L8raid has changed a lot since Beros was writing the column for us. First off, it's not even a raiding social experiment anymore. When Wrath of the Lich King trod all over our perfectly peaceful game, the group's leaders decided to get more formal and form a guild. This is a big step, considering the l8raid group was originally a group of friends running heroic Burning Crusade instances. That group expanded to try their hand at Karazhan, and eventually the 25-man content that expansion had to offer.
I joined the l8raid group about a year ago. At the time they were running Tempest Keep, giving Void Reaver and Little Miss Bamfs-a-Lot a run for their money. I had heard about the group six months before when I left my last raiding guild (work made the raid times impossible for a West Coast gal on an East Coast server), but didn't have the guts to join the channel until about March. I joined the raid bringing in my undergeared underplayed priest and contributed my whopping 1400 Healing to the raid. I was hooked ever since.
What made l8raid so very different from my previous raiding experience was the personalities. These people were pulling together an organized pug three nights a week and succeeding. Just the thought of it fascinated me. Therefore, when the group that slaughtered Illidan in one week, the group that was plowing successfully through Mount Hyjal decided to form a guild, I jumped on in. Here's my chance to be a core member of the group finally, I said to myself.
It was the growing pains that eventually got us in the end. The original idea of l8raid, the small group of friends banding together to run instances, doesn't always translate well to guild life, especially when the rest of the guild feels a bit left out by virtue of not being there when it all began. The raid divided into two groups, one made up mostly of the original l8raid core, now turned guild officers. They were called the Bear group, because they had set themselves the mammoth task of getting a set of Zul'Aman Amani War Bears.
Exclusive groups like these always lead to bad blood, and this was as exclusive as you can get. You pretty much had to be raiding with the group for four years to be part of the team, so we formed our own animal-named 10-man group, the Badger group. Badger group was a misfit collection of whomever wanted to raid Zul'Aman but couldn't get into the Bear Group. By nature misfits are roudy, and sarcastic, and even moody. But the group worked despite all that. They rose above and managed to create something out of nothing.
What started as a healthy bit of competition turned into resentment on both teams, Bear versus Badger. Bear didn't like that Badger were feeling superior for accomplishing things Bear couldn't, and Badger was still licking their wounds from being excluded from the ZA runs. This all poured into Naxxramas, where each team did their own thing, conquered bosses in their own way, and Badger team became as tight-knit as the original Bear 10-man was.
In a guild where 25-man content is the focus, having two competing teams come together is a tricky business. The people within them obviously prefer to work with those they know, and so the guild leaders decided now that we were pressing into Ulduar it was time to break up the teams and were suddenly surprised at the vehement resistence they received to the idea. I stepped in to explain, because I had been sitting by frustrated for months at the cool kids table mentality that was running the guild.
We forget when we play games with other people that we are building a society of our own, albeit a virtual one. When we forget this, we sometimes get to the point where we think "it's just a game" but it's not. Raiding is a sacrifice of time and virtual resources that could be spent elsewhere. Each person that signs up for a raid had given up something -- be it karaoke night or watching Heroes when it airs. They sacrifice these things because there is nothing like being part of a cohesive team, working, laughing, and triumphing together for a common purpose. It's the cohesion that's the hard part.
[image via Cyberklaw]
