Tales from 2 AM
by Matthew Rossi 
Dec 19th 2007 at 2:00PM
The hardest thing about playing WoW during the night shift is watching your standards for success drop as people who aren't as demented or as sleep-deprived as I am realize they have to do things like sleep and get up in the morning. Since I know I won't be able to sleep I'm fairly cavalier about it, but as the night transforms into early morning people go from let's clear Heroic Arcatraz to let's try one more time to kill this annoying boss and call it a night. That's right, Zereketh, you know who you are. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, so it can be very frustrating for me to tank a boss over and over again and see the DPS dying from stuff I can't do much about, like the Void Zones he keeps spawning right under the clothies' feet, especially when you get the boss to 1% six times in one night.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
I'm sure we all like to do well. And it can be horribly frustrating to bog down in an instance you've cleared flawlessly before: I still don't know why I had the run I like to call the 'Shattering Halls' the day after tanking the entire instance without a single death. The group composition wasn't that different, the players seemed fairly competent, so what magic change caused us to die over and over again? Was it just the magic of a run that lasted till 3 am? (If you want to call it magic, I guess.) I know that tempers fray and attention gets harder to maintain as you get tired, so that could be part of the reason why the priest faked a disconnect. I still find it hard to understand.
Still, I enjoy playing late, and I've had as many good runs as bad in the wee hours, although to be fair I've had less runs period that early. There's just not so many people online at 2 am, sometimes you have to just go to Zul'Aman with six paladins. Yes, I actually did that. No, we didn't do well. Hey, it was four in the morning, I wasn't feeling picky.
Got any stories from the wee hours?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Social Conventions, Odds and ends
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Mr. Applebutter Dec 19th 2007 2:11PM
One of my good buddies in my guild is Australian. I'm on US Eastern time. Over the summer I had graduated college and was taking the summer to job hunt and would play WoW wayyyyy too much. I used to run heroics with him until 8am my time. I had to ween myself off WoW once I accepted a job offer to get my sleep schedule back on track.
Hokuto Dec 19th 2007 2:14PM
The reason is pretty simple: Zereketh does magic damage, 6-pulls at SH do melee damage.
It's easier to tank 6 mobs at once than getting around 2k shadowbolts of 3k voids.
Nyght Dec 19th 2007 2:15PM
Last night about 2am the late night dementia got me bad! I had just finished a daily cooking quest and too my surprise I got my much anticipated Stormchops recipe! I was so excited to give it a try. An alt was already in Ironforge so I logged on the alt, went to the AH and bought all the Lightning Eels and Clefthoof meat. I mailed it to my main(the cook with the new recipe) and after I sent it, much to my horror, I realized I sent it to a misspelled version of my character. Oh Noooooo what was I thinking. I send stuff between alts all the time. I attribute the blunder to "Late Night Dementia" I'll have to wait another day to try out the Stormchops.
William Dec 19th 2007 2:30PM
I don't know if this word accurately portrays my sympathy, but here goes nothing: bummer.
And one more word for a secondary: Hahahahaa!!!!
Chris Anthony Dec 19th 2007 3:37PM
This is why I make it a practice to add all of my alts to each character's Friends list. With auto-complete, misspelling is a thing of the past.
(Guildies, on the other hand, I have worse luck with, especially when they have short names that aren't worth auto-completing. I once found a nice tanking chestpiece underpriced on the auction house, bought it, and sent it to a warrior friend named Oin - only to discover, to my horror, that I'd accidentally moved my fingers one key over and sent the chest to "Pom"...)
Coherent Dec 19th 2007 2:15PM
You'd be risking team burnout if it wasn't a PUG. Six tries is way more than you should need to realize that it isn't going to happen, heh.
Rob Dec 19th 2007 2:26PM
A few times the guild has been running Kara until 4am my time. After about 1am people start to get sloppy. After about 2:30 or 3 its a miracle people are still awake. So my new Kara cut off time for myself is 1am. If people want to wipe on trash until 4am that's not my problem. To me it's a pretty strong correlation between time of night and performance, we're just not at our best after 2am (my guildies). But last night I went to sleep at 1am, they cleared trash until 3am or whatever, and a few were still online when i got up to do dailies at 8am. Pretty insane.
Freelier Dec 19th 2007 2:28PM
Hey, Nyght, you can add the misspelled name to your ignore list and the mail will come back.
William Dec 19th 2007 2:32PM
Thank you SOOOO Much for posting that. I KNOW it'll come in handy someday. Poor Nyght.
Zumwalah Dec 19th 2007 2:29PM
my guilds raiding times are 10pm-2am i have only once or twice seen issues with this which usually are "sry i fell asleep" other then that we seem to get better if anything as the night goes on.
Theserene Dec 19th 2007 4:55PM
Our guild does not do instances/raids past 1am. In fact we don't raid weeknights either on account of most of us having full time jobs.
You will however find us online past 1am on Friday and Saturday nights. Usually doing PvP or grinding though, not anything that requires concentration :)
kdeselms Dec 19th 2007 2:52PM
I actually quit raiding because of people who didn't know when to stop. There's a point you reach where you realize that either the raid is undergeared for the encounter, or the raid composition isn't ideal...and you say, "Okay, enough's enough...we'll try it later." Some people don't know when to fold up the tents and walk away. They usually end up being raid leaders.
