Umbral Sect > Illidan

One of the games that I am really into is World of Warcraft. Even though I'm taking an extened hiatus from it, I still keep myself up to date on the happenings of WoW. Anyways, so I visit my guild website (Umbral Sect of Gorgonnash) this morning after about a week of not checking up on them(due to being somewhere in the Smoky Mountains for spring break) and lo and behold, I find that they downed Illidan.

Now, who cares? After all, Black Temple has been out for several months and many many many other guilds out there have laid waste to everything that moves inside BT. However, Umbral Sect finishing all of the current raid content for WoW brings to mind a very interesting point: how a band of (relative) strangers can come together and surmount near impossible odds.

Consider what it means to complete the entire raid content in WoW (or any other MMO for that matter). A group of forty (pre-Burning Crusade) or twenty-five (post-Burning Crusade) players that have probably never met each other in real life must get together online and coordinate with each other in order to kill really big and nasty things. While this may not sound all that hard, I assure you, it is much easier to get a highschool football team to reenact every scene in High School Musical. Every single member of the raid must know his/her role (what to do, when to do it, where to move, where to stand, etc.) for that specific fight. One single mistake, one tiny accident, one lag spike . . . that's all it takes to wipe the whole raid and force everyone to start the fight over.

Another point to consider is the sheer amount of hours put into this. With 10 million active subscribers, and assuming everyone plays for only four hours a week (this would be a uber conservative estimate), a total of 2,080,000,000 hours would be expended (that's 86,666,666.667 days or 237,442.922 years) per year to grinding levels, farming mats, raiding, PvP'ing, etc. Just imagine everything that can be accomplished in this world if all of that playing time was applied towards something productive . . . on the other hand, all work and no play is a very bad thing ;)

But I digress . . . anyways, grats Umbral Sect!!