the drunken housewife and her time consuming hobby

Several people (including my own Sober Husband) have requested that I write more about Warcraft. Evidently people, like my husband, who find Warcraft uninteresting and have no desire to play it and who may even make fun of me for playing it so much, cannot get enough of reading about it (probably this is so they can ridicule me all the more).

Over the last couple of months I've been playing Warcraft far too frigging much. Why, pray tell? Because I have entered the more elite ranks of players; I've become that glorious creature, a regular raider (for another point of view, substitute the word "obsessed" for "elite" and "pathetic" for "glorious"). "What the hell is that," you might wonder. Fear not, for I shall explain.

The World of Warcraft is a very large and flexible world. Millions of players around the world participate in it. We are housed on various servers, which are based upon our geographical region and our presumed language of choice. Servers also have distinct personalities: you can choose one where the players can attack each other at any time, or you can pick one where you can turn off the ability of other players to attack you until and unless you yourself make an aggressive move first. There are also "role playing" servers, including a very infamous one known for its cybersex, which I have not myself visited.

People play Warcraft in a number of different ways. You can just quest all the time, which is how I largely spent my first couple of years in Azeroth ("Azeroth" is the name for the virtual world in the game). You can join battlegrounds and fight it out with other players, which I love to do. And you can join with other players to enter dungeons, which we call "instances", to do more complicated and difficult fighting against harder monsters.

I never used to be able to run instances, because I was either not in a guild or in a "social guild" where we just yammered to each other all the time but never grouped up to do anything seriously. (I still miss my old Alliance guild from Drenden, where the wit was always sparkling and the conversation always extremely inappropriate). But then Blizzard brilliantly created a tool to enable players to join up with strangers, either for specific instances or for random ones. Servers are grouped together in "battle nets" or "battle groups", which means that when players join together in these random groups, they meet up with players from other servers whom they might not ever see again. (Random groups are called "pugs", an abbreviation for "pick up groups", and this morning I pugged with some lovely players from Chile, who adored me because I am that rare creature, an American WoW player who speaks Spanish and doesn't go off on a tirade if Spanish is the main language of the pug).

Before Blizzard created that tool, it was very hard for me to get a group together for an instance. I remember the day when FINALLY I was running Zul'Farrak with a decent group when our tank had to quit because his mother insisted he get off the damn computer and go outside to play. Now I run a random at least once a day (by running random dungeons, players earn points which can be amassed and used to trade for really good armor).

Even though I spent far too much time playing Warcraft, I was always what the other players call disparagingly "a casual player." For more serious players, there are two much more challenging ways to play Warcraft, both requiring players to form teams which regularly work together. First there are arenas, where teams of different sizes attack each other. There's a sexist saying in Warcraft, that "chicks quest and guys arena", and there's a lot of truth to that. I've never joined an arena team, although I have talked idly of forming one. Blizzard tries half-assedly to turn arenas into a true sport, with actual seasons and rankings and what-have-you, but so far, like a chick, I've sat it out.

Then there are raids. We call anything a raid which requires a lot of players and which is supposed to be hard to accomplish. Raids are usually either ten players or twenty-five players (although years ago Blizzard created several forty player raids, they seem to have given up on the idea of trying to make us herd 40 catlike players). They need to be well-equipped and to know what they are doing. And what do they do? Blizzard purposefully designed parts of the World of Warcraft to be so difficult that it would take a group of ten or twenty-five players several weeks to conquor them, slaying every monster and gleaning every bit of loot.

The places you go on a raid are beautiful and strange. The developers spent a lot of time and energy on them, and the graphics and ideas can be breathtaking, funny, disgusting, disturbing, or deeply moving. The level of difficulty can be huge: one person's fuckup will usually mean that everyone dies (and when you die, you have to run back as a ghost to your body, and your equipment is damaged. You'll be less powerful until you're able to pay for expensive repairs to your gear).

Currently I am on a ten man raid team. My raid team meets twice a week, from 9:00 to 11:30 p.m. my time (the players are scattered around the world). This is my second raid team, the first fell apart after a month or two, but thankfully one of the other players from that first group took the lead in organizing a second raid team for that time slot. I love playing with this group: the players are intelligent, adult, and respectful of one another. When I tried raiding on another server with another character, I got upset regularly as a couple of the other players, extremely experienced raiders, tended to lord it over the more casual players. I felt there was a healthy sprinkling of sexism in that, as well as arrogance which was often appropriate (these players were indeed strong and highly experienced with better equipment), but at times misguided. For example (and here I get more technical), another player was always trying to micromanage my paladin's buffs, despite the fact that he had no understanding of the paladin class mechanics. Every time he'd bitch me out for not giving raid buffs, when at that time paladin buffs were by class only. No matter how many times I explained that paladin buffs were class buffs, not raid buffs, he never learned that and continued to try to correct me. I felt my intelligence was always being insulted, and it was maddening coming from someone who never could be made to realize that he was making factual errors in his criticisms. But my current team is composed of only gracious players, who have nothing but politely worded encouragement and gentle constructive criticism.

Being on a raid team is like having a part-time job. You need to be on time and prepared. You should be logged in, fully repaired, with plenty of expensive elixirs and food (elixirs and top end food give your character heightened abilities for an hour). You should study the fight ahead of time (there are endless tutorials players create on Youtube). We talk to each other both by typing and by speaking; I bought an annoying headset with a microphone and headphones just for raiding. (My family members are united by a hatred of hearing my fellow raiders talk on the voice program we all call "vent", but they love hearing my isolated, out-of-context remarks. Their amused laughter often forms the background when I'm making cogent remarks into my microphone such as "he blew me right off the platform" or "I'm putting my mammoth up for repairs").

And you need to have the time blocked out, without interruptions. I could never have raided when the children were smaller. I remember trying group things in the past and having to have the Sober Husband explain to my group that I'd been called away for a child emergency. Now that they are older, I can shout directions at them while still manipulating my elemental shaman. I do still run into more trouble than the average raider, though. Often I have to ask, "Could you please repeat that? I have a lot of parrot aggro over here; I can't hear you over the birds." This past weekend during a particular intense moment, Pigwidgeon the idiotic African grey parrot decided to join me. I already had Al the moronic orange tabby kneading my chest and Frowst, our majestic trophy cat, leaning against my arm, and Pig divebombed us all, landing on my head. The cats flinched. Al dug his claws in my cleavage. Piggle squawked and awkwardly looked for footing around my head. Through it all I kept playing, not missing a beat as my shaman waged war against a massive air spirit with a rather threatening pelvic undulation. After all, a raider must maintain focus.