The Silent Revolution of the Willing Mentors

In all secrecy there’s an ongoing revolution on the official EU forums. It started in July at an initiative from the player Leilana at Emerald Dream. She put together a list of friendly players on each realm who are willing to offer advice to new players.

Enthusiastic reception
In just a few weeks this list has grown considerably and now there are willing tutors on the alliance as well as the horde side on quite a number of realms.

Many of those volunteers don’t only sign up for giving services, they also write touching and enthusiastic testimonies about how glad they are to help out. This is just a couple of examples among many:

“I know it sounds quite sad but I do actually like it when I meet a new player who asks me questions when they are completely unsure how something works, because they are new to the game. I would even cancel a raid signup if someone needs help, or would like me to show them around, and I think seeing someone happy and having fun is always way more rewarding than any epic loot that drops.”

“I too get very depressed and sometimes even furious when I see some of the drivel that pops up in the Chat Channels: you may be uber-epic in your purply raid items, guys (and you KNOW who you are) but typing "Learn 2 play nub" and suchlike does NOT make you big or clever. Rest assured you can ask me anything at all without the slightest fear that I will laugh or think it is a dumb question; in the four years I've been playing I've learned most of what I know by trial and error, and as a result have done spectacularly dumb things myself!”

Will the newcomers find it?
This is indeed a beautiful thought. Does it work in reality?

A question that crosses my mind is if the newcomers to the game really frequent the official forums at any greater extent. This post is marked with a blue sticky, but is that enough to make them find it?

Speaking for myself, it took me quite a while before I realized that I could learn much more from the gaming community than I could from the quite poor manual which came with vanilla WoW (which mainly seemed to deal with the glorious history of different races, and fell apart into single pages if you as much as looked at it.)

Will they respect the rules?
Another question is: will the newcomers stick to asking questions, or will they be temped to beg or ask for boosts?

A few thumb rules are given in the thread:

* Don't beg for gold or keep asking people for money or items.
It's taken a long time for high levels to get to that level and earn their money, and at low levels you certainly don't need large amounts. You can save money by not buying items from the Auction House - you will get sufficient armor while questing, and if you do any dungeons. It's much more rewarding buying things with money you have earned yourself too.

*Don't beg for boosts in instances
Instances are areas where a group of similarly-levelled players fight stronger monsters than you would usually find around the world. It is possible for high level players to 'boost' you in lower level instances, but it is always better to find a group of people your own level. It's much more fun and you will learn a lot more. If you can't find a group, then you could ask politely if your helper would mind helping you out when they have free time, but if they are busy then respect that :)

*Most of all, be polite to people and largely, they will be polite back to you.
You will always find unpleasant people who like to call people noobs or other names, but it's best just to ignore them. Everyone was new once, we all did silly things, we all got stuck in caves and had to hearthstone out way out (or maybe that was just me!) People who call you names aren't worthy of any replies, just ignore them.

I can only hope that the newcomers will read and respect those guidelines.

Will it last?
My third question is: for how long can it last? We all know that there’s a constant flow of players, people having breaks or even leaving the game, not the least among the veteran category of players, which I suspect that most teachers belong to.

Will they notify Leilana if they’re not longer available? How long will Leilana herself be around to maintain this list? It’s definitely a weakness that the existence and updating of the list is so heavily depending on one single player.

Maybe a better solution would have been to follow a suggestion I saw somewhere: to make it possible to flag yourself, just as you flag for PvP, if you’re willing to answer questions from newcomers. I believe that you need to build this sort of activities into the game, rather than keeping it in a out-of-game forum, if you want it to work in the long run.

The Silent Revolution
But now I want to put my doubts aside for a moment and just let out the warm, fuzzy feeling I get in my stomach when I read this kind of posts.

So far there hasn’t been a single trolling reply. There’s no one claiming that the beginners suck, should learn to play, are plain lazy or that carebears are pathetic. Everyone is all kindness and willingness to share.

Azeroth isn’t yet completely overtaken by douchebags.

