world of warcraft addiction

Yesterday I made the startling revelation that my main, Sayas, a level 80 discipline priest on Farstriders (US) was better qualified for raiding than I had thought. Today I begin to explore what that means.

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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