PhD Research into Raiding

[LadanC]

Greetings, Blood Legion

I ran into Nodozz on the Paragon forums and he suggested I post here. I watched with great interest the trailer for the documentary for the that is being made about you all. How fun and, I'm guessing, strange that must be.

To introduce myself, I'm Ladan, a raider, and a PhD research student at Durham University in the UK. My research is all about WoW, raiders, and our raiding culture. (Yes, it's a dream come true! I'm looking at how we identify ourselves, how we operate, and what values and goals we share. You can read more about it on my site: http://www.raidingresearch.co.uk/. You may also be familiar with the Personality Test that was recently launched by Paragon and me on their site. It's been making its way quietly around the interwebs, http://www.paragon.fi/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1260. Maybe you've even participated?

Anyway, in addition to my work with hard core and casual raiding guilds, I've been trying to connect with a few of the elite guilds to get their perspective and insight as well. So I'd love to chat with you all! It would be a short interview with whomever would like to participate about how your guild functions, how you run your raids, and what kinds of game space and UI set up you tend to use. If you are interested, please drop me a PM here or get in touch via my research site and I'll be glad to get in touch. I'm in the UK but I"m quite used to talking with folks in the US so there is no problem with time zones. We can VOIP or IRC it, whatever you prefer.

Thanks and best of luck with your pursuit of all things raidish with the arrival of Cataclysm!

Ladan

[LadanC]

Dear Blood Legion

Even though I had to stay up until 3 am my time to do the interview, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You guys were absolutely wonderful to speak with and I'm so glad I had this opportunity! I'm going to write up a short piece based around our discussions last night and will post it on my research site once it's done. I'll post a link here when it's ready.

Thanks again, to those who spoke with me: Ataxus, Camcorder, Cixel, Firstaidspec, Grunz, Kruv, Lawliepop, Nodozz, Reagalan, Rootzo, and Taft who joined in at the end. And thanks to the rest of the guild--even though I did not get to speak with all of you, I got an excellent impression about you from your guildmates.

I'm happy to see yet another top level guild that is smart, open-minded, focused, and level-headed.

Warm regards,

Ladan

[Firstaidspec]

Was awesome for us as well! Best of luck with your research, and I'm sure many of us would be happy to hear that accent again, so stop by anytime!

[LadanC]

So was this a clever ploy on the part of the North Americans, making the EU servers so hard to log into tonight?

Clever, evil, and admirable strategy!

xox Ladan