40 People Walk into a Lair

I've been raiding in MMOs in one form or another for close to thirteen years now (yikes), so I think I've got a pretty good idea about my preferences in regards to this specific activity. One conclusion I came to after a while was that as a general rule, I find bigger group sizes more fun. They have their issues of course (more likely to cause lag, people talking over each other a lot etc.) but there's just something more... epic-feeling about a large group of people storming an enemy stronghold together.

That said, Classic's 40-mans have still been a step up for me, as previously the biggest raid size that I'd ever been a part of was 25 people. That's 60% more players than I had to deal with previously!

And I really quite like it. 40 characters make for a proper little army that requires organisation into multiple smaller sub-groups, which makes for some interesting interactions. For example I'm but one of five "core" hunters in the guild, and it feels like we're our own tight-knit little group within the larger whole.

There's also a unique sort of social energy to a large and organised, yet fun-focused raid. It oddly reminds me of the dynamics of a party in real life actually, only without the physical awkwardness sometimes associated with initiating or extracting yourself from conversations (it's easy enough to choose whether you want to address the whole raid, others of your class, people near you, or just one specific individual by choosing the right channel of communication), and instead of everyone getting drunk by the end of the night, the ultimate goal is to smash some dragons.

I don't recall ever having been a huge fan of parties in real life, but I quite like this more selectively distanced and organised version. That said, I'm still an introvert at the end of the day and I can't deny that therefore all this socialising is also taking a toll on me and leaving me quite tired at the end of the night. The fact that I'm still relatively new to all the raids and have to pay close attention to every mechanic instead of being able to auto-pilot through a lot of them probably doesn't help either.

So I spend my raid nights laughing at jokes on Discord, exchanging whispers, emotes and random gifts of useless items with various raid members until we're done slaying dragons, but then I'm properly knackered. I can only hope that I'll become a bit more resilient against this over time, because as tired as these nights leave me, I still love the vibe.

It also makes me feel a little sad actually to think of the downscaling in raid sizes that will come with Burning Crusade. I'm sure the poor officers struggling to fill a raid with 40 people every week (the runs are actually rarely full from my experience so far) will welcome the logistical pressure easing up a bit, but it will also force those sub-groups of "the hunters" etc. to shrink and just generally diminish the experience a little bit.