The Silent Revolution of the Willing Mentors is here. And it makes me smile.

I wish I was in it for the loot

Wouldn’t the game be so much easier if gear was all that mattered? Especially considering the New Deal Policy of Blizzard let the purples rain over everyone.

Gear up. Shine. Smile. Be done. Log out.

Sometimes I wish I was in it for the loot and that I could look upon other players as NPCs, replaceable tools which just happened to be working towards the same goals this very moment. Easy come, easy go.

Nothing could hurt me. There would be no losses, no pain, no disappointment. I would play WoW the same way I would play Lemmings. Happy and confident in my loneliness.

Another farewell
I came to think about it when I found one of those farewell letters in my mail the other day. It was a guildie of mine who has been on a break for a couple of month to focus on his studies. Now he had been caught by the “Real Life bug”, as he said, and decided not to come back to the game.

He tried to comfort me: “maybe another time somewhere we will see each other again in a MMO”.

But of course he knew as well as I did that it was a lie. This friendship has come to its end, just like the other friendships I’ve had in the game.

Or wait, that came out wrong. It sounds as if I’m one of those people that have a friend list that is about to explode, with a ton of friends coming and going, and that is not the case. They’re not overwhelmingly many. But the few there are matter to me. The chat window feels a bit gloomy if all you see is the pale, colourless talking going on in general or the green conversation in the guild chat. To occasionally get a pink whisper brightens up my night, even if it’s only a cheerful greeting when I come online or a silly remark about nothing in particular.

Not getting attached
In his farewell post on the guild forum, my departing friend commented on the gear mechanism of an MMO, which bugged him:

“I miss the good times raiding with you lot, that was and always will be fun times that I will miss a lot, but the whole, pray to the loot gods for upgrading gear to the next level, only to have to do it again every time a new expansion comes out...lets say I won't miss that anymore”

To be honest, replacing gear has never bothered me that much. You just can’t get too attached to it. It will all replaced at some point, sooner or later. But when I think closer about it, isn’t it the same with most of the people you meet in the game, or for that sake, your favourite WoW bloggers?

They’re just as likely to disappear in the next patch as your old gear is. Thinking anything else is to ask for sorrows. Don’t get too attached.

This is of course easier said than done. It’s hard to fight your nature. I’ll probably keep investing myself more emotionally into this game than I should. And it will keep causing me pain. On the other hand I don’t think that the opposite is necessarily a good thing either. If I would always keep a sound distance, meeting the world behind a protecting shield, telling myself that “nothing of this matters”, watching it all from the sideline rather than participating it, don’t you think I would miss out an important aspect of the game?

I guess the answer lies somewhere in between. Make friends, because without any friendship, WoW will feel as empty as the Barrens. But in the same manner you should always be prepared to see them take off. It can happen any minute, any day. There will be new shiny epic loot. And there will be new players that you can get to know, who suddenly will brighten up your chat log with pink colour.

It’s in the nature of MMOs. You just have to get used to it.

Why I want to run instances that take forever

Is the Hardcore Raider a dying kind?

Yes, if you should believe Theerivs at a High Latency Life. He ended a post about the new five man instance (that seems to be the name of it; until now I haven’t heard anyone calling it anything but “The New Instance”) with this prediction.

“I got some sick stuff yesterday. With this great stuff though, why would I do Ulduar which takes forever. I sense the death of the Hardcore Raider soon.”

The loot motivation
Theerivs is probably far from alone in this mindset. On the contrary, he represents the view of the average player of today, the player that the Blizzard developers have in mind when they design the new, modern five man and raid instances. Those players are happy that the days are gone where you could spend 2 hours+ grinding trash mobs in order to complete a single instance. They don’t miss the masses of packs that infested Shadowlabs or the seemingly endless corridors of Shattered Halls. They don’t long back to Botanica, with all its beautiful, imaginative, deadly flowers growing in every corner.

