Intermission: WARNING: F-Bombs Have Been Authorized!

*pulls out the old fogey stool and shakes his cane at the young whippersnappers and johnny-come-latelys*

So, back in the day when the choice of raid size was 40 or...40, there were these things called "raiding alliances." Now, some of these have survived to this day (hi, TRI!) but most have disappeared for the simple fact that getting together 40 ADD jackholes hopped up on sugar and caffeine (and various other substances) in one place at one time and getting them to all focus on one task for more than a few seconds is mind-breakingly difficult. Also, you think the drama is bad inside one guild when shit goes wrong? See what happens when there’s two or three or six and people are blaming everyone else in every other guild and the shit is being talked inside one guild and nothing is actually being addressed in the open because that would fucking well makes sense, wouldn’t it? Oh, yeah, good times. Usually these alliances occurred when a large, but not large enough guild, would approach a smaller, but not small enough guild, to join together for the betterment of all. Yeah, ‘cause communism works so well in the real world, it should work great when John Gabriel’s Internet Fuckwad Theory is in effect. What usually ended up happening is some small and normally easily resolved bit of drama would get blown all out of proportion and the alliance would collapse in on itself like the Austro-Hungarian Empire…or a flan in a cupboard.

Why were these strange and bizarre constructs created, you ask? Because for one guild to be able to field 40 people at one time was freaking hard! Like "why are we bothering with this shit" hard. So, people would meet other people from other guilds and they would join up so they could field 40 people. Problem being, most guilds usually had more than, say, half a raid's worth of people who wanted to raid, but even with multiple guilds pulling together, couldn’t field more than one raid, thus causing Drama the First: Who Gets to Raid? Guilds came up with all kinds of crazy shit to manage who got to raid when and who was in and who was out and for which fight and...ugh...

Hand me the vodka, I must destroy the memories.

Ah, better. Once it was determined who got in and who got sat, came the actual business of raiding, which, really, had far more in common with herding cats than playing a game. And there was always that one guy who feigned in front of the healer, pulled aggro intentionally, went the wrong way, tried to follow the stealthed rogue, etc, etc. Granted, that guy is still around but usually only once these days. If and when you managed to get down to the srsbizns and actually down a boss, well, then up popped Drama the Second: It’s Mine, No It’s Mine, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, also known as Loot Distribution.

If you’ve been around for a while, say, over five years, for example, you’ve probably heard of some ridiculous loot system or two: DKP, SWAPS, Karma…the list goes on ad nauseum. But since there were FORTY FREAKING PEOPLE who all showed up for loot, and a whopping five or six pieces of loot, for the toughest (read: Ragnaros) bosses.

Let’s see…carry the one…divide by the square root of pi…aha!

Yeah, with a good night of raiding, you were looking at maybe a dozen people getting loot. We’re also talking a FULL NIGHT of raiding. Raids were five to six hours long! And you still didn’t finish the damn instance. You had to go back a second and sometimes third night! So, you put in all this work, raid for a long damn time and all you’ve managed to rack up at the end of the night is a big repair bill and a little more damage to your liver. Somehow, some genius in one of the “top guilds” decided it was a good idea to reward people who had the intestinal fortitude to show up every night with points they could use to buy gear. This eventually filtered down through the whole system and just about every freaking guild in the whole damn world adopted it. Yet, no one could really come up with a system that was as fair and balance as the one Blizzard implemented from the word go: the random roll. See, every one of these point systems had a weakness: they could be exploited by the people with lots and lots of free time. Show up, get your points, go home. Wash, rinse, repeat for a few weeks. Suddenly, one guy has taken all the loot and the loot drama commences!

Strangely, people still yearn for those days to return. I have to assume these are people who never actually raided 40-man raids. Those days were far more headache than they were ever worth. More often than not, the only fun that was had was in the friendships made along the way, not in the actual gameplay. Yes, yes, I know Blizzard was new at designing raid encounters and didn’t have the tools then they do now. With few exceptions (I’m looking at you living bomb, Razorgore, Vael and core hound packs), most raiding in those days was straight up tank’n’spanks. Where do you think we get the term? Other than using them as a DPS meter, how much fun does anyone really have on a tank’n’spank? Hey! Stand there, don’t die and DPS as hard as you fucking can! Yeah, it’s fun once. Once. Then it’s time to move on to actual challenges.

I was only too happy to see 40-man raids die like the filthy fucking dogs they were. This was also about the time that most of these “raiding alliances” died away as well. These I wasn’t as happy to see go, as they were usually a good source of friends you might not meet otherwise.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one….

See, back in the dark days of vanilla WoW, I was a member of this little guild, who, for security purposes, shall remain nameless. For some reason, we’ve been prone to attract a lot of hate on our server. I’m still not sure why. Anyway, this happy little guild was part of a fairly large raiding alliance. The alliance was rather successful, as these things go, but eventually it did fold, largely due to one guild *coughminecough* having grown large enough to actually put up a full 40-man raid on its own and leaving the alliance. Great days! Not much changed. What worked in the alliance worked fine on our own as well, only without the annoying attendance points.

Enter BC and all the glorious glory of new, smaller raids! We initially thought this might be a problem, but it turned out half the guild were raging fuckwads and pulled out like their fathers should have done from their mothers the night they were conceived. This left us as a pretty lean, mean fighting force and we were able to meet most of the challenges of Outland head-on, with minimal breakage of skull on our part.

Okay, so it actually gutted our roster for a couple months until we were able to reorganize and rebuild into the leaner, meaner fighting force, etc, etc. But! We were still here.

