The following is kind of a follow up to my last blog post. It also is something I just now first posted on our guild forums. Unlike some though, I’m not at all adverse in “pugging” or running outside my own guild so long as its a well thought out, mature group. Perhaps you’re a small guild occasionally short a healer or something. Obviously, for this to be relevant at all, you’d have to play Alliance, Farstriders (US) server. But if you do, and need someone, feel free to contact me:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make my in game time more productive. Seems like I spend way too much time trying to put runs together on the fly or simply waiting for one to come together. I doubt I’m the only one in this boat.

So here is what I’m thinking to try within this message thread and for myself, this message in particular which I’ll edit to keep current. I suggest we post our general availability and a brief goal statement for each toon we’re *actively* playing at the moment. Then also an *out of game* means of contact that has near constant accessibility. For many people this would mean a phone/text number. For some like myself, it could be an email/im address. For those with phone only but uncomfortable giving out there real number, google offers a phone number forwarding option called gvoice I think. So somebody contacting me could hit me up with something like:

Can Sayas heal an Onyxia run Thursday at 10am server?

To which I could either commit or decline. But with acceptance, I’d know how to schedule my time. So here is my current information which could be used as a template:

GENERAL AVAILABILITY: (server times)
Monday-Tuesday: 9:30pm – 11pm
Wednesday: 9:30pm – ???
Thursday-Saturday – Any time
Sunday: Before 11pm (finish time!)

TOON/GOAL/INTERESTS:
Sayas, lvl80, priest: Healing role, discipline primary spec, looking to learn a holy heal off spec, interested in badge (heroic) runs, particularly heroic daily for triumph badges, H ToC for gear drops, Onyxia for the experience, VoA, Ulduar, ToC10

Dhume, lvl75, death knight, blood tanking, unholy dps, looking to learn tanking, group dps, leveling

Whispera, lvl22, druid, feral tanking & dps, healing off spec, learning tanking, learning druid healing, of course leveling

CONTACT:
gmail/gchat: staretssayas@gmail.com

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First of course is the time commitment. Now we’re not talking quantity of time primarily. I spend plenty of that. I’d guess 10-20 hours a week typically. It seems like most raiders devote at least two nights a week to raiding and then many guilds seem to spend one night a week beyond that on “progression.” So, we’re talking three nights, three hours a night… so nine hours. Luckily, my guild really only expects two nights reducing that number to six hours.

But my deal is more about the expectation of nights of the week set aside for raiding. While I spend plenty of time in game, almost all of my time is on an ad hoc basis. I fit my time in between other commitments. Raiding turns that upside down to an extent and says you must to some extent fit those other commitments in around raiding. Still, I want to raid and anything you want doing takes a degree of prioritizing. So what if I committed just one night a week? Would that be good enough? I’m not sure because I know sometimes each raid is a progression in itself. In other words, night two is a continuation of night one. Obviously its an inconvenience at the very least to the others if I participate on night one and not on night two. Then again, what if the day of designated were to fall on day two of our raiding schedules? The chance that I’d be called upon to fill in for someone that started on day one would certainly be diminished from having started the raid in the first place.

I could look at pugging raids instead. I actually do a fair amount of that with 5 mans. But part of my motivation here is guild participation, not just raiding for raiding’s sake so that doesn’t seem to be a satisfactory solution. Also, I could look at raiding with a guild that consistently raids at a more convenient time for me. If I could raid mornings instead, that would far easier for me to commit to. But that would involve me changing guilds and perhaps servers as well. So that kind of would defeat the purpose as well. I don’t even know, is it possibly to transfer to servers in other areas of the world so that my morning might be their evening? Hmm…

So, there you have my thinking on the time issue. Next time, I’ll look at another concern.

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