As a sponsored raider, I make a cool $700 a week Ebaying all the crap headsets and mice my guild leader didn't keep for himself.
As a sponsored raider, I make a cool $700 a week Ebaying all the crap headsets and mice my guild leader didn't keep for himself.
They take a week off from work when a new expansion is released for progress.
You're wrong to think these people are basement dwellers, they're just very dedicated and well-organized.
In Cata, they cleared DS in ~80min without the nerf in speed runs. So with the nerf, they could do 4 clears during farm, with only two 3 hour raids per week. That's a pretty relaxed schedule.
They don't, they get income from sponsors and need no work. Paragon, as the #1 guild in world earns a lot of money from Asus, Steelseries and many events they attend every year. In Finland you also get 500-700 euros a month if you're unemployed so shouldn't be a problem.
Please stop saying this. Spreading misinformation like this, that could encourage people to try to pursue this as an active source of income, is just wrong.
Read: http://manaflask.com/en/blog/Zemme/356/p/4/
Last edited by spectrefax; 2013-03-19 at 08:27 AM.
No, as I understand, Paragon was the first guild to introduce systematic alt-farming to help with class-stacking. That gave them the advantage over Ensidia in ToC.
Over time Paragon gradually lost some of its skilled core, and they had difficulty replacing because they're Finnish-only. After DS they lost a lot of people they couldn't replace. So they had to choose between losing the race in 25m, or switching to 10m.
(That's why I hate when people say Paragon defeated Method in T14. When Paragon announced their switch to 10m, they explicitely admitted they did so because they could no longer field a 25m group able to compete at the highest level.)
Anyway.
If you look at the rise of top guilds such as SK Gaming (which merged with Nihilum to form Ensidia) and Paragon, they rose because they introduced a more effective, but also more time-consuming strategy: All-day-raiding by SK Gaming, and alt-runs for class stacking by Paragon.
And the fall of a top guild happens when too many of its members become tired of raiding.
That's basically it - top 5 (top 20?) guilds actually spend significantly fewer hours raiding in total than your average heroic raiding guild, it's just that they do theirs in 2-3 week bursts. After that, it's 1 hour full clear, maybe 2-3 times a week (with alts) - in other words, they can do 2-3 full clears in the same time that typical guilds spend on an evening of raiding.
Bingo. They don't get paid to raid by their sponsors. Anyone who believes this is a moron. Sponsors give them headsets, mice, vent/mumble servers, etc. They just have very, very flexible hours at work or just don't work at all.
And the guilds would raid on the 'cease fire' day(s) anyway hoping the others would hold to their agreement and sneak in a world first :P
Good Point. Guilds raid this many hours because they have this type of free time, or flexible jobs, or living at home without expenses. People should understand there is no "prestige" in being a wow raider for anyone except the raider themselves. Raiding for status in the world is about as lame as keeping track of whose scored with a girl the most times and having a tallied score at the end of each 2 year period.
It's a game, it will always be just a game. People should raid because they enjoy raiding, and for no other reason.
It's even ridiculous and I've been a hard core player who used to spend 5-6 hours per raid night (4 or 5 days a week) in BC.
But we come to a point where this people has been doing so for more than 7 freaking years =O
I think it's crazy unless you are getting payed, and many of them actually are, but not all AT ALL are payed :P
I always wondered what heroic raiders did after the first month or two of a new raid. I assume by then their mains and alts are all fully heroic geared?
PvP perhaps?
Your typical raider with a 9-5 job uses their vacation time during the first week or 2 of progression.
The rest of us are typically university students, and simply work ahead of our classes 2-3 weeks a head of time, so we can miss class if necessary ( a lot of the time its not ). Last semester I managed to be 2-3 weeks ahead in all assignments due for my 15 hour course load, and informed all of my professors I would be "out of town", so they allowed me to take my finals 2 weeks early ( the week before progression began ).
If you start putting limited attempts on bosses, the top guilds will just start running mirror raids again, like they did in ToGC and ICC ..
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
Hardcore raiders would just quit then, as they did in ToC and Dragon Soul for instance. How is that in Blizzard's interests, or anyone's interests for that matter?
While playing a video game for 12-16 hours straight might seem weird to people who have no interest in doing it or don't have the time, the "health" concerns are pretty dramatically overblown. Anyone with an office job sits in a chair 8 hours a day and then most likely drives home and sits on the couch. It's pretty much the same thing. Of course if you did it all the time it would definitely be a bad idea, but for 1-2 weeks every six months? Hardly.