Monday, March 7, 2011

Traveling and the right number

This is my third week of traveling for a project in Columbia, Maryland. It's been exhausting getting used to a travel schedule again, and being on the road from Monday to Thursday. But as I previously predicted, I find myself blogging more though I am definitely playing less.

The other tough part of traveling has been that I fly back late on Thursday nights, which is one of our two regular raid nights. Because of that we've had to reschedule for the last two weeks, which I feel really bad about. Thus when I was told last week to book travel to come back out here next week as well, I told them ok, but that I would have to get on the early 5:30 pm flight out of BWI because I "had a thing". "A thing" being a raid. Hee hee.

Traveling makes the weekends go by really fast. I spent most of Saturday dealing with my internet provider because my latency has been horrible the last 10 days or so. And let's just say doing Omnitron with red latency, lagging about 3 times for about 8 seconds each is not fun. I was so nervous that I would be the one targeted by an ooze just when I was lagging.

Fortunately my connection did get fixed, which Comcast blamed to inappropriate splitters being used at my junction box. Um hello... you guys put in that splitter when I moved in! Anyways, I had to then test whether my connection issues were really solved. And how did I do that? Running Isle of Conquest and running to docks. I used to always always lag or DC there with all the aoe. I'd pop a tranquility, and it was over for me. So it was amazing actually being able to heal successfully at docks!

In other weekend news my team, the Carolina men's basketball team, beat Duke to clinch the ACC regular season title. So sweet, so f'in sweet. Now here is an interesting note about this team. Since last summer, the team has lost 4 members. Three guys left the team by having their daddies tell Coach Williams they were leaving (way to stand up as an adult for your decisions boys). One guy was kicked off after several drug violations.

Anyways, the reason I mention this is because I think our basketball team last year had too many players. While individually we had some excellent players, we were trying to give too many guys play time and the constant shuffling around of different makeups was not good. The team had no chemistry. Fast forward to this year, and while we are probably a leaner basketball team than Carolina often fields, the chemistry is amazing. Our new point guard knows where his team members are going to be even before they do.

The corollary here to raiding? Well, Jess and I have talked about how raiding does feel like we are on a sports team. And I think our guild has finally found the perfect number for our team. I'm so excited that after 3 months of recruiting, we are at a really good place right now. And yes, I know that you're always recruiting and I'm sure more people will be out as spring and summer rolls around, but for now we are not actively recruiting! Hooray!

Right now we have 11 raiders within the guild, with a friend or two outside the guild to fill in from time to time. And within the 11 guildies, there are 3 toons who can tank and 4 toons who can heal, which is the perfect number for us. To this point, we luckily haven't had to sit anyone for a raid yet. I think as we continue to raid together, this new crew will continue to build team chemistry, and hopefully we'll soon all be able to read each other or know where someone is going to be.

I'm curious though, for those of you in 10 man raiding guilds, how many raiders is the right number for you?

7 comments:

  1. We're a similar guild in stature, and your numbers sound just right! Having those non-guildie friends who are essentially trusted raid members is a must. We have 3-4 non-guildies who regularly run with us as well, who are in social guilds, or private guilds with their spouse, or etc. And being small, it's really nice to have some guildies with multiple raid-ready characters, so we can account for various roles. We do this as well. :D

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  2. @Rades: Mmmm. Yeah our non-guildie friends have come up huge for us from time to time. Its hard though because then the subsequent week if we are full within the guild, they can't raid, then they aren't learning the new bosses.

    Last couple of times we've used non-guildie friends, it was a bit of a last minute scramble though, which was unfortunate. But I guess I'd rather deal with the stress of scrambling some times than having to sit a guildie from a raid. How often do you guys end up sitting someone?

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  3. We are a few guildies fewer than you, so...never! Haha. But we could use 1-2 more. We usually pug 2-3 people, so an extra guildie or 2 would really help. I think we've had a full guild 10 exactly once so far in Cata.

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  4. This means I can retire now, right?

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  5. @Nico: Oh hell, no! You better believe we're missing you Nico!

    Are you going to be back this summer? I hope you're doing well. <3

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  6. I will be back later this summer, though when I cannot say. Things have been... interesting. I'll tell you all about it when I get back.

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  7. Some days it feels like we have exactly 10 raiders for our ten mans, but recently we have had something like 15 raiders for our 10 mans. We've been 40/25 man raid guild through each expansion and lost a lot of people at the end of LK, which sucks that we only get 10 now. :|

    We need to work on a more effective rotation method for 10 mans...and recruit more tanks. We have 3 tanks, but somehow we were tankless last week.

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