(Parenthetical aside: the asshats who left to be uberleet and ultra hardcore raiders? Gone. Guild failed a couple months after inception. Strange how when you take all the assclowns from one guild and put them together in another, with none of the balancing force of the awesome people, it falls apart due to a critical mass of asshattery. And yeah, it really was just all the assclowns.)

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t raid much with my guild in BC due to real life commitments (read: my fucking work schedule sucked donkey balls.) I even spent some time in a different guild for that reason. I did help that guild to become raid viable, however. Which was an achievement, let me tell you. You guys know who you are. You know.

However, I did get into the raiding late in BC and let me tell you, the flexibility to choose 10 or 25 based on how many you had at the time: awesome. It didn’t much matter that ZOMFG TWENNYFIVSH HAZH DA BESHT GEARSH GUYSH! WE SHOULD RUN ONLY DOESH! SHERIOUSHLY! (that last bit should be read with a lateral, or “slushy” lisp.) The differences in item level wasn’t so great that 25-only raiders could really look down on 10-man only raiders because they were doing the same content because some of the gear was just as good, even if it was fuckugly. (ohai, ZA, I didn’t see you there. Okay, I did, because fuck you.)

Now along comes the Rash of the Itch King and suddenly, not only do we have the option of how big we want our raid to be, but where. This is a huge thing. We’re not locked into the same three raids every week, no matter how many times we’ve done them or how long ago we mastered them. Okay, fine, so Naxx was kind of weaksauce, but we really only made it to the door by the time BC came out, so fuck it, it was nice to finally see.

My happy guild (still around, with much of the same people as it started with) started out Lich King doing Naxx 25 and making quick werk (UCWHUTIDIDTHAR) of it. Eventually, summer came and people left and some never came back, so we stepped things down a bit to tens.

(Also, I spent some time with another guild because, again, I couldn’t make my guild’s raiding schedule, but could the other guild’s. Drama drove me back. My guild is pretty much like that one old girlfriend that will always take you back because she really loves you and you really love her even if you’re too stupid to know it. You know, the ones that only exist in the movies?)

So here we are. Wrapping up Lich King (both the expansion and the boss…well…FUCK YOU SINDRAGOSA!) doing ten mans and the occasional pugged 25. We’ve got a tight core group of raiders with plenty of room for others to step in and wreck shit up if they want or if their schedule doesn’t allow them to raid every raid night. We do well and we do it on our own. The changes coming down the pipe? BRING THEM THE FUCK ON. Give us more flexibility. Give us the one thing that makes the 25-only fuckwits think they can look down on people who raid only tens. Cry me that fucking river because your epeen won’t be as huge and glorious because you raid with 24 other fucktards while I raid with nine good friends. Your tears are delicious and they nourish me and power my Fortress of Win™. Also, they fuel Fifteen Seconds of Awesome™ (that’s an inside joke, by the way, for all the people who know me who don’t read my blog *sob*.) It pleases me that Blizzard is doing everything they can to do what this game is supposed to do, be fun. Someone else said it better than I can: if 25-mans die, it’s because they were meant to die, not because Blizzard killed them. Strangely, when you make the playing field level, the players with the real skill are the ones who step up and really shine.

Things have improved so much from the dark days where we bled, sweated and cried in Molten Core. Why would anyone want to perpetuate that, much less go back to it. The idea that only a select few players should be able to access and successfully defeat the top level content is an idea that should have died back when EverQuest was releasing their third expansion (and yes, a giant FUCK YOU to Furor for trying to keep it that way for so fucking long, which is another rant entirely.) Even with ten-million players worldwide, it doesn’t make any kind of financial sense for Blizzard to design content for one-percent of their subscribers. How many people would have quit playing by now if they knew they had no chance of ever seeing the top-end raid content because they couldn’t get into the hardest of the hardcore guilds? WoW is successful because it doesn’t do these things, because Blizzard does try to make their content available to as many people as possible. Fuck all, I’m just a hack fanfic writer and I still want as many people to read my shit as possible. Blizzard has got a huge fucking team of people working to create as much awesome shit as your eyeballs can take. Why wouldn’t they want as many people as possible to see it?

To the whiners with a terrible case of silicate vaginosis who can’t feel like a worthwhile human being unless they have the highest Gear Score (another fucking rant) possible with a side order of mighty, golden epeen: FUCK. YOU. Quit trying to douche the game up according to your infantile need to be better than other people in a video game. Enjoy the fucking game. Let other people enjoy the game. If you can’t enjoy the game without shitting all over other people’s enjoyment of it, well, I hear EverQuest plus all 15 expansions are about forty bucks on Steam and they cater to your type quite well.

To the people who chase world firsts and are concerned these changes will make your achievements somehow mean less: um, really? First of all, it’s cool you beat the game and all, but it’s not like you won a marathon or, say, the Tour de France seven times in a row with one fucking nut. Yes, your skill is admirable, but quit acting like you’re the queen’s own shit. Because, really, if these changes will do anything, it will be to give you an even greater chance to shine. (Because the field is level now, see above.)

In summary, the changes are good, whiners can chug a big ol’ glass of go fuck yourself and I’m looking forward to year six with my guild and raiding with a bunch of good friends for as long as we’re here. Because we have been here for a long ass time. Longer than most guilds I’ve seen. There are very few who are still around from five years ago. Fewer still who still have most of the same roster then as they do now. We’ve seen a lot of shit over the years and a lot that has improved. Take the long view. Look back on the road we’ve been down and look forward to where we’re going. It’s been doing nothing but getting better for five years and shows no sign of stopping now.

Fuck.

(Total f-bomb count: 24. Beat that, K.)