Raid Tourism – Being the 25th Man

It isn’t as though I have never raided before.  It is just that my raiding days are pretty much deep in the past at this point.

I used to be very active in such things in TorilMUD back in the day.  It wasn’t called raiding back then, it was “doing zones” and it required a full 16 person group with the right mix of classes.  While well shy of the 40-person peak in WoW… and whatever the raid sizes got to in EverQuest… 75 people or some such… that does put it smack dab in the middle of the 10 and 25 person marks that WoW uses today.  And in a community as small as TorilMUD’s was even at its peak… a few hundred players with maybe 100 online at peak times… 16 players was a big group.

And it also meant that if you were not a complete screw-up, you would get invited to do zones pretty frequently… if you had the right class.  Or even the wrong class.  I played a druid, which was more of a utility class and you really only needed one per group for a zone.  But druids could also do some damage and act as backup healers (heal the casters and such), so if a group had an open slot I could end up going along all the same.

And so I ended up in Jotunheim, City of Brass, Tower of the Elementalist, Ice Crag Castle (ICC long before Ice Crown Citidel was a thing), and a dozen or so more raid zones.  I even went on the big big zone once, Tiamat’s Lair, an all day affair that involved fighting through the astral plane and into Tiamat’s throne room.  As I recall, we made it to the room outside of the throne room before time and wipes ended to effort.

There were (and still are) lots of zones, big and small.

But that was also a point in my life where I could come home on a Friday night with a pizza, some snacks, and a few sodas and say good-bye to the world until Monday morning.  But life moves on and those days are behind me.  Since then, raiding hasn’t really been a thing for me.

There was a brief resurgence of it when our guild leader in EverQuest II declared that our guild would become a raiding guild and started yelling at people for not keeping up to date with the guild calendar and raid schedule.  I tried to play along.

Proof I was at least in a raid group

I think the move to raiding actually pushed the guild over a cliff.  The guild still remains, but most of the players went off to World of Warcraft.  Those we remained in EQII went off to other guilds.  The guild remains… and my character Nomu is still in it… mostly as a marker.

I was one of those who ended up in WoW, where raiding is a big part of the game.  It has just never been part of the game for me.  I have been happy enough with single group, five player content.  That is my niche.  I like it and I do not begrudge any effort Blizzard spends on larger group content, so long as they throw smaller groups a bone now and again.  I have given no thought to actually getting involved in raiding in World of Warcraft in all the years I have played.

Until Blizzard introduced the Looking for Raid option.

More after the cut… because verbosity and me.

Quote of the Day – More Pessimistic Than I About Draenor

There’s also no mention of expecting Warlords of Draenor to boost 2014 sales. It feels natural enough to infer that the expansion won’t launch until next year. While this expectation wasn’t exactly uncommon already, it seems at least a little more credible now.

Richard Aihoshi, MMORPG.com post looking at Blizzard’s Q4 financials

And I was called out for predicting early September for the Warlords of Draenor expansion and then feeling that Blizzard might have been hinting at that themselves.

See you guys in the fall, right?

The whole post strikes me as working to try and take a negative spin on anything Blizzard said.  No doubt there is some link bait appeal for the site in that. (It worked on me.)  But I cannot recall anybody saying before that Warlords of Draenor might not ship until 2015.  Is that something new?  Has that been going about?  I mean, I thought people who were calling April for the expansion back during BlizzCon were way off base, but this seems a bit of an excess in the other direction.

Of course, he didn’t say where that expectation wasn’t exactly uncommon, so maybe it wasn’t uncommon in his own mind.  That would fit in with his whole post.

No Warlords of Draenor until 2015?  Credible or not?

I am sticking with September 9th… of this year.