Nope. I can’t do it.

April 22, 2008 Tipa 24 comments

I can’t be a full time raider, perform my day job competently, be a professional blogger, play the wide variety of MMOs I need to play to do my job, participate in the two betas I am in (don’t ask), and also sleep. The past couple of weeks, sleep-debt has been killing me. Simple fact is, I need to be in bed 11PM each night. Staying up until 1, 2 or 3AM writing after raids is killing me.

The other writers warned me I wouldn’t be able to keep up a six night a week raiding schedule. I thought I could, but… well, I need to be awake when I write. I make stupid errors otherwise. So I’ll be talking to my guild leaders about cutting back my raiding obligation to two nights a week, or maybe it’s time to just go completely casual. I’ll never see my mythical epic, but the ordinary one is pretty sweet by itself… and there’s always pickup raiding.

Anyway, off to the dentist (yay).

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Written by stargrace about 2 years ago.

*hugs*
Written by Captain Angry about 2 years ago.

I’ll never “raid” again. Its really not worth it.
Written by Einhorn about 2 years ago.

I can’t help but to feel partially responsible for this!

/wrists
Written by Lucifrank about 2 years ago.

I’ve found that even “casual” raiding (2-3 weeknights) was a bit much for me and quickly began stepping on my toes too much professionally and personally. I agree with Captain Angry. It’s just not worth it after a certain point. The sense of teamwork and cooperation you get from smaller dungeon runs is replaced with monotony, social interaction and problem solving is replaced with impersonal grouping and following cookie cutter strategies, and that “second job” feeling slowly sinks in. The epic fail of EVERY MMORPG to date is their inability to make endgame as fulfilling as the rest of the game.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

Oh, I love raiding. I love *leading* raids, though I haven’t done it much lately. I love organizing things, getting all the strats, making the groups, getting things done… I used to run raids for my oldest guild, United Norrath Coalition, all the time, and I ran some planes and DoN raids for Crimson Eternity, in EQ1. In EQ2, I’ve been content to just be a follower, but I don’t love raiding any less. I consider myself a raider.

I just don’t have time for it.
Written by Mayadhros about 2 years ago.

I feel your pain. When I used to raid in WoW (Pre BC) I knew the pain of sleep dep.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

@Einhorn — no, Nostalgia the Guild doesn’t have anything to do with it. Becoming a writer did. Given the choice between raiding and writing — and it is a choice I have to make — it’s going to be writing. Raiding will never help me in real life, but writing most definitely will.
Written by Davic about 2 years ago.

Well I imagine if we ever manage to actually get to VP and take down the stuff for our epic then we will hit it every week. I think you could still get the mythical.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

Hey Dav.

I’ll talk with the guild leaders tonight, see what they think. Obviously I don’t want to deguild. I just need to sleep. Last night I was falling asleep all the time in SoH and that’s no way to be, it wasn’t even that late.
Written by Relmstein about 2 years ago.

Wow, are you raiding in EQ2 while trying to start a guild in EQ1? I could never find time to raid when I was balancing two different MMOs. Raiding seems designed to forced commitment from players especially if you are a class that is needed for certain encounters.

Anyways just wanted to tell you that I enjoy reading about your EQ1 encounters even though it looks like a lot has changed since Gates of Dischord.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

I hated GoD until we got to Uqua, Inktu’ta and Tacvi. Loved those zones.

The EQ1 guild is a casual, once a week grouping thing (though people have been logging in every day for alts and xp, and I think that’s great). Once it’s set up and going, it shouldn’t take all that much time. It’s raiding and writing that I can’t seem to balance. I have been trying to write before raids and immediately after raids and it just isn’t working out… plus it means I don’t get to enjoy EQ2! I am only there at raid time and I love grouping and doing instances as much as I like raiding.

I’m glad you’re liking the EQ1 stuff :) The game has changed a lot, and I’m glad to have the chance at another look at a game I was seriously burnt out on a year ago.
Written by Einhorn about 2 years ago.

Tipa, let’s start another-other-other guild in another game, and also play table-top D&D every third tuesday. Also we can learn a musical instrument together – something easy and quick like Violin!

Also, if you have any spare time, can you please help me PL several alts in several different games, and camp Stormfeather with me? Thanks! See you tonight.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

I was right there with you until you mentioned Stormfeather. No friendship is worth that.
Written by Malfi about 2 years ago.

@Einhorn HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Written by This Raiding Thing is Serious Business | Random Battle about 2 years ago.

