Project Lore

During this week's raid, an odd thing happened.  Something that has never happened in my entire MMOG career.  The event was shocking enough to leave me speechless.  Literally.  In the middle of our run through the Military Wing of Naxxramas, the Ventrilo server kicked the bucket. For those of you who may not know, Ventrilo is a popular voice chat application that many players and guilds utilize for communicating while playing WoW, among other games. Once the raid realized that the issue was guild-wide rather than personal, the chiding set in. "Looks like someone forgot to pay the bill." "The economy is so bad that even the Ventrilo hosting companies are laying people off!" "This guild can't kill Sarth + 3D or even keep their Ventrilo up?!  I am outta here," followed by a joke /gquit. The server went down during the early trash of our second wing of the night.  After a slight pause to let the Warlock admin reboot the box, we moved on.  We were at pre-Instructor Razuvious trash, so no worries.  Who wipes on trash, right?  I don't know if it was the distraction, the need to type again or random chance, but we nearly had our first - and what would have been our only - wipe on the second to last pack of Death Knight Cavaliers.  The raid pulled out of the lengthy skirmish with a healer standing and a few DPS.  Thankfully, things shaped up after that. Once the initial excitement and near wipes dissipated, an unusual calm set in.  Macros were patched together in haste for boss fights, tanking and stun rotations were set way in advance to compensate for the inability to voice our directions (Yes, I know WoW has built-in voice support now, but I don't know a soul who uses it).  The adaptations allowed us to continue on for the night, but holy crap was it an entirely different experience. I and many other guildies never realized how boring a raid would be without the pointless banter.  No more mom/girlfriend jokes to distract us during trash.  No more lore quips about Thaddius and how he is composed of women and children.  And political/religious chat?  Who the hell would want to type all of that stuff out?  None of my guildies, that's for sure.  Normally the GM has trouble shutting people up, but Ventrilo goes down and even text-based conversation drops to a minimum.  Damn, I should have done /tumbleweed.  I am sure that would have got a few laughs. Have you ever had to suffer through a Ventrilo-less guild raid?  It is one thing to be a part of in a PUG (and usually, you are smarter for not signing on that Vent).  But when you aren't conversing with people you know, the game certainly loses some of that social aspect.  It was one of those eye opening experiences.  You will never realize how much you enjoy Ventrilo until it is randomly absent.

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