Because when it comes to an end they’re in it for the loot. They most of all want to gear up their character, thus manifesting their progression in the game. It’s their motivator. And the quicker the better. It seems as if they just want to log in, have a kill-boss-and-loot-fix, and then log out and throw themselves into another activity.

In one way it makes sense. But if you ask me, this kind of game play leaves me empty, still hungry for more, in the same way as a hamburger meal that lasts me five minutes wont give me the same satisfaction as a three-dishes course at a french bistro.

The missing music
So what am I missing in the new way of designing instances? What’s my problem with the additions in 3.2, as far as we’ve seen them? And why will I rather do Ulduar “which takes forever” than grind the The New Instance and farm 5-man heroics until I’ve got all the gear I could possibly wish for? This is what I’ll try to explain in this post.

I think it boils down to two aspects. It’s about musicality and it’s about immersion.

Let’s have a look at the musical side of it first.

Even though I agree that the boss fights generally are the top moments of instance runs, in 5-mans as well as in epic raids, this doesn’t mean that the long walks through drainage pipes, gardens, caves, corridors, fighting whatever you see on the way, are pointless and boring. On the contrary.

The dramaturgy of an instance is like music. You can look at classic compositors as Beethoven and you can look at modern rock musicians, putting together a gig. They will always have slower, more gentle and subtle parts in a symphony or on a record. Because without them, the magnificent crescendo won’t be half as impressive.

Maybe I’m just a victim of nostalgia, but to me the 3.2 instances lack something in the musicality. There’s no time to build up excitement before it’s done and over. The drums may be loud, but since they’ve been going on during the whole encounter I don’t hear them anymore.

The lack of immersion
The second problem I have with those short encounters is the lack of immersion.

I’m a slow starter. Whenever I’m about to consume some kind of entertainment, be it a book, a move or a game, it will take some time before I get into the mood, leaving the real life behind me, losing myself in another world. That’s why I prefer novels to short stories and big format movies to a 30 minute TV episodes; once I’ve done the effort to get to know the characters and the plot, I want to enjoy it and stay there as long as possible.

It’s just the same in WoW. Black Temple was an awesome because we were sneaking through the pipes, scared to death by the dense darkness we were facing. The atmosphere was built up step by step and we were all wrapped up in it. We were explorers and heroes, venturing on a heroic mission in a huge, unknown world. Not gladiators, killing of the next poor monster sent into the arena.

To me raiding for 3.5 hours straight isn’t a pain, not any more than seeing the extended version of Lord of the Rings was. A full-night raid isn’t a sacrifice I make to get hold of epic loot or achievement points. It isn’t work. It’s escapism and it’s pleasure, a pleasure that is increased if it can be done without too many interruptions, such as changing instances because there were too few bosses in the first one.

If you’ve ever been into jogging, I think you know the feeling. It’s when you get into the “second stage” that it starts to be enjoyable. The 3.2 instances don’t ever let you reach that point.

Casual friendly
Finally: I know that this post falls into the “player complaining about a lost glorious past” genre. I know that the cause is lost and that there are good reasons for the change of design philosophy.

To many people (myself included), it’s quite hard to play without real life interruptions for hours. Places such as Shadowlabs were not friendly with players who had families to tend to. You had to plan for playing a heroic in the same way as you arrange your life around a raid. With the new deal you can run an instance in half an hour and if you’re up for fighting more bosses, you can just run add another instance. It’s modern, it’s flexible and it’s a huge improvement for the average player. I don’t disagree on that.

Still I can’t help hoping that Icecrown will be different from this. No one would be happier than me if we could get another place that will take “forever” to explore and conquer.

Maybe the new extend lockouts will be the solution we’re looking for. With those in place, there shouldn’t be the same need to make the raid instances shorter in order to make sure that all players will see as much of the content as possible. You can always extend your exploration to the next week.

The 5-man instances will however remain short I’m afraid. We’ll never again see another Shadowlabs. Mostly for good and just a little for bad.

