Friendly Mooseseses

I’m pretty sure this sums up my blogging style.

I really do try to focus and Crooked had a great definition of causal in the comments of my last post that I wanted to expand upon. Plus I still need to talk about deleting characters, LFR, and such. But a rambling comment on another site became a post. Oh well.

There have been a few discussions about Friendship Moose and all of that and the one got me to babble today was Navi’s.

#FriendshipMoose and Free Moose runs - An example of a great WoW community? Or an administrative nightmare?

I'm torn about a couple of things as far as this topic goes. Not about people offering to help though. I think that is great and as much as I personally would probably never buy a carry, I can understand the logic of selling them. Especially if carrying people (and the effort it took to get the skill level needed to carry people) causes a lot of armor repairs.

When the community steps up to do something a business or group is not doing, it reflects the good in the community. Great. But, for some people, it then kind of justifies the larger entity (business, government, etc) not doing anything to help solve the problem. They can get in the mindset of, "oh, our users/citizens will step-in and solve this issue so we don’t need to do anything". Yes, they likely will, as there are good people out there, but they shouldn't have to. It reminds me of the debate about support* services for the needy versus government programs.

Now, a moose run is nothing like support services. One is just fun optional stuff and the other can be critical to survival, so I don't mean to compare the two in terms of scale. But still, there is an obvious problem in the community (frustration over the requirements to get the moose mount) and the community is solving the problem, not the business.

But aren't people getting their mount? Yes and perhaps new raiders and good will in the server community will come of this. Those guilds and those people that do the carries will be greatly appreciated and likely respected, so there are a lot of upsides. But I still don't know that I like how we are getting there. That the community is taking a "bad" situation and improving it speaks well of the community. In my opinion, it speaks poorly of the company.

The other reason I have hesitation is, of course, the nature of a carry. I don't see it as pride or anything like that, but just a desire to not be a burden on others for something pretty unimportant. I have no problem asking for help when I need it for something important. But for something like this, it just seems unnecessary for me.  Not an opinion on others getting carries mind you.  Just for me.

I know that I cannot perform at the level needed for heroic raiding and so a carry would be my only option. And so while I’d like the moose on some level, and I’d like to be able to help my spouse get it, the effort and requirement just to get a place to be carried are more than it is likely worth to me.

I’m not saying those requirements are unreasonable. They actually seem reasonable to me but I don’t know if they are. I would assume a guild capable of carrying in heroic knows what is necessary. Whatever the case, my thoughts about the requirements were perfectly captured by Crooked:

“...if presented with requirements to participate in something, a casual is more likely to not participate…changing specs, using a certain voice chat, installing addons, doing pvp, whatever, if they don't want to do something, they would rather not participate at all…”

All of this is something of a moot discussion for me anyways, as I don't think I have a 100 on any server running these (although I haven't check recently) and those 100's I do have are not yet 710. So why am I writing on this? Well, where would you be without my wall-of-text opinions?




* or, since this was originally a comment over at Frostwolves, should that be suppourt? :)