I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in
having that second of hesitation when I'm asked to talk about my
hobbies or what I do for fun. I mean, I do a lot of things other than
work, eat, and sleep. Playing an MMO is hardly my only hobby, but it
is one of them. And I don't
even care about the "those games are for nerds,
real people play Madden and Halo" sorts of people. I have to say
I'm completely indifferent to their opinions.
I'm
much more sensitive to an objection that I've never actually heard,
one that goes something along the lines of "how can you play an
MMO? Don't you know it's just a virtual Skinner box with a variable
interval payment schedule?"
And
well, yes, there is
that element to them. That is a true statement; it is not, however, the only true statement.
There
are also folks who are totally fine with an MMO hobby, but they want
to know "why World of Warcraft?" It's old and ugly and
anyway, don't I know that Cataclysm
was the worst expansion ever? They've lost like a million
subscribers! And next expansion they'll be jumping the panda!
I get that Cataclysm
was unpopular with a lot of people. Some think it catered to the
casuals and the game got too easy or watered down. Some think it
catered to the hardcore, becoming too inaccessible. A lot of people
seem to have been bullied as a child by one of the Pandaren. I'm not
really sure.
Let's talk about my guild.
I
came to my guild by resubscribing to the game after taking a break
from December 2009 to October 2010. That's a pretty long break! I had
played Wrath from about the time when Ulduar came out to about the
time Icecrown Citadel came out, when a new job made raiding pretty
impossible.
I
think it was probably my boyfriend that told me that a friend we'd
made (or rather, that he'd made and I'd gotten to know through him)
outside of WoW had become GM of her small guild, back on the little
tiny role-playing server that we'd originally started playing on and
had since transferred off of.
They
had no need of a hunter, so when I transferred over I moved my priest
first and started healing for them. Their raid schedule was about
half as intense as what I'd been used to. They could only field a
10-person raid, and further that was all they wanted
to field. In fact we pretty frequently had to find an extra person
from outside the guild to fill in.
But
then over time, some of those people became regular raiders. Eventually some of
them joined the guild and a team started to congeal.
Cataclysm
was actually the first time I went into an expansion on patch day. I
wasn't playing the game when Burning Crusade was released and I was
taking a break when Wrath came out. I went into it with a
group of people I liked with a plan for how we'd resume raiding
after we'd leveled to the new cap. We used the release of the expansion pack as a reason to change up the raid roster, allowing me to go back to playing my hunter as my main character.
We've
built a guild culture - almost from the ground up - that we can all
be proud of.
Both
of our main tanks, a role most commonly held by men, are women.
None
of the women on our raid team have to worry about being harassed or
denigrated because of their gender.
My
boyfriend and I don't have to worry about referring to each other as
a couple.
No
one yells or screams during raid time.
If
someone needs a week or two off, no problem.
People
have been able to change main characters and change roles because
they wanted to.
There
have been disagreements. There've been some hurt feelings. It
happens, but we've dealt with it all as a group, and we've done a
pretty good job with it.
I
don't log on to push the loot-pellet dispenser lever.
I
don't log on because it's Warcraft or because it's the Cataclysm.
I log
on because I like playing with my guild.
We started raiding in Cataclysm
probably about a month after most other casual guilds did, and a good
couple months after the really serious raiding guilds did. We never
quite cleared out the initial tier of raid bosses on normal
difficulty, and we never did any of the heroic modes. We got close,
with only the most difficult two (Nefarian and Al'akir) remaining,
but then the Firelands patch was released and it was time to move on.
We
started out on Firelands with Beth'tilac, a giant spider boss that
most guilds killed second or third, and it was tough. The DPS,
healing, and coordination requirements forced us to play better - so
we did. The coordination and individual skill requirements of
Alysrazor stymied us for a while too, almost a whole month, and we
had to go back to basics and work on fundamentals again. In the end,
we didn't quite get Ragnaros-normal down before the whole tier was
nerfed pretty hard, but we did
get him the week after that. We would have
been able to kill him before he was nerfed.
As it
was, we used the post-nerf Firelands content period as a time to sort
of rest and regroup. It got boring doing the same bosses over and
over, but we were able to mostly farm up all the gear people could
have wanted, putting us in the unfamiliar position of really being
prepared going into patch 4.3 and the Dragon Soul raid.
That
raid was, of course, released right around the holidays, and out of
the four-week period of its initial release, we only raided two.
Bosses were dying, though. We cleared out the first four bosses on
our first night in there, and those bosses - even on 10-person normal
difficulty - have presented some significant challenges for a lot of
groups.
I
think that Zon'ozz and maybe even Hagara would have been huge
speedbumps for the guild that first stepped into the Blackwing Descent
and Bastion of Twilight raids of Cataclysm's
initial release. I personally didn't even start using Aspect of the
Fox until halfway through Firelands. No one was pre-potting or knew
what it was (if you're unfamiliar, "pre-potting" is the
practice of drinking a potion just before combat begins, allowing you
to drink a second potion a couple minutes into the encounter. Potions
provide a significant benefit for a short period of time).
Everyone
in this guild has gotten better over the course of this expansion.
We've grown as a group and improved as players without having to give
up any of the things that make raiding fun for us.
Every
single week that we've actually raided we've killed a new boss in
Dragon Soul, and we haven't had any trouble replicating kills once we
learn them the first time.
Last
night we completed the Madness of Deathwing encounter on 10-person
normal difficulty. That's the big villain of the expansion, Deathwing
himself. That's what we've been moving towards this whole expansion.
We've reached this point without having to give up anything. We
didn't have to add a new raid night, or kick people we liked, or
scream, or raid when we'd rather be spending time with loved ones, or
anything.
We've
just been having fun, indulging in a social hobby with people whose
company we enjoy, and we've killed some dragons on the internet in
the meantime. And now, for the first time, we're going to do some
heroic modes.
Cataclysm
has been the best of the WoW expansions for me, and it's been that
because I love my guild.
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