Mimiron in Ulduar

You’ll find that the thought processes I apply here will strongly effect my viewpoint on many things to do with guild relations, and I’m sure you’ll find that you disagree with me on many points.

That’s cool! I’m glad for it, and I’m happy to hear your thoughts and views on the same situation. I’m sure other readers will appreciate it as well, seeing many perspectives intead of just the one I present.

Why I Raid

If I had to choose the top three reasons why I raid these days, I’d choose the following:

• To experience more of the World of Warcraft
• To challenge myself and my playing skills
• To participate in time-scheduled, high-quality play

Truthfully, when I was building that list, I realized that those weren’t the original reasons I got into raiding, but that’s a topic for a future entry (Why I Got Into Raiding, not yet written :) ).

I will, however, take time to go more deeply into the explanation of the above points:

Reason #1: To Experience More Of World of Warcraft

There is a limit that a player can do within World of Warcraft once one hits level 80, without setting foot into a raid:

If you plan to stay on one main character, you can do dungeons and heroic dungeons, you can skill up professions that had lagged behind your leveling process, you can grind reputation in a large number of factions (including ones that take you back to Outland and Azeroth) and you can farm for gold a lot more easily, or run friends through instances.

But after a while, that becomes boring. So then what do you do?

Depending on your ability to commit time to dungeon runs of questionable quality and length, and funds towards crafted gear with expensive components, you might choose to start up an alternate character instead, and begin leveling it up (in fact I do recommend it in a way, but that’s another entry on its own).

But at some point, even someone like me with 3 Level 80s and 3 non-DK’s at levels above 60… gets bored of advancing more toons through the same levels and zones that are “the grind” of leveling up.

At that point, even if we didn’t want to commit to raiding, or get into a raiding guild in the past, now our mind starts to shift a little bit, and we start thinking about all the new content there is out there that we’ve never, ever seen.

And of course, when the new content comes out - it’s rarely in Azeroth, isn’t it??! Most of the new content that goes into the game goes into the “top end”, extending it out further for every player of the game.

Obviously as a way to combat alts boredom, raiding provides a never-ending train of new fights and new dynamics to the new raider.

Reason #2: Challenging Myself, My Playing Skills

This is a point that has always been important to me, but what I consider “challenging” is a relative thing that changes with my own skill level.

Back at the start of my play time, there was enough challenge in simply questing and exploring and leveling within the game, but over time my play needed to expand in order to keep the feeling of being challenged to improve.

So, I got into dungeon runs with guildmates when someone was looking to run something, and tried to “softly” bring myself into the world of Grouped Play on World of Warcraft.

Truthfully, it didn’t work very well. Guildmates were rarely wanting to run something when it fit my personal schedule, and as is pretty standard in a leveling guild, there were very few members who were in my level (and thus dungeon) range as well.

So, I made the emotionally scary journey into using Pick Up Groups for my dungeoning needs. I put on my nicest asbestos suit (you know, to protect me from the flames of so-called “better” players) and head into the world of PUGs where an extremely wide variety of folk can be met.

But eventually, even the novelty challenge of a PUG’s natural skill and speed varieties wore thin, and I craved a new challenge once again.

Thankfully, in Burning Crusade when I hit this phase of “boredom”, there were still plenty of challenges left, and the first one was named “Heroics”.

And wow, Heroics were an eye-opener, at least to me. I grew excited at what I saw, because I recognized it as “the next phase” I was aching for in my challenge-hungry heart.

I learned quickly that Heroics, at least early in Burning Crusade, were a self-correcting system. By that, I mean that early BC Heroics were rarely time-wasters like Regulars were… if you were undergeared or underskilled for Heroics, it was crystal clear after the first pull. Groups tended to break up immediately, or progress through the dungeon at a respectable pace, and there was very little in-between.

Once I got into Heroics, I was in a whole new world. The friends I began to make were Raiders, more and more. They weren’t available during the evening for Heroics runs during the week, because they were raiding.

And while I had no real intention to get deeply into raiding, when I received a random whisper from a raid guild recruiter one morning just before putting myself into LFG for the daily Heroic, I was pleased when the conversation ended not with a random guild invite, but with an invite to join a 25 man raid that evening, in Serpentshrine Cavern.

Moving from the challenge of a 5 person team to that of a 25 person team was insane, especially because I pretty much skipped over the 10 person raid of Karazhan until I was already raiding 25s 3x a week for over a month, and decided to actually make my first move onto the roster of a Raiding Guild.

From there, I was hooked on the level of challenge of play that’s available in the Raiding World. Even with an awesome team, the personal challenges rarely cease.

It’s great!

Reason #3: Time-Scheduled, High Quality Play

I left my first raiding guild after nearly six months of membership, once the guild environment changed enough that I no longer felt I really “fit in” outside of the raids themselves.

