Loosely controlled chaos, more meetings

Last night after work we had another running club related meeting, this time about our Thanksgiving race which may be the largest event of the year.  It feels like the planning for this years event has been slacking because last year, the first year of the event, we started early to mid-summer working on it.  As usual I emerged from the meeting with a list of to do’s.

Last night when I got home I again had an extended WoW session completing the second to last part of the end game raid, leaving only the final boss to go.  These encounters are total chaos, especially for me since I go into them with no prior knowledge of how the fights are supposed to go.  For the most part I just try to follow the lead of others, don’t stand in poop and  stay alive.  The boss fights can take a very long time,  the one last night was approaching 15 minutes.  The thing is if the group wipes (dies) before defeating the boss your reward is to go back and do it all over again from the beginning.  Two of the bosses were like that, taking two attempts to kill.

Having 25 players, especially 25 strangers trying to coordinate their efforts leads to conflict as you can imagine.  The more hardcore players that have already done these fights dozens of times have very little patience for those of us that have not.  When the group dies on a boss it instantly leads to waves of rage quitting, verbal chastising and other typical immature internet behavior.  However I am well versed in this behavior and for the most part ignore it unless it gets out of hand.

While I was waiting for the group to form to do the raid I was running around another area of the virtual world trying to work on some solo quests, minding my own business.  Unfortunately the area I was doing this in had a very large collection of opposing faction horde players.  On my server the horde to alliance faction ratio is terribly out of whack. There are many more of them than us so in most situations alliance characters such as myself are outnumbered.  On top of that, compared to serious players of the game, my character is a 98 pound weakling.

Well despite being no challenge for enemy horde players, they insisted on attacking and killing me literally dozens of time as I was trying to get stuff done.  Of course I tried to fight back best I could but having two or three well geared horde players on me at once meant I was dead in a matter of seconds.  Obviously this angers and frustrates me but I just rolled with it, trying to find more remote areas where I was not as easily spotted by these horde players that were so interested in unfair fights.  Even with those frustrations I am still enjoying traveling back into my virtual second home for awhile.  It’s a good disconnect from some of the stresses that roll up on me in my daily grind.

Speaking of grind, yesterday I had a huge serving of running club related things to attend to.  It looks like today I am going back for seconds, followed by our only mid-week, evening race of the year tomorrow.