Return to Ragefire Chasm

I did two full runs of Ragefire Chasm this weekend. The first one was a boost, as a nice guildie offered to quickly run a bunch of new players and alts through the instance. As I've explained in the past, I tend to feel ambivalent about boosts, but in this case it was too good an opportunity to pass up, as my warlock was almost over-levelled for the dungeon anyway, and I was glad to just get the quests out of her log.

The next day however, I was fishing in the Barrens when I spotted some actual chatter in LookingForGroup about people wanting to do RFC on characters at the right level. Both a healer and a dps were involved in the conversation, so my thoughts immediately went to my little warrior, who was a few levels below the warlock - I could get out her sword and board and be the tank to complete the trinity! So I relogged, and not much later we were off.

The run itself was nice but unremarkable. We kept a good pace, nobody died and everyone was friendly. However, what made it stand out for me was that this was in fact my very first proper pug dungeon on Horde since since I started playing Classic era. I'd done a few on Alliance side before, but on Horde side with its much lower population, my dungeon runs had all been initiated and mostly comprised of fellow guildies, simply because the LFG channel was dead.

So this has been another lovely milestone for me, because while I obviously enjoy playing with my guildies, I don't want the world to feel like it just exists for my guild; I want to be part of something bigger, and encountering other players "out in the wild" is an important part of that.

Despite the recent virality of Classic era, population growth in our little neck of the woods has been slow, probably because playing Horde on a PvE server seems to be the least popular "combo" to pick for whatever reason (it's the same on the US servers). However, this past week it's really been picking up and giving me a lot of hope.

I saw it today while raiding Molten Core too. In the past, it hasn't been unusual for a lone leveller to pipe up with a dungeon request during a raid and get no response at all, until eventually a raider would reply that sorry, most of us were busy in a raid. But today I saw grouping requests get answered by other levellers even during the raid, and it just warmed my heart. It also makes me want to play my own alts some more to get in on some of that levelling and dungeoneering action. I'm always worried about jinxing things by being too optimistic, but it certainly looks like there are good times ahead right now.