Salty Dec 19th 2007 3:10PM
Living on the east coast on a realm whose time is one hour behind mine, in a guild of predominately west-coasters and Canadianese folks, I find there are more than enough solid folks around me to do a great run in the “late night.” The only problem is that I wind up being the weakest link and bringing myself to ruin, often falling asleep at the helm. Indeed we finished the instance and did well, but it’s 2am server time, 10 or 11pm their time and 3am my time. Inevitably I see “it’s still early, who’s up for another run?” as my consciousness waxes and wanes and I begin to shift my weight between butt-cheeks and alternatively rest either eye. It’s tempting to continue on with a group that can easily AOE-pull heroic shattered halls (how often does that happen!?), but there’s something suddenly sobering about the realization that I may be facing 3 hours of sleep followed by 9 hours at work reeling from virtual victory yet suffering physical exhaustion.
Of course, before I joined this guild, I was a hardened PUG mercenary and would often sacrifice sleep and sanity for one last chance at that all-important additional piece of my heroic hunting set. Indeed, I won those pieces over time, but all-too-often it was 5 am when we rolled empty-handed out of Sethekk Halls into the barren city of Shattrath. One thing that I found to my wonder was that there were far fewer petty, immature and transient players late in the night. The casuals have long since foregone ambition for the all-important considerations of reality, the children have been unwillingly ushered off to bed by responsible parents, and the otherwise less obsessive players have gone on to farming or late night bank grooming.
While I wouldn’t say that the definite quality of players improves in the aging night (and certainly not the selection), I would say that the hunger and desire of those players has grown and they will take many matters much more seriously and tackle them with greater care when precious minutes of sleep are weighed against opportunity, ultimately in favor of ambition. I attained many of those pieces in our group’s darkest hour, at the brink of failure and after many replacements of fallen allies. I still flinch a little as I slowly replace them all in the brighter evenings of my newfound raiding days with relative ease. And to this day, I still hang on to some of those pieces, though they will never prove superior under any combination of my equipment than what I have gained since… for they are stained with many hours of lost sleep and carry the rank stench of struggling PUGs which has grown sweeter as those experiences continue to prove my mastery over the petty squabbles among the raiding class, long removed from the grimey work of personally forging success from a band of alien strangers in the wee hours.
webrunner Dec 19th 2007 3:10PM
I'm new to Outland, (played pre-BC and recently restarted) and run ramps three times. 30 gold in repair fees, and I still haven't cleared the instance. I'm decked out purple, everyone i've played with has been competent, but we keep having trouble, even the first boss. I just hope people will be geared better once I get to Furnace.
oshin Dec 19th 2007 3:30PM
Levelling an epiced out 60 is a pain, the small advantage you gain over green geared people is lost to the fact every time a mob hits you it costs 1s and every time you die you pay 2g. You also get zero gain from most of the green items, which you vendor to cover repair bills.
That being said, ramps should be doable by somebody who got some outland gear from hellfire.
webrunner Dec 19th 2007 4:11PM
A lot of people I see on ramps have a lot of greens.. and I think there are some classes that benefit from having gone to MC more than others... especially since, as a paladin, I now have a reasonable +damage bonus from the +healing on Lawbringer which makes taking down all of those hellfire demons a snap.
Matt Dec 19th 2007 3:24PM
Zereketh is a bastard. My guild is working on T5 content and that shmuck still ruins us sometimes.
Joran Dec 19th 2007 3:38PM
I just completed a 12:30 AM to 3:45 AM Karazhan run. Back in the day, we used to clear Karazhan in 2 days. We'd clear one increment up to Aran to get the port, then clear the top tier bosses another day and we'd stop at a reasonable time like 1 AM. Now that we substantially outgear Karazhan, we feel compelled to clear it in one day.
Unfortunately, most of the people in this run either don't have day jobs (grad students) or live at least 1 time zone removed from me, so they wanted to keep going. I shouldn't have done it but we already lost one person to sleep and I felt if I quit, I'd be letting down 8 other people.
P.S. We had 5 paladins for Zul'Aman once. It actually wasn't that bad; 2 protection paladins for tanking, 2 for holy paladins for healing, and 1 retribution paladin for DPS. I ended up having Blessings of Kings, Might, Light, Salvation, and I may have had Wisdom (as a warrior)
Matthew Rossi Dec 19th 2007 4:17PM
Yes, but you had ten. I had me and six paladins.
We were doomed, but it was fun to watch how LONG it took for us to wipe on things.
Alchemistmerlin Dec 19th 2007 3:38PM
My favorite time to be on is 5 am to 6 am Monday Night/Tuesday Morning when the cities are empty, the sun is just glinting above the horizon over stormwind, and the server is counting down to daily maintenance.
There are so many things you can do during this time: Find some other people and panic because the "world is coming to an end!"
Or do a Schrodinger's Cow experiment, where you take a tauren and leap from a point of thunderbluff that you aren't totally sure will kill you, RIGHT before server shut down. Until you log in and find out, the Tauren is both dead and alive at the same time.