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Saturday, August 29, 2020

A Bit Like The Ending to "The Searchers"

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
--Neil Postman

 

Cardwyn's last Molten Core run with her first "regular" raid group was last night.

It felt bittersweet, given that it was nice to see a lot of people I've gotten to know as acquaintances and friends one last time for an MC run, but the knowledge that I'll have to find a new MC home for Card put a damper on the occasion for me.

The rest of the raid group was in good spirits, however, and the raid went very well. There were no wipes, although we did lose half the raid on a trash pull right before Baron Geddon. That seems to be the norm for the packs in the Baron Geddon/Shazzrah area, where the packs seem to be more deadly than the bosses themselves. I was also exposed to yet another strategy on taking out Shazzrah, which I commented on to a friend of mine. 

***

That did get me to thinking about how similar some strategies are for bosses and others are totally different. They're all personal variations between guilds --and even raiding teams within guilds-- and if they work, then that's fine. But as time has gone on, there often seems to be that "one person" who thinks the way their raid team does it is the right way, and says so on the Discord or in Chat. Frequently that means they can become a disruptive influence on the raid, especially if there's a wipe. I've been in more than one Zul'Gurub or instance pug that dissolved into chaos because of people insisting that "you're doing it wrong" after a wipe, and effectively throwing a temper tantrum because they weren't getting their way. I've even seen it happen after a wipe in an MC run, which the person throwing the fit was a guest of the guild putting the raid on. And really, that takes some brass balls to try to tell the people putting on the raid that "they're doing it wrong" when they invited you to come along in the first place.

But I guess that's the finest example of an MMO being as good as the people who operate inside it. 

***

Meanwhile, back in the Hallowed Core (as Ragnaros calls it) I was pondering all of that, as well as how different guilds have different internal dynamics.

Each guild has their own personality. I don't mean the differences between leveling guilds and progression raiders and social guilds, I mean how guild members interact with each other and the greater WoW world. Within Myzrael, if you run enough instances or group up enough with people from various guilds, you begin to get a feel of a guild's personality. I always try to not to extrapolate from a couple of people to an entire guild, because that smacks of prejudice, but I'm also a firm believer in that when you're a member of an organization you represent that organization no matter whether you're "on the clock" or not.*

One of the primary methods of guild recruitment --outside of spamming LFG or posting ads in the Myzrael Discord-- is the pug. Prospective guildies get a chance to hang with members in a (theoretical) non-stressful atmosphere and see the guild dynamics at work and in general have a good time. Take the proverbial high school or college mixer, place it online, and that's what pugs are. It's not perfect, but it does work. And when I attend a guild group, whether it's in a Scarlet Monastery run or Zul'Gurub or Scholomance or even Molten Core, there's an unspoken evaluation going on in both directions, whether or not the pug was advertised as a recruitment event or not. 

What I've found in running enough raid pugs --with Discord-- is that the guilds that put on these pugs do put their best foot forward. Nobody wants to look like an asshat, and you can tell that the guilds that have been around long enough have settled into a comfortable level of banter and enjoyment in Discord. Of these regular pugs, I don't think I've come across one that made me feel uncomfortable with weird dynamics or people who were overly aggressive in trying to push the raid to a speed record or something. However, I've been in enough of these sort of pugs where I can detect a distinct separation between the guildies and the puggers. It's not intentional, as it is the product of familiarity and friendliness, but it's there. And in an MMO where there are no visual cues to derive from, you're left with Discord and in-game chat to navigate that separation. 

Me? Because of my natural shyness I resort to humor to break the ice** and, naturally, if my attempts at humor are well received I begin to feel a bit more comfortable with the situation. 

I was considering all of this in the raid --yes, deep thoughts for a raid that starts at 1 AM EDT on a Saturday morning-- while I was thinking of the struggles of some of my Classic friends to find a home in the game.

I've watched as several of my friends bounced from guild to guild. Or in the case of some of them, watched a couple of guilds blow up or have significant departures; in those cases, I look back on my guild history in Wrath and think "there but for the love of God go I". It didn't make anything easier for my friends, however, but all I could do was just listen/read while they aired out their grievances. And I wondered just how much of the raid pugs presented a complete slice of the guild dynamics. It's far better than an advertisement, for certain, but it's not foolproof.

Some of my friends, however, eventually found a guild that suited them. Finding yourself in a group of people that accept you and let you grow is a good thing, and I'm happy that they found their landing spot. Others are still looking, and the best thing for me to do is to be there for support. 

