Bye-bye, Nalorakk!

Yesterday, my hobby and sometimes part-time job, World of Warcraft, received a major update which included a new high-level playing ground: Zul'Aman. ZA (as its known within the game) reflects a lot of thought and care in its design by the game designers at Blizzard. It's a short, but very challenging, instance, with scaling rewards for better performance by you and your fellow players.

I play with a team of 9 others that meets twice a week to play and tackle the high-level parts of the game. Last night was our first night inside Zul'Aman, and in what was a shock to most of us, we took down the first major challenge in Zul'Aman: the bear god Nalorakk. A lot of other groups didn't have quite so easy a time as us, and I think that had a lot to do with both excellent players and excellent team work. When you work a lot with the same group of people (and actually like working with them), you begin to understand their rhythms and their approaches to getting the job done. The more familiar you are with how each other works, the easier it is to anticipate the areas that will easily and automatically be covered and the gaps that will emerge. By letting go a bit of what will be covered and covering more of the gaps yourself, you make the job for the whole team a whole lot easier.

Yes, I'm talking about this in context of a massive online game, but the same principles apply in real life. And that's why we succeeded while others failed.

We made a number of attempts on Zul'Aman's second major obstacle, the eagle god, Akil'Zon, but that bitch is hard and we only got him to 28%.

There's always next week.