Saturday, April 26, 2008

My Current Problems with World of Warcraft

My first MMO was Everquest. It was a pretty hardcore environment in the endgame; character death resulted in experience losses making it possible to lose entire levels, and every raid boss in the game was a timed spawn shared by the entire server. When the Avatar of War was up, it was a race between the top guilds to get to him. You always had to be ready to grab your gear and get to the spawn if you wanted your guild to get the kill.

When World of Warcraft started up, their answer to raid targets sounded like a dream - all encounters would be instanced, there would be no competition for big bosses, every guild/raid group would get it's own shot at it on their own time, when they wanted. The only catch being that once you killed it, you had to wait a set amount of time before going after it again. Sounded PERFECT. No more competition with people who had less of a life than me. And for a time, it was.

Now I'm experiencing the flip side. I've started playing again, and back in a guild consisting of old RL friends, and people from my old guild on Alleria (Aftermath/Tolerance). The guild's time, as it turns out, isn't really my time. The main raids are started at 8pm eastern, and typically last until midnight... on Tuesday and Thursday. I go to bed at 10pm. Gruul/Mag are done on Sunday night, starting at 10pm so those are right out. So needless to say, I'm missing out on most of the good stuff. Tuesday I got in on two boss kills, Thursday I got in on one. Out of 7 killed between the two nights.

I'm not angry at the people in the guild, this was their schedule long before I started playing again. I wish I could be there for more, but I understand that's the schedule that works for them. In Everquest, I played whenever I could, and whatever bosses came up while I was playing I made the most of it. Those that spawned while I wasn't around, I didn't worry about much, because you just can't be around for everything all the time. In WoW... I could be around for everything, but the ability to schedule your raids are actually making me miss a lot.

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