***

I suppose it was a good thing that I didn't use Discord to talk in the raid***, as my mood was more than a bit melancholy, and the last thing I wanted to do was to be a Debbie Downer on what for a lot of people was a good time.

And what didn't help my mood much was when I happened to look at the damage meters to get a feel for how I was doing.

Over the past couple of months Card has slowly moved up the charts as she's begun to get some T1 gear and fix the gaps in her T0 gear, like replacing things like Priest/Warlock T0 with true Mage T0 gear. Right about now, Card is about half T1, half T0 Mage, and some of the minor gear pieces (trinkets and whatnot) are finally being replaced from leveling greens and blues with something more raid ready. I've not bothered with enchantments because that money hole is something I'm going to pursue once I get enough pieces good enough to enchant that I'm going to keep for a little while.**** And she's been hitting the 10-15 ranking mark on a regular basis on fights that require her to just go balls to the wall and attack without doing massive interrupts. She was frequently 3/4 or 4/4 in the mage group, but given the other mages were getting T2 gear from regular Blackwing Lair runs, I thought I was moving in the right direction.

And then I saw the meters this time. 

I knew that more people in the pug were raiding AQ20/40 now, and more than a few of them weren't alts at all but people's mains, but when I vanished from the Top 20 for almost the entire run I knew I had a long way to go. 

***

In the end, I did get a good send off: the T2 Mage legs dropped, and I won the roll for them.

And while I got a lot of whispers from friends trying to convince me to join them next week when they start up the Blackwing Lair pug, I had to keep telling them that I simply wasn't geared for it yet. I wasn't ready, and I was determined to not be a detriment to the raid. 

What did it feel like? About the closest way I can describe it is that feeling when you first drop your grown child off at a university. You raised them, were there for them in all their successes and stumbles as they grew and matured, and you let them go to make their own way in the world. They go on without you, and you can only watch with a mixture of pride and sadness.



*I've always impressed on the mini-Reds that it may not be fair, but when they are out in public wearing a shirt with their school name (for example), people will judge their school based on their behavior. "It isn't fair, but that is why it is so important to behave well," I'd frequently tell them. "You carry the weight of expectations, and live up to them."

**Trust me, it's there. I know that more than a few people have a hard time believing that I'm pretty shy, but you have to realize that these are just words, and I'm not talking to you face to face. HUGE difference. And even then, I struggled to put together this particular post because it was difficult to corral my thoughts into something that resembled coherency. It was only toward the end of writing this that the light bulb went on in my head and I remembered an article from Cracked about Robin Williams and Why Funny People Kill Themselves, and I said "Oh!" I may not be as depressed or anxious or anything as represented in the article, but it does explain to an extent why I use humor so much as a defense mechanism to overcome my own shyness and nervousness.

***This particular channel required the use of push-to-talk, and I'll be frank in that I suck in using PTT while trying to not stand in the bad during MMOs. My headset allows me to mute myself when I push my mic up, and the mic is re-engaged when I pull it down into a talking position.

****I am NOT getting on the gold farming treadmill just to enchant an item that will be only equipped for a couple of weeks.

 

EtA: Cleaned up some grammar issues.

EtA: I should clarify the title of the post a bit. If you're as old as I am --and being even older is better-- The Searchers was one of director John Ford's best films. Ford was a master of cinematography and letting the symbolism tell the story, which is quite a feat in the Western films era. While most people today know of The Searchers as part of the inspiration for the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes the dialogue, the treatment of Native Americans in the story, and the acting is very dated, Ford doesn't shy away from the flaws that make Ethan, John Wayne's character, so single minded in pursuit of his niece who'd been captured by the Comanches: his ruthlessness and his racism chief among them. Ford's direction and cinematography forces us to reevaluate the racism implicit in the settlement of the Old West, and to realize that Ethan is not truly the hero of the story at all; he is just as dangerous as the Comanches who killed his relatives and captured his niece. One of John Ford's themes in his Westerns was the approach of civilization and the replacement of lawlessness --embodied by gunfighters and outlaws of all stripes-- with the normalcy of civilization. As in Ford's other big film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne's character is a product of the Old West, and while he helps to usher in the New (Civilized) West, he has no place in it.

I obviously wasn't going for all of the rest of that subtext about The Searchers in this post, because I could write at least 3-5 posts on how WoW approaches complex subjects such as racism, but rather the basic theme of the outsider watching as the world has passed him by.

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