Missing In Action

Friday night was Progression night. I was all excited. Then Mrs. Hammer informs me we are going out to dinner with a couple friend of ours.

See Hammer is a happily married guy, and one of things that makes Mrs. Hammer so incredible is she understands / puts up with my WoW addiction.

One of the things I do to keep it that way is to make sure WoW never interferes with our life. Basically, if she wants me at any time for any reason, she gets me. I don't tell her, "Not tonight, I've got to raid."

Because of that, she never gives me hard time about playing, and because she knows she takes priority over the game, she rarely feels the need to test it. The net result is I get nearly all the time I want to game.

Dinner was at 6:30pm. That gives me two hours to still be on at a reasonable time. Of course I didn't log in until almost 9pm.

To my great surprise, the Raid has not started yet. Not only was the Frost tank (me) a no show, but we needed a couple of healers. We finally do get the raid put together and head into SSC.

I got a disconnect on one of the trash pulls. It was an omen of ill for the night.

Instead of one shotting ole Hydross, we ended up wiping about 6 times. At least half of those were caused by me having some sort of connection issue during the fight. My guildies were somewhat amazed that I help aggro during the dc.

"You make one heck of an offline tank, lol." I suggested on more than one occasion that they replace me and go get some attempts on Lurker, but we hung with it. Finally, my connection held long enough for us to kill him, but by that point is was getting late and we didn't go to Lurker, but instead planned on trying him on Saturday. That would turn out to be a tactical error.

Saturday night we only had about 12-15 of our main people log on. We kept pushing the raid back and back and finally called it.

When I logged on Sunday, there were 2 Kara groups going and again no SSC.

I'm beginning to sense an undercurrent of discord among the members of the guild. It's like the guild is becoming cliquish and splintered. We don't Raid enough for some, we raid too much for others. The group that raids is too exclusive, the rest are too noobish. Guild chat has become more chippy.

I know we've got the people in MK to do really well and progress, at least through SSC/TK, but calling Raids because no body showed up stinks. The irony being that I nearly caused the Raid to be called on Friday.

Knology is sending a tech out on Monday to try to find out what's going on with my connection.