So, anyone who's followed my on-again-off-again love affair with raiding will understand my joy when I tell you I've found the perfect solution to my problem. My problem being a guild with no motivation to raid conflicting with my desire to see all the content in the game. I have attempted to join raiding guilds on Elune, only to find that my West Coast time zone and my need to work to earn a living previously came into direct conflict with the raiding schedule of most guilds (well those guilds that didn't implode upon my arrival that is).I had heard about the L8Raid back in November when I was getting back into the normal workforce, but I didn't brave joining the channel until a few weeks ago. Well, in reality I did PM the raid leader/organizer several months ago, and was discouraged not to receive a reply. These sorts of things frighten me, stepping into new territories without guidance or (more importantly) an invitation. To explain the concept, L8Raid is a group of people that want to raid, but have West Coast schedules for some reason or another. Instead of leaving their guilds, they have allied together to raid, and as a result are progressing nicely through the content.
Enter Nitnoid. Noid was a WoW Insider reader who contacted me in game to harass me for not posting on the site anymore. I had the lovely opportunity of explaining that it wasn't by my choice, and lo and behold a friendship was born. I credit Noid with much. It was he that revitalized my love of blogging, that reminded me that I don't need a paycheck to write about the game I love. It was also Noid that suggested I hook into L8Raid, and now with the group being brought up twice, I wasn't one to ignore a sign. Therefore I typed /join l8raid and have been happier ever since.
The most interesting thing is I am raiding with an alt, the priest, and enjoying the challenge. I expected to have her rejected on account of her sad gear and +healing, but that wasn't the case. The first night I ran with them to Tempest Keep and had an epic boots pattern drop, and that was the beginning of the DKP guilt cycle. Within a week of that I had improved my gear exponentially with a combo of amazing luck in Karazhan and making my new boots. In essence, I went from having a character barely ready for Kara to a character almost ready for TK, and all with gear I received while with L8Raid.
But Mandifesto, you ask as a clever reader of titles, what the heck is the problem with PUGs? Where this concept of the organized pug breaks down is Sundays. The group runs ZA on Sundays. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, at least for the 10 core raiders. They have a set group and organize their group outside the L8Raid channel. What ends up happening is that the rest of us log in at the regular time waiting for the raid organizers to pull together ZA groups, we here nothing, and end up logging out in frustration as the core group happily runs their instance.
Last night I suggested that perhaps next week in the name of inclusiveness and the greater group that one large group be formed and then smaller raids be filled from those interested and available. What ended up happening is that they asked me to work on that, which I guess is fine, except that I am not one of the leaders of the group. Sure I can organize things, but it is not my intent to take over someone else's concept. I didn't join L8Raid to lead, but then again it seems, neither did anyone else.
And that is the problem with PUGs, and to a larger extent groups in general in WoW and in life. Sure there may be a shortage of tanks and healers, but there is a greater shortage of leaders. There are very few of us that are willing to step up and make something happen rather than simply waiting until someone does it for us. Personally, I can be one of those people, but the problem with leading PUGs is that I usually get told to sod off when I take charge. This has happened to me since grade school, and more recently with the last guild I tried to raid with. Therefore I am a little hesitant in stepping up lest I am asked to step out.
3 comments:
Cool, another blogger!
Hi Mandie! And welcome to l8raid. :)
Noid directed me to your blog. He knew I'd have a positive response to it. I've been blogging near-daily on warcraft (and a little real life) over on the guild site for 3-4 years now. Look for the Beros blog threads on orderofthechicken.com.
I hope you won't be embarrassed about complaining about the organizing if the organizers read your blog. I'm well aware of the ZA problem in particular. I had not seen your post before seeking you out to go to ZA last night. I had just remembered that you (with Dethnotronic and Altiman) were one of the people most bummed out about not getting into the group Sunday. I hope you had fun.
You can also see what the challenge to organizing that ZA is. It's a pretty unforgiving instance (we weren't even going to Malacrass if you hadn't had your pvp gear with you). We are ripping through it by bringing a very-high-performing subset of l8raiders. The gear requirements to clear ZA are significantly more than any of the 25-person T5 instances we do.
I don't like the exclusive nature of this, but I don't know how to get access to the late boss gear otherwise. If you take a look at my blog, you'll see I've been wrestling with the problem for a few weeks.
There are 2 basic problems to getting a second group going. First, it's going to be less successful at first. We tried running 2 balanced groups about a month ago and neither group got far. But then nobody wants to be in the 'B' group. Second, while we can actually find the tanks, healers and dps for a second group -- Raid Leaders are in very short supply. The 3 most regular RLs, Beros, Crashandburn and Bloc all run with the regular ZA group and we actually like getting to hang out together on Sundays (we've become good friends over the years). It's even more relaxed and chatty than the 25s. Unfortunately, this leaves us needing to recruit some new ZA RLs for a second group. As an aside, that was another reason for getting you, Dethno and Altiman into ZA last night. :)
More ZA nights would help too, but our schedule is pretty full. Last night, we canceled our team's arena matches in order to run more ZA. I find myself raiding 5-7 days/week lately and it can be tiring to lead that much (although easy ZA runs like the last 2 are not tiring at all except for staying up too late).
We'll keep improvising as best we can. Maybe you can consider doing a little more organizing for ZA, too. Perhaps bloggers make decent raid leaders? :)
P.S. I did too reply to your original PM about joining l8raid! I even copied most of the content into a post on l8raid.com for other interested people. There was a really bad server crash not too long after that might have wiped out that PM. Or it might just have bugged, the hosting service over there kinda sucks. I'll probably move the site as soon as the contract runs out.
Beros:
By virtue of having virtually no readers (Anna and Noid excepted of course), I feel like I have the freedom to speak my mind here on Game Nouveau, so don't you worry. I may very well tread on some toes, but it's in my own little corner.
As to your response, I did eventually receive word from you about the raid. Alas, I am all about instant gratification, and took the delayed response as a sign that L8Raid was not for me. How wrong I was!
As far as your ZA run is concerned, there should be no pressure to include others in a set run, but instead of saying "L8Raid is running ZA tonight" on the schedule, I would suggest not advertising it. You have a set group, one that does not call for invites in the channel, and that is perfectly acceptable. When you put ZA on the schedule it suggests to the rest of the raid group that we will all have a chance to run, which really isn't the case with a set ZA group. I think it might save the rest of us from feeling left out if it is understood that this is a set run that a certain group does every Sunday.
Post a Comment