From there, I floated for a while, remaining unguilded and enjoying the pre-WoTLK TBC summer that brought with it so many raid PUGs at all Tier levels of play.

While I enjoying my freedom and lack of responsibility to any one raid team, I pondered my raiding future.

I made new friends in Heroics as I went through the gearing-up hoops with my second Heroically-geared character, and asked many of my current raiding friends more detail about the raid guild they were a part of.

As WoTLK drew nearer, with its 10 additional levels and complete reset of the gearing and raiding team environments, I made my move and began to pursue membership with a solid raiding team. I was especially looking for a team that was STILL RAIDING even after the official release date of WoTLK was announced.

That turned out to be a tough thing to do after WoTLK’s release date came out, because a high percentage of our realm’s raiders were raiding for gear progression, not for the experience of attempting or defeating the content, and as soon as it became apparent that any gear progression would be useless, many teams stopped Guild Raids out of lack of attendance.

That’s what happened with the first raid guild I accepted membership into - my #1 choice (the guild I’m in now, BTW) rejected my app and gave me no indication about how I could reverse the rejection, so I went to my #2 choice and my website app (that included asking me how many of their raid days I could attend) got approved right away.

When I was able to get a guild invite, however, the Guild Message Of The Day read something like: “Gear up and get ready for the xpac. No raiding until WoTLK”. My first response was “what? we’re not raiding? uhmm….”

I left that guild within three days, because while the players seemed to be friendly and helpful and there were a regular stream of Heroics going every day, I wanted to see as much of the TBC content as I could before WoTLK came out, and I didn’t want to have to PUG it.

I sent thank-you and sorry messages to the few people I connected with in that time, and sent one to the Guildmaster as well. All I heard back from anyone was that “you won’t be able to find a guild that is raiding right now, nobody’s raiding“.

Aside from the ironicism that I DID find a guild that raided TBC content right until the night of WoTLK’s release, there’s this: After WoTLK came out and our server had high queues for a while, half of that “nobody’s raiding” 25-man guild transferred to another server, leaving the guild on our server COMPLETELY unable to raid 25s until a month or two into 2009.

These days, I’m in a guild that has not only a solid raid schedule, but a solid raid team. We start raids on time (although getting set up in vehicles in Ulduar sometimes slows us down 5-10 min), end raids on time, and are consistently making progression on a weekly basis with our team.

This is my first guild that has “Official Raid Days” as well, and the first raiding team I’ve been a part of that records attendance and has an Officer-based Loot Council who make the ultimate decision on who wins a piece of loot when it drops for the team.

What’s weird is that before I got into a “committed raid team” like I am now, I thought the commitment would be worse instead of better in terms of play time. After all, who really wants to schedule their life around a video game, right?

The thing I realized was this: Without the schedule, I was wasting a lot more time in-game in order to feel like I’d “accomplished” something. I’d sit in LFG for however long before getting an invite, then go into random PUG dungeon groups that could be excellent or incredibly painful. I’d spent a lot of time waiting for less-scheduled raid groups to get together and Git’r Done, and was stuck with my finger in my ear while people in these PUGs went AFK for 5-15 min at a time, usually holding up the whole group. I’d feel like I was stuck in a group out of loyalty, without ever knowing when the raid night would be over.

With the schedule, and with the combination effort of a solid Officer’s team and Raiders who are interested in being part of a good team that does well, I was surprised how many problems vanished:

• Raid overflow is a great motivator:
  • If you ain’t online 15 min before raid start time, the spots are filled, and you’re on Overflow unless you’re Really Special[TM]
  • AFKing too much? Not coming prepared with consumables? Hey, there’s someone here who can replace you who ISN’T exhibiting these traits.
• People who commit to time schedules like to know not only when they start, but when they end, too.
• Setting official raid days and non-official raid days gives your raiders a break, and clarifies who makes the personal choice to raid more often.
• Once you know when your raids start and end, and what days are Official Raid Days, you can actually start to PLAY LESS because you’re not wasting time in LFG or with questionable groups.
• Within a solid team of high-percentage attenders, Raid Applicants that join but are ultimately unreliable for raiding seem to guilt themselves into even poorer attendance, which makes the decision of recruiting someone new (and hopefully more reliable) a lot easier, sooner.

Why I Raid, Summarized

Yah, I know I just wrote a half a book up there about only three of the reasons Why I Raid, but really, I guess when it comes down to it…

I Raid Because It Brings Me Joy.

And ain’t the best parts of life about the joys things bring?

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Here’s a video I made with some raider guildmates who were awake with me in the middle of the night when the Midsummer Fire Festival first started, and we got our first crack at Ahune after a year of not having seen him around.

He’s pretty easy to take down at 80, and his loots are level 70 epics, but still a lot of fun!

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