Game Synergy

English is an amazingly rich, deep, superficial, fun, annoying, simplistic, complex, confusing, easy to understand boring language. There is a theory that language reveals what is truly important to a people, as in the fact that the Inuit (Eskimos) have 13 words for different types of snow. If this theory is true then perhaps what is important to English speakers from the list above is confusion, for one of the most notable features of this language is the fact that the same word can have myriad meanings. Cool doesn't always mean a state on the continuum of coldness; "take the Mickey" does not mean cutting into a film and stealing a cartoon character. In Australia a barbie means a grill but in America it's a doll. Confusion rather than order is the order of the day.

All of this means that when I hear non-native speakers of the language make mistakes I typically overlook it in the interest of getting laid by hot Scandinavian blonds. But sometimes this confusion really does create a pickle when people fly off the handle and make a beeline for the computer where they mash out their angst on the official Warcraft forums. A great number of pixels have been spilled over the topic of class representation and class balance and I think most of it stems from a simple misunderstanding by speakers of Engrish.

In the balance

To all the forum posters and bloggers on the topic of class balance let me quote Senor Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Be careful, the word 'balance' is one of those tricky words that has more than one meaning and those meanings are opposite of each other.

One defination of the word balance is the expression of a binomial condition. This is the way it is meant when we use it in sentences such as "The jury is in deliberations and his life hangs in the balance." While technically it is possible for even an all female jury to return hung, the phrase "in the balance" always refers to an either/or condition; in this case either guilty or innocent. This meaning of the word balance is derived directly from the old term for a traditional scale. Think about balance as teeter totter (seesaw); when one person goes down the other person must go up. In economics this concept is called a 'zero sum game'; for every winner there must be a loser. Ideal class balance is always a state of equipoise and the goal of class balancing is to get as close to this state of equilibrium as possible.

On Balance

The other defination of balance in English is that of a relation of parts to whole. This is the way we mean balance in the sentence, "After interviewing all the candidates John decided that on balance Ms. Jones was best." This defination of balance refers to a multivariate distribution, not a binomial one. This is the defination of balance, for example, that is used every day in the winery business. Here is the defination I pulled off of a wine site, "wine balance is the synergy of all the components that formulate an enjoyable tasting experience." In this vision of balance the relationship among the various elements of wine is not a zero sum game, for every winner there is not a loser; the simple question is which combination of elements cooperates to produce the best tasting experience. This does not mean, of course, that there are never any trade-off in the binomial sense; but it does mean that those trade-off are not the focus of the decision making process. From a wine makers' perspective which is the better wine: the wine where there is a strict balance between sweetness and acidity yet makes most people gag or a wine that is more sweet than acidic but flies off the shelf and wins many tasting competitions.

Ghostcrawler

Ghostcrawler has repeated numerous times that he defines balance in this second meaning of of the word. For example, he wrote in this Warlock thread, "That may be sufficient for you. That may be sufficient for a lot of players. But I don't think it would be sufficient overall." I honestly don't know how he could be more clear. It isn't a question of Warlock vs Mages, or PvP vs PvE; it's a question of what's best for the game as a whole. I honestly think the situation borders on pathos. A poster writes, "Alas when they put out too many changes, players complain about the game changing too fast. When they don't put out enough changes, the game moves too slow." Notice how the poster collapses the entire game development process into a single binomial. Ghostcrawler won't buy it. If there is any sweetness and light in this world it is contained in his response, "Of course, that still doesn't mean that the right solution is to give up either." The biggest problem with looking at life binomially is that it doesn't allow any room for growth or improvement of the whole. In a multivariate analysis, even if one is worse off compared to his neighbor they may be better off compared to where they were before because the overall quality of the game has improved.

The problem for Ghostcrawler then is how to balance the game using his multivariate understanding of balance when many players are responding to developer decisions based upon a binomial understanding of balance. What I wonder is how much of this player response is conditioned upon a misunderstanding of the meaning of balance. The dual meaning of balance in English is confusing, especially for non-native speakers of the language who almost certainly interpret it in the first sense of the word. It has gotten so bad that every time developers say "balance" players think "Who got nerfed?" My own opinion is that everyone could have a more fruitful discussion if we just abandoned the whole phrase 'class balance' entirely.

