Up with the Zeitgeist as ever, I was catching up with some WoW articles about some “ubah” guild somewhere abandoning raiding, and general griping about the difficulty of high end raiding and not being rewarded enough for it compared to PvP/heroic 5-mans/spending the same amount of time getting a second (or quite possibly first) job that actually pays real money. I got to thinking… what if it’s all a psychological experiment? There’s Nick Yee’s classic Everquest as the Virtual Skinner Box, maybe bleeding edge WoW raiding is a continuation of the Milgram experiment being performed on the dev team, they’re being ordered to inflict progressively greater tedium on raiders to see if at any point they’d question the orders or refuse to implement them. No dice so far, if the 2.4.1 patch notes mention that wiping in Sunwell Plateau will result in progressively greater electric shocks to players, I reckon the authorities might need to step in…
The authorities just might…but my personal opinion on the whole subject is, since I don’t have the “extra” time to devote to being a dedicated raider, I am put into the position to seek advancement of my characters by other means. The first option for me is PVP, can’t beat the rewards and it is a lot of fun to me. Now, I have been asked a number of times to join different raiding guilds over my time I just can’t honestly join up because I just don’t have the drive or the energy to put into it 100%. I can see the reason for people complaining, I currently have 4/5 pieces of the Arena Season 1 Gladiator gear and I feel pretty cool…you can call me a welfare epic moocher or whatever, but in the end, it is a game and having fun is what’s most important no matter what you do, right?
I was the same, not enough time for raiding and mostly kitted out in PvP gear. I can sort of understand why some people want to effectively bash their head against a wall for a while in the toughest raiding challenges to demonstrate just how skilled/dedicated/stupid (delete depending on perspective) they are, but to then complain that you get a headache seems a bit odd…