And if you’re lucky then the God’s a she.
I don’t think anyone understood the lyrics. (Or we were all really liberal. Probably both.) At any rate, small things like that made raiding with forty strangers the best thing in the world.
We needed those joyous social highlights, because the game raids required a TON of coordination, not only to assemble the exact number of qualified people, but also to get your character ready for action. “I have to spend three weeks gathering equipment? You’re saying I need to do homework to play this video game?!”
Yes. That is what they were saying.
We’d rush the same monster over and over for weeks without succeeding. “Turdburger, you let me die again! Stop eating while we’re fighting, I can hear you chewing your Subway!!” It was NOT a casual hobby. We raided together about twenty hours a week, sometimes just to fail the fights again, and again, and again. Sounds incredibly annoying and not like the definition of “game,” which is to “play,” which in turn means to “engage in activity for enjoyment,” right? So why bother going through all this grief? Bottom line (just like in Puzzle Pirates): outfits.
All the best armor and weapons were acquired in the difficult mega-group dungeons. It was the Rodeo Drive of Warcraft. When you got a piece of fancy “epic” purple equipment, your character became more powerful and looked cooler when you danced on mailboxes inside the game. It’s the same reason why real-life men buy sports cars and real-life women buy handbags that cost the same as said cars. (Back then, I would have salivated over a “Tier 4 Nemesis Helm” before a Hermès Birkin bag any day of the week.)
In order to win the best stuff, you placed bids according to points you’d earned for raid attendance. Basically, minutes of your life were used as currency. (When I describe it that way, it sounds horrifying.) There were only three to four items auctioned off to the group of forty people each week, so, like debates in British Parliament, things got rough. Because avarice doesn’t generally IMPROVE one’s character. One time my brother Mochi got reamed because people thought he was hogging equipment, so he posted the following on the forums:
It has come to my attention that there have been bones of contention raised about a few of my raiding bids in Blackwing Lair and in the Molten Core, specifically, with my fellow raiding warriors questioning my bidding demeanor concerning the Helm of Endless Rage, which drops off of Vaelastrasz the Corrupt in the Blackwing Lair zone, and with the Onslaught Girdle, a Ragnaros drop from the Molten Core zone.
If, on any of my future bidding, you have any questions or qualms about what I am doing, and would like me to know about your second thoughts or have any ideas/suggestions for me, I invite you to write all your thoughts on the matter in a message/email/forum post for me. Then, print it out, roll it up in a tube, and stick it up your ass.
Sincerely, Mochi
He wasn’t one of the more popular members.
I, however, was very popular. I had a charming lack of fulfillment in my life, so I was psyched to be able to work hard and study like I was in college again. “4.0 in Warlock? Sounds like a goal to me!”
But as we started working through harder and harder dungeons, more and more prep was required BEFORE the actual raid time. Making potions, gathering equipment and herbs, rearranging my in-game storage unit. Most people had day jobs or school, but what was I doing during the day? Except for the occasional “Going to audition/class/coffee-with-other-actresses,” I had TONS of free time. I figured, “Someone needs to make those Flasks of the Titan, might as well be me!”
That is when my gaming life started tipping out of control.
I started working full-time in World of Warcraft. I’m not exaggerating. Every morning before I left the house (IF I left, which I frequently didn’t), I would log online and fly around the game world, harvesting herbs across the virtual globe to make potions. This hunter/gatherer trip would take about an hour or two each day, minimum. (Yes, I spent a large portion of my time inside World of Warcraft commuting.) I invested in a very expensive office chair, for my ass comfort, because I was sitting on it most the time and it was starting to spread. But I didn’t care about my booty, ’cause there was looty to be collected! (HAR! Okay, no more puns, I apologize.)