The discussion I think Ghostcrawler wants to have in regards to class representation and class balance would be better described as "game synergy". This is also where he's headed in his comment about making classes "distinct but equal". How does a designer make the the DPS talent trees function equally in the game without turning them all into a homogeneous mass of goo. I don't think there's a simple answer to that question because, given the thousands of variables in a game like Warcraft, it's a complex problem and we should resist the temptation to simplify complex problems by reducing them to a single binomial condition. The only thing that will do is tempt us to give up. There is no system or set of systems for making the perfect game in the same way that there is no magic formula for making the perfect wine. Like wine, game development is more art than science despite the fact that there is an enormous amount of science behind it. By using the term game synergy we change the focus of the discussion from how the various game elements (such as class representation and class power) compete with one another to how they cooperate with each other to produce the best gaming experience for all. On balance, I think this is a better method when the life of the game hangs in the balance.

The Alt patch will leave my alt out in the cold

So, the patch is out and excitement is in the air all over the place. Finally we get some new content to discover, conquer, get used to and eventually bored with at some point in the future.

I’m pretty sure many players think it’s not one day too soon, since they’re more or less done with the current game and need a change.

A little bit too early
Others, and that includes myself, aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the timing of the launch. It seems to be planned more to give a golden edge to Blizzcon and to strategically match upcoming activities from competing MMOs, than to actually fit with the progression curve of the majority of the guilds.

Taking our guild as an example, we didn’t get around killing Yogg-Saron in 25 man mode before the summer and vacation period crimpled us, and I’m pretty sure there are quite a few other guilds that are at the same point, 12/14 in Ulduar. Given a couple of weeks more we could at least have made it to 13, before our focus started to shift towards the new raid instance. This bugs me a little (especially since there’s another nerf coming with the patch).

On the other hand, we’re now given the ability to postpone the reset of the instances at our own wishes. This change is so good for guilds like ours that I lack words for it. It’s brilliant, so good that it outweighs the possibly bad timing of the launch.

At last Blizzard has left the decision to the players to decide if they’re geared enough to face the harder bosses or if they want to keep farming known content a little bit longer before accepting the challenge. For players who prefer progression raids to farm ones, but have RL obligations that keep them from raiding every night of the week, this is a huge improvement. And this will surely increase our possibility to get that last kill soon enough and to work on more of the hard modes in Ulduar as well, while we’ll still have time to run the new instance.

Effects on my playing
So how will this patch affect my everyday life in Azeroth? Quite a bit, I think.

1. Mage changes
The changes to the mage class are the least thing I’ll be worrying about. They’re minimal. The only thing I have on my agenda is o figure out when it’s worth applying Living bomb to multiple mobs and when it’s not. I guess I’ll just look what they guys on EJ suggest and do whatever is recommended. (Yeah, I admit it; I’m lazy when it comes to theory crafting).

2. Tournament dailies
I’ve been boycotting the Argent Tournament Dailies for quite a while now, since the day when it dawned upon me that I didn’t enjoy doing them. The new improved bank/mail/vendor squire and the outlook to call myself “Crusader Larísa” isn’t incentive enough to bring me back to the chores.

However, the mounted combat that we’re supposed to do in the Coliseum is. There’s no way around it – I need to practice jousting, even though it feels rather strange to do it as a mage. Finding up the concept of jousting, it seems as if they suddenly forgot about the different approaches different classes normally have to fight mobs. As a squishy I’m supposed to use my superior intellect and knowledge as weapon. It doesn’t make sense that Larísa is suddenly turned into a plain knight,, downing her enemies by charging and hitting the enemies with a lance.

Still: If I have to know how to joust to do the instances, so be it. I’ll do it, although I’m muttering some protests meanwhile. Argent Tournament grounds, here I go again!