[...] nights per week, often closer to five or six, for 3-5 hours at a time. While I’m not quite where Tipa is yet, it certainly makes my weekly schedule a bit more challenging. I’m pretty sure that [...]
Written by Relmstein about 2 years ago.

I actually have two college roommates who tag teamed camping stormfeather for about 40 hours straight I can’t even remember what item it gave you except I think it was haste buff oriented. I tried getting back into EQ when the classic servers first went live but I think some old school guilds basically powered level through the content and just kind of ruined the experience for most people. Plus they had changed a lot of things. I kept getting lost in freeport which I used to know like the back of my hand.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

Yeah, it was a pretty sweet item. You had to get a map piece from Lodizai, the bit from Stormfeather, mm I think something from a named cat in the area and something else. I never managed to complete it on my rogue; I had the Lodizai bit but I was unwilling to camp Stormfeather that long. I did do it for several hours stretched over a weekend but he didn’t happen to pop then. I was also unsure if I’d be able to kill it anyway :/ but it never did come to that.

If you want to try out a guild moving really slowly through content… :)
Written by Einhorn about 2 years ago.

It was for the Eyepatch of Plunder quest, and I completed it!

I camped out for 47 hours without sleep to get Stormfeather. It was most wise to save the Stormfeather and Lodizal parts for last because (at the time I did it) there was a Chinese Necro soloing Lodi with kiting. The first 20 hours I spent trying to communicate with the guy, then the next 10 I spent trying to ask him permission to loot a map piece of Lodizal he was destroying. He wasn’t letting them rot, he was looting them one at a time and destroying them.

He finally agreed, and my last 17 hours were spent cursing at the sudden flood of invisible white cats which had ruptured my door and burst into the room. I was clearly very sleep deprived, because I didn’t own a white cat, nor a flood of white cats, nor any cats. Also, at some point I saw my whole room as having purple walls (they are white). I really messed up my brain camping Stormfeather.

I decided I would turn my monitor towards my bed, put on headphones, turn off ambient noise (polar winds), and try to sleep with the volume turned up in hopes of being woken by the sound of feathery wings flapping. In the next 17 hours I tried to sleep, I was woken a total of 68 times by marauding cougars. I’d wake up to the sound of “MAAHHRRAARRR!!!” and have to leap out of bed to fight them off.

Daylight came, I groaned and stretched. It was time for breakfast, but first it was time to pee! I hadn’t left the computer in a very long time. When I returned I accidentally kicked the headphone jack out of the port – the volume was louder than usual for the headphone sleeping experiment….and my room filled with a deafening “WHAP..WHAP..WHAP..WHAP” noise.

My brain exploded! I was hearing…wing…flapping! I looked around in a fever! HE WAS HERE! HE HAD TO BE! He had spawned in the 15 second window created by my leaving to use the restroom! I bum-rushed him and slaughtered him with my trusty Windblade. The most satisfying kill of my entire EQ career. I celebrated, cheered, and then realized he dropped two map pieces exactly the way Lodizal did. I sold the other map fragment for 5K (huge at the time) via /shout.

Then I turned in all the pieces and slept for an unholy amount of time. It was forever to be known as my “Stormfeather Torpor”. One of the best and worst times of my entire EQ life.
Written by Rick about 2 years ago.

Definitely try to take time for sleep. I’ve seen studies saying that a prolonged lack of sleep has negative health effects. I can’t remember exactly what, I’m not a doctor, but I know that I go without proper sleep too often. I wonder how many of us are tempting fate by playing late (or writing late!) night after night and waking up exhausted the next day, and doing that month after month.

Not for nothin’, but I’m glad you’re picking writing over raiding. I enjoy your contribution to my gaming RSS feed :)
Written by Einhorn about 2 years ago.

If you don’t take time for proper sleep you could turn out like….LIKE ME!
Written by Wydow about 2 years ago.

*hugs Tipa* It sounds like you have way too much on your plate, so I think you have made the write decision to cut back on raiding, 6 nights of raiding a week is a big demand.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

And, I’ve caught up on my writing, am playing the betas I am supposed to review, it’s great!!!
Written by Taymar about 2 years ago.

It definitely sounds like you are trying to take on too much all at once – even though it’s what you love.

I will say that it’s only your presence on Massively that keeps me there – getting very tired of the “WoW is the greatest game, now let’s discuss X” attitude of a lot of the articles.
Written by Tipa about 2 years ago.

I do tend to focus on games that aren’t WoW because, I agree, that game is hardly starved for coverage. But people write about the games they enjoy, and for most people, that’s WoW. Those of us who are not current WoW players get a little drowned out, but I expect it to lose some of its glamor with the new games coming out.

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