The Cassandra Complex

This entire blog is me thinking “out loud” – as a lot of blogs seem to be. It therefore has no real story or point except letting me crystalise my thoughts.

It’s been seven or eight months now since I started playing World of Warcraft, and the game has eaten up a large chunk of my spare time. I have a night elf druid at 60, a night elf hunter at 48, and assorted other toons (aka characters) at levels below 30. I try to avoid thinking about how much time I’ve poured into this game, though I have a game mod that would let me add it up if I wanted to.

My druid, Swiftspring, is now at a level where I’m part of what’s called the “end game” – where the level caps and you generally stop the solo questing and minor group instances (aka dungeons); instead, you start to participate in huge 20 or 40 person raids into bigger and more complex instances where the wandering monsters take everyone to kill and the bosses require complex strategies – and, when killed, drop ZOMFGEPIX (epic) items of armour and weapons that have the potential to make your toon better.

I say “the potential”, because there are lots of character classes in the game, and not every bit of equipment is going to be suited to your character. Also, even if the item is perfect for you, you have to first win it over others of your class and/or other classes that can use the same item. For example, if an uber staff that does damage and healing drops (for example the Staff of Dominance from Molten Core), odds are that not only will my druid be interested, but so might the priests, warlocks and mages.

It can mean you do a lot of runs and get nothing for it. Your compensation is generally a better shot at getting the item in future (less competition, more points earned for attendance) and the fun of the run itself.

And that’s where my WoW-life crisis sets in. Because I’ve discovered (and this will not be a surprise to anyone, but it’s disappointed the hell out of me) that, the bigger the group of people you’re running around with, the statistically greater chance you have of encountering a dickhead. Or, worse, a group of dickheads who have banded together to look out for one another and make life hell for others who aren’t part of their little circle.

Myself and M. recently had cause to leave our old guild (aka group of people who get together to do instances) after a conflict that had been escalating for months exploded into nastiness. M. had discovered another guild that had just started up and was looking for other raiding toons (aka level 60 characters interested in end game instances) whose players weren’t dickheads. Sounded awesome, so we joined.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a group of people with no dickheads present, and even if there was, any method of communication that isn’t face to face has great scope for people to misunderstand one another. And it’s amazing how many people don’t actually ask for clarification or approach someone if they hear something that shocks them; they usually just bitch about it behind the person’s back. And that’s how these in-guild feuds start.

So. Having realised all of this, I figure that there may come a point soon where my patience runs out. At that point, I have three options.

One is to find another guild, but I am not very excited at the idea of developing a reputation for guild-hopping, because eventually no one will take you.

Another is to find another server – Blizzard offers a transfer service where you pay a fee (everything costs money) and they will transfer one of the toons on your account to another server. Yes, one – meaning I’d have to pay a silly amount to transfer all of them, or just pick a couple and then delete and recreate the rest (meaning all of the time I have spent on them would be lost). The advantage to this approach is that I can escape the baggage of my current server and never have to look at people who have pissed me off again, but the disadvantage is that there will inevitably be dickheads on the other server too (there always are). The other disadvantage, of course, is that the majority of people I’ve “met” on my current server are awesome, and I would lose touch with them too. :(

The third option, and the one I may ultimately go with, is that I hear the new D&D on line game has lower sized end game instances – 15 to 25 people rather than 20 to 40. The percentage of dickheads per group may be the same, but the actual occurrence should be lower.

Anyway. I haven’t decided to do any of these things yet. The difficulties so far in my new guild seem to be of the misunderstandings gone wrong variety (I hope) rather than the dickhead variety, and, again, most of them seem to be awesome and lots of fun to hang out and kill stuff with. Part of the problem is that M and I are the outsiders in a group of mates, and we really feel that way – but it’d be silly for me to pull the plug without actually giving it time for them to regard us as part of the gang.

Also, in November or so a World of Warcraft expansion pack is due to come out, called “The Burning Crusade”. It will increase the level cap to 70 (meaning weeks or more likely months of questing and leveling, which is the part of the game I enjoy the most on account of how I can do it solo or in a small group of people I like), and apparently the new level 70 instances will have a maximum raid size of 25.

I guess Blizzard have learned that groups of 40 aren’t really sustainable given the dickhead factor too. :\