-level dungeons searching for specific pieces of rare (and generally Bind on Pickup) gear to enhance their twinkdom. All I do is regularly visit the Auction House and within reason, spend cash to upgrade my equipment so it’s the best I can get at any one time, without having to run the same dungeon over and over.
Now that I’m experienced with the game, I am able to start semi-twinking my first toon on a new realm, instead of running my first toon to be the Main Money Supplier of the second, twinked, toon. How? By buying cheap level 1 cooking recipes from lowbie vendors and then reselling them in the Auction House, I can generally get 2-4g in my first 24 hours on a new realm. That’s huge cash for a toon under level 10, considering most green equipment in the AH costs under 25s each until level 14 or so!
That’s my writings on Twinkdom for now. If someone’s got questions I can write more on the topic again later :)