3. The hunt for emblems
The biggest change of my game play however will no doubt be my renewed interest in doing five-man instances on my main character. I can’t remember last time I did the daily dungeon quest. I’ve had no reason whatsoever to do it. Now I have every reason in the world. Even if they’re far from exciting and interesting, the reward from them is too good to neglect. Being a raider at heart, my first priority is always to keep my character in shape, among other things improving her gear. With epic gems incoming as well as Tier 9 gear that can be bought for emblems, I see no alternative than to grind five mans, provided that enough instances can be launched, which I suspect may be a problem, at least in the first rush of enthusiasm.

I expect this hunt to go on for as long as I need the gems and there are available badge upgrades. This also means that the leveling of my druid alt probably will slow down radically or even stop altogether for a while.

An alt patch?
People have been calling 3.2 an Alt patch, because of the changes to the mount system and badge drops from the heroics. But if you ask me, the effect of this patch is the opposite: it’s the “desert your alt and get back to your main”-patch. I won’t have any time for alt playing until she’s as well geared as she possibly can be.

I can’t help feeling a little bet cheated on the druid forms. It would have been nice to see them, instead of once again doing the same old instances over again on my mage.

But then I tell myself: “Larísa, don’t panic! There will be plenty of time for everything you possibly could want to do in the game. This feeling of being slightly overwhelmed comes with every major patch. Realistically it will be quite a while before we get Icecrown. You’ll surely be playing your alt even more than you would like to before Icecrown finally arrives. Just relax and see. ”

So how do you feel about the patch? Do you think it will change your daily life in the game?

The first horde application to our alliance guild

We’ve been trying to recruit a tank for a while, using every channel we can think of. Last week we got our first application thanks to Lookingforguild. It came from a tank in one of the top 100 guilds in Europe. He said that he wanted to slow down from a 7 nights a week schedule to something lighter, possible to combine with a normal life outside of the game. Awesome.

It was very attractive in every way except for one: we’re an alliance guild and the applicant was a bloodelf! His plan was to change faction at the release day of the next patch. He seemed to be totally convinced that this feature will be available in 3.2, to be released anytime soon.

Poor guy. Or maybe not so poor; I’m totally convinced he’ll find a suitable guild on the horde side whenever he wants to. But still he symbolizes a problem I see currently: that Blizzard talks too much about things that are far, far off in the pipeline, which haven’t progressed much further than from the “what if we did like this?” idea stadium. The truth is that when this change will come this guy may not even be playing the game anymore. It could very well wait to go live until in the next expansion – or maybe even later.

Fooled players
I can’t help wondering how many players there are out there who have been fooled by the constant pre-view news leakage from Blizzard. Most people don’t read much more than the headlines or possibly the first few paragraphs in a news article. Very few will read it to the end. And who can keep up with the constant flow of information on the Blizzard home page, Wow.com, mmo-champion and all the other sources available? I can’t, and then I know I’m pretty good at superficial browsing where I get the main content without too much time and effort wasted. I’m trained for it. Most people aren’t. They will just get a fragment of the news articles and they get most of their information, not directly from the sources, but indirectly from rumors in the general chat and such channels.

When Blizzard are talking about all the cool features they’re thinking about, I’m convinced that many players take for granted that they’ll see it in the next patch.

Now, being into information myself, I don’t advocate that Blizzard should go more silent. I’m a big fan of communication and I think that it’s a great thing that they’re opening up to the community, being more active in the public forums than before (even though you could take it as a bad sign, as Hatch pointed out in an angry, well put post recently, but that’s another story).

However I think Blizzard should think twice before they send out all those rather vague signals about their future plans. I guess they hope to keep the interest from the players. But it could very easily backfire if people get disappointed when the next content patch won’t give them what they believed they had been promised. Or when changes seem to be postponed so long (anyone remember the dance classes?) until they turn into just a joke. Every time this happens they’ll lose a bit of our trust.

Maybe the vagueness partly is intentional, not to give the competitors too much information about the current development. After all it’s about business. Maybe they’re also vague just because they don’t know how long time things will take. They don’t want to make promises that they can’t fulfill at a later point.

