As someone who exclusively does LFR, I know there are people who will say that LFR is not “real raiding.” Hence, why I’ve chosen the title. I wanted to give those raiders their little entitlement by switching my category as a player. But what I want to do is explain why I do not raid.
A friend in my guild asked whether or I would not join a raiding guild. I had a few reasons. First is that, despite having more free time right now, the server is an Oceanic one so the schedule will differ. My sleep schedule is pretty off and can match any schedule, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to commit to it. Second, I did try raiding for a bit. I did not enjoy the experience. Perhaps, it was through my old, crappy computer that caused me some grief, but I feel with the way the game is designed, raiding just isn’t my thing.
The way I see it is that you do have to commit a certain level of effort and time into raiding. Part of that involves reading up on fights, watching videos, etc. Even now, I still do that level of effort. Now, the part that I tend to hate is the idea of wiping over and over. There’s something that’s entirely wrong about that. In fact, I dislike the idea that a game somewhat requires one to watch videos and read about an encounter in order to execute it. It doesn’t feel like a game anymore. It feels like reading Cliff Notes when you write a book report or are quizzed for an AP test. That’s just wrong to me.
You might ask, well you seem to put about the right amount of effort into improving your game play. In fact, you might even say that I might put too much effort for a so-called “casual gamer” to put into this game by doing some of my homework.
Perhaps, the real reason I dislike the idea of “real raiding” is that I’m not much of a team player admittedly. In fact, I hate following orders. That’s a personality quirk of mine. I become somewhat resentful about being told what to do. Worse yet, if I mess up and someone scolds me, that simply discourages me. I can tolerate all this, but for me it’s over a game.
Still that can occur in anything you group in. Sure, that is true. For me it feels that the stakes can be higher in some cases. I think that it’s better to raid with friends as opposed to anonymous people. However, it’s easy to get sensitive in certain situations and shoot from the hip unnecessarily. And there’s many opportunities in raiding where this can happen. In short, you can easily lose friends if you have a short fuse (and I can definitely have a short fuse and lack patience).
So when I look at raiding and the little experience I had with it, I felt that it just wasn’t worth the overall effort. The cons just far outweigh the pros. I want to have fun in a game and not worry about too many little details. If I’m required to put that much effort in, I’d better get something out of it.