Little Did They Know

Back when I first began playing MMOs --okay, WoW-- back in 2009, most of my game time was spent playing in parallel with people. By that, I mean I was out in the game, doing whatever, while Soul and his wife were also online and playing, but we weren't necessarily doing the same thing. We may have been questing, but we weren't questing together. Or even in the same area.

My playing on the family PC also meant that I had to work around my wife and my kids' usage as well, so I moved in the direction of solo play at odd hours. 

This was my life when the mini-Reds
were in elementary school.
From yourtango.com.

Middle school sounded the death knell for early morning WoW, because the kids would have to get up at 6 AM to catch the bus and/or get dropped off at school*, and I wasn't getting up at 4 AM to play WoW. Okay, in 2020 I began staying up until 3 AM to finish raids, so I guess you could say that I came full circle, but still...

For me, playing MMOs began to mean "doing my own thing, whether on my own or grouped with strangers."

***

There's a certain amount of freedom to being on when nobody else that you know is. 

For example, if you're on a PvP server in WoW you can make a run for it through certain zones without worrying about whether some max level toon is going to come along and gank you.

Kind of like this, running as Horde
through Wetlands and Dun Morogh.
From tenor.com.

No matter how much you try to handwave it there's a significant amount of stress involved, and even in the off hours that's no guarantee that some toon won't come along and fuck you up just because. However, I discovered way back in 2009 that if you time that run from Arathi through to the Badlands just right, you won't see a soul on the road.

These past few weeks I've been channeling my younger self and have been spending more and more time on my alts, such as Linna 2.0 and Neve, getting them to max level and doing things that I used to do on Azshandra and Cardwyn in my pre-raid days: run Battlegrounds, quest, and queue for instances. 

I know the Wrath instances very well, having done them back in the day ad nauseum, so I'm comfortable queueing for those instances in what passes for an LFG system in Wrath Classic. I also made a point of doing that dungeon running when it's highly unlikely that I'll run into anybody I know from the franken guild on Atiesh-US; my status on the server as Deuce --messy and uncomfortable and all-- means that I try my hardest not to put myself out there where I could run into people I don't care to interact with. And that means leaving Deuce on the shelf when outside of raids while I get in touch with my past.

"Bolster my defenses! Hurry, curse you!"

I can imagine that you might be thinking "Hey, Atiesh-US is supposed to be a very large server. Why all the caution?" That's because I keep running into the same people while doing leveling dungeons on Atiesh. On Myzrael-US, which is a much smaller server, that's to be expected. But on Atiesh? Yeah, it's very much a thing.

Just like back in the day, when I ran dungeons at odd hours I kept seeing regulars in the automated LFD tool, despite being in a large battlegroup. 

***

This brings up yet another item that I discovered in TBC Classic and has seemingly carried over into Wrath Classic: people sprinted to max level and jumped straight into raiding, and once they --and their primary alts-- hit max level, dungeon running participation plummeted. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this development, and from conversations I've had with people in game it also seems that people are getting bored (or whatnot) and are unsubscribing and/or dropping from raid teams until the next phase hits.

If this sounds like a modern mentality of saying "I've done that already so I'll unsub until new content drops", yes it does. 

And with that revelation, I think I can now explain the sudden reappearance of the Joyous Journeys XP buff far sooner than people expected: to try to fight that yo-yo effect of people subbing and unsubbing.**

But I digress.

***

I've found a lot of relaxation and joy in just going with the flow and running some dungeons with people whom I've become acquainted with over the past few weeks. We're not guildies or anything, but we're people who know each others' abilities, and we reach out to each other if we've got a spot available. There's no pressure involved, and even if it doesn't work out as intended, we'll still have fun.

What Ingvar needs is some stylish gear,
that's all. I'm gonna miss these Brutal
Battlegear sets that our group was rocking.

The biggest part about these dungeon runs is that I truly do feel no pressure to perform. The expectations are different for me in these runs, because I know going in that I'm not going to have a lot of gear so I won't be rocking the charts or anything. And when a piece of blue gear drops that I can use, it's a bonus all around. 

I can hear my questing buddy already, saying that we want to just hang with you, not put any pressure or anything on you. The thing is, no matter what is said --and I'm sure it's meant by everybody I know who has told it to me-- I still put pressure on myself to perform. 

(There, I even put it in italics for emphasis.)

And no, once I've joined a raid team --or been a former member of a team-- I can't avoid the pressure. It's just part of me, because once unlocked it can't go back into Pandora's Box.

In these scenarios, however, nobody is trying to max out their gear and get those last BiS items before raiding. Nobody is trying to speed run their way through the instance, collect their daily badges, and log prior to the raid. If we get to the extra boss in time in the Culling of Stratholme Heroic dungeon, we get there. Otherwise, nobody sweats it out. 

The lack of defined purpose is key. Because we aren't there for a specifically defined metagame reason, these runs are enjoyable. That I am just an anonymous pugger from a leveling guild with hardly anybody left on the server (Neve) or a small friends guild in a large server (Linna 2.0), I can relax. The major raiding guilds all keep to themselves on Atiesh-US, and Myzrael-US is small enough that everybody has to band together to keep a pugging community alive. 

So I find that when I set aside my raiding life, placing it in a compartmentalized box, I've found my time spent being anonymous to be enjoyable.  

*The elementary school started at 8:30 AM, whereas the middle school began at 7:30. This was to accommodate the bus schedules. Like a lot of school districts in the US, ours had to deal with a lot of  voters who believed in the "lean and mean" style of school district financial management, so schools had to make do with as few busses as possible. That meant adjusting school start times to get the most out of as few busses as possible.

**And with Ulduar opening up on January 19th, Joyous Journeys' ending on the 16th seems very appropriate.