Wanted: clearer information
Still: a little bit more of clearness should be possible, especially when a patch is incoming like now. I know it’s “all in the patch notes”, but you can’t expect everyone to read every line of it. There must be a better way to make it clear to players if a change is imminent coming or if it’s just something that is discussed.

Maybe some kind of markup system is all what it takes? They could put a green light for everything that actually is scheduled and has a release date, a yellow light for work in pipeline that will become reality within the next two years. And a clear read light for wishes from players that we actually never ever will see (if they have the guts to actually say NO to something.)

If Blizzard doesn’t become a bit clearer about the state of this change, I think that we may very well see more cross-faction applications from confused players this autumn.

We interrupt for this message

“I know you don’t like to put up this kind of stuff on your blog…”

The whisper came from my beloved guild leader. He sounded apologetic.

I assured him there wasn’t any problem, even though The Pink Pigtail Inn normally is a commercial free zone.

“Most bloggers do that kind of posts when they’re in need, like we are now. I’m sure the readers will forgive me. And besides I’ve give my word to our recruitment officer that I’d do it”.

Successful recruitment
So here I go once again, putting up a recruitment post. How could I refrain from it? After all I was very successful last time I did it, back in March.

One of the regular readers of PPI, a mage, read it and ended up transferring servers in order to join us. He turned out to be absolutely awesome, both as a player and as a guildie. (A way much better mage than I am to be honest, but I’m old enough to handle it.) He was the kind of player who just fits in so well right from the beginning that you think you’ve been playing together forever, rather than a few weeks. A lost jewel, finally coming home.

I think he was as happy about the transfer as we were. Recently we had a discussion thread in our forums where people wrote under the header: “I love Adrenaline because...”

And this is what our PPI recruit wrote:

“...People actually use the planner properly and are generally reliable

...We get a raid team 99% of the time we have a scheduled raid

...We progress well despite "only" raiding 3/week

...There is enthusiasm for alt runs/achievement runs

...You can almost always find help with whatever you need

...On the rare occasions we do have bad raids, the leadership deals with it sensibly

Some of you may take this stuff for granted...but believe me, it’s not in every guild!”

This sums pretty well what makes Adrenaline such a good home for people with a certain kind of mindset. Our raids are generally well structured and efficient (the focused silence was a bit scary before I got used to it), but outside of them, the environment is lighthearted and relaxed. And the schedule isn’t worse than that you can combine it with family life, friends and career.

What we need
I guess it’s about time now that I tell you what we’re looking for. We’re looking for tanks – one or two, preferably a warrior and/or a DK. This is indeed a demanding position, so you need to be up for it, looking at gear, experience and mentality.

Unfortunately Blizzard hasn’t done anything yet about the barrier between the continents, and the faction changes aren’t coming anytime soon as far as I know, so you have to be an Alliance player on the EU side (We’re residing on the Stormrage realm, which is flagged for normal PvE).

Our main focus is 25 man raids, three nights a week, where you’re expected to attend at least two. The other nights we’re often running 10 man runs and alt runs for whoever is up for it. We’re doing some hardmodes in Ulduar, so you shouldn’t be completely opposed to achievements and hardmodes. Yogg-Saron is still on his feet in 25 man, but I would be surprised if we didn’t get him rather quickly, as soon as we’re back to normal raiding after the summer vacations are over.

Well, I’ll try to keep this message short. But if you would like to become my guildie or know someone who you think could be a good match, check out our recruitment post on the Blizzard forum. You can also visit our website and our forums where there’s an application form.

End of message. Blogging will soon go back to normal. Promise.

/Larísa

PS
If you’re wondering about my whereabouts, I’ve had a blast exploring Paris. This was followed by a week of new PC problems (a never-ending story as it seems), which have kept me away from blogging. When you read this I’m climbing some mountains. Elnia has surely done a great job keeping the inn going, so I don’t think you’ve missed me too badly.