On a personal level, I just wanted to note that last night, my guild finally dropped Lady Vashj (one of the more insanely complicated fights in WoW), after well over a month of trying two nights a week to get her down. Somehow, last night, everything just clicked, and on our third attempt, we beat her down with 20 people standing at the end.

This cements our status as the #1 guild on our server, according to WoWJutsu, which to our guild, is the really important thing. See, at the top end of the raiding game, there exists fierce competition on each server to be the best raiding guild, where ‘best’ is defined primarily by number of boss kills, with extra weight given to first kills. I like to call this competition the ‘Great Race’ – largely because it sounds pretentious. Anyway, WoWJutsu has codified this into a score for each guild (by scraping the Armory, which is admittedly imperfect at best), and is now considered by many raids to be the definitive WoW scoreboard.

The interesting thing is how this aspect, which is central to a raid game that a fair chunk of the players (call it 10-20%) of the players play, touches on a lot of the things that Raph harps on. First off, it’s clearly Asynchronous Competition – players do not have to be playing at the same time to play the same game. Yet, they often ARE, mind you, especially when new content is released. When the new raid, Zul’Aman, was released this week, three different guilds on the server snagged server firsts on the first four bosses, with some kills preceding the others by a matter of minutes. Yeah, you can compete asynchronously, but it’s a lot more heartpumping when everyone’s racing at the same time.

The second thing that’s interesting is how this great race is almost entirely player driven, and how a player tool emerged from unofficial postings on message boards to track this extremely compelling game. If I recall correctly, EQ2 already has this built in. One is left to wonder how long Blizzard will take to incorporate a server first tracker of their own.

The third thing that’s interesting is how each server has its own Great Race going on. Our server is a relative backwater, obviously, with no one having killed Kael’thas or even set foot in Black Temple or Mount Hyjal. And while it would be nice to have a larger recruiting pool to choose from, it means that we get to be a big fish in a little pond, which is ideal for a more casual guild that raids only 3 nights a week.

Anyway, mostly I just wanted to gloat about Vashj.