Before I created Syzygy, I only raid led the duration of one raid: Hellfire Citadel (or HFC). That one raid was an especially long one though, because it was the last raid before the new expansion came out, where everyone would get to increase their maximum level from 100 to 110, and a there would be new areas to explore, new things to do. As such, HFC lasted for over a year. This was a year when I steadily grew as both a raider and a raid leader. In a sense, it culminated when the PUG I led killed the last boss of the raid on the highest difficulty level. After this happened, my next step was to move up from leading PUGs, to forming my own guild.

9 min video of when we killed the last boss on mythic in my PUG

When it all began though, when I started raid leading, my goal was simply to put myself in a spot where I would be able to raid at a higher level quickly, and to be able to raid a lot, unconstrained by the raid sessions of my guild DH. Continue reading →

I had no thoughts of raid leading when I joined Dark Harvest. It was more important to me at the time to improve as a player. I still considered myself a noob, and in actuality I was: I didn’t really know what to expect. When I was in DI, I essentially entered in the middle of their progression, when they’d already done 9 bosses. With DH, I was going to experience progression from the very beginning: right from when the new raid becomes available for the whole world. The new raid was called Highmaul, and had 7 bosses.

By now, the four raid difficulties had been renamed and overhauled to be LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic, with both normal and heroic allowing for a ‘flexible’ situation of 10 to 30 players, and mythic only available for 20 players. This meant what used to be heroic guilds were now called mythic guilds, and instead of either going for a 10 or 25 player situation, all high end guilds needed to have 20 players. This was decently easy for a guild that was previously 25-player to adjust to, but was very difficult for many 10-player guilds to adjust to. I was only aware of the fact that it was hard to find another 10 good players, at the time. Later I also realized a big part of the difficulty was having the leadership transition from only needing to manage a bit over 10 people, to now needing to manage more than 20 people.  Continue reading →

There are 4 levels of difficulty in WoW raiding. At the time I started raiding, they were called Looking for Raid (LFR), Flexible (Flex), Normal, Heroic, in order of increasing difficulty. Each raid often had about ten bosses, and the goal in no matter which difficulty was to ‘kill’ them all and gather the loot that they would drop, which usually was gear that allowed you to be stronger, to eventually enter higher difficulties of raiding. The first time you kill a boss on any given difficulty, each week, you are able to loot it. Since the ability to loot bosses in raids resets each week, I would learn in the future that each week is called a ‘reset’. For those of us in Asia, the actual moment of the reset happens Tuesday night, so each new ‘reset’ started on Wednesday. Eventually, I even stopped thinking of a week as a ‘week’, I instead scheduled my time around ‘resets’, as in, “my dentist appointment is on day 1 of the next reset”. In layman terms, my hypothetical dentist appointment would’ve been on Wednesday. Incidentally, ‘hypothetical’ here is a literal term: I didn’t go to a dentist a single time during my gaming career. Ever notice that when you get drawn into a passion or a career, the things that treat you best are the ones most easily neglected? My teeth have always been good to me, so I was as likely to schedule a dentist appointment as I was to schedule a flight to the moon. My muscles, however, have always been high maintenance, so every month or so I’d remind myself to schedule workout times, and sometimes I’d even follow through. Continue reading →

I started playing WoW the fall of 2012, a good six years ago. For the first year I played, I spent maybe an hour a week leveling my character. It took me an entire year to level that one character up to max level (at the time, level 90). To put that into perspective, if a bit of real effort is put in, most gamers could probably do that in a few days. I also only leveled with a couple of real life friends, that played just as rarely as I. For the most part we would do some questing that doesn’t require players to be in a group. Sometimes, though, we would go into Dungeons, and that required a group of 5 people. However, WoW offers a way to randomly group up with people, and often you join a few people you don’t know, do the content, then leave the group never to see them or even remember them again. The content of Dungeons while leveling is easy enough that someone like me who didn’t understand what I was doing could get through them no problem. As such, even though it ‘required’ 5 people, there was no need to coordinate anything amongst the group, no need to communicate, no need to even perform. What I remember of it is always going to where a bunch of flashy things were happening (the mobs we needed to kill were usually there), and randomly pressing buttons that should allow me to hit stuff. Sometimes I wouldn’t even target anything and would be hitting nothing, and I didn’t even realize. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything about the content that required thinking, you could do whatever and just accidentally finish it. Essentially, it felt like a mindless solo game that you could do at the same time with friends if you wanted, like Candy Crush with Friends or something. What constituted the ultimate fun in the game was having my character and my friend’s dress up in sexy Christmas outfits and take screenshots.

I was a ‘gamer girl’ in name only. That first year was a time I hovered in a weird in-between zone, where I thought of myself as a ‘gamer girl’, telling myself I now fit that nerdy yet cool cachet, but I didn’t even realize I barely dipped my toes in the gaming world. It was the only time in my gaming career that I took pride in the term ‘gamer girl’, for the appearance of uniqueness it lent me (“you’re a gamer girl? Wow…. can I have your number and take you to dinner?”), instead of taking pride in myself for what I was really doing. Continue reading →

I’m fully aware that most of the world views the time gamers are drawn into a game as wasted time, like time spent by an opium addict semi-passed out on a cot in an opium den. People, in embarrassment, hide the fact that their family members are taken by this gaming addiction, knowing that these family members contribute nothing to society, make little to no money, and only spending time eating chips and losing social skills. Most gamers I’ve met online never admit to their colleagues that they game in this way (Candy Crush is acceptable, but playing an online game like World of Warcraft or League of Legends is ever so slightly shameful). Continue reading →

Yesterday was my last day in WoW for awhile at least. I’ve told everyone I’m taking a break, but in truth I don’t know if I will go back. I’ve gone through so many lows, and even more lows, that for the most part it has overshadowed all the highs. I would say I’ve been burnt out for maybe 1.5 years (Syzygy has only existed for 2 years), and for maybe the past year I’ve been dying to just let go, to dump all responsibilities and not need to deal with anything anymore. I literally couldn’t live with myself if I actually did that though, so I’ve been holding on, feeling like an ant does grasping at the edge of a twig while a river torrents by, whirling it around. Continue reading →