Most raiding guilds in World of Warcraft have scheduled at least one raid night per week, and often two. These raid nights are scheduled to occur every week and usually last for two to four hours, and are the time when the raiders in the guild run one of the large instanced dungeons in the game.
If you aren't familiar with WOW, raids require either 10 or 25 players, and the composition of the group is very important to the success of the overall raid. Each player has a role, and you cannot easily substitute different players for certain key roles (main tank, main healer, etc.). What this means is that if you are a raider in the guild, you are making a pretty strong commitment to be there for whenever the guild is raiding.
For some reason, from my experience talking to other Eve players, listening to Eve podcasts, and reading Eve blogs, Eve does not seem to have the concept of a "raid night". There does not seem to be a specific night where a corp or an alliance gets together to do a big task that requires a lot of manpower. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I think that instituting something like a raid night in a corporation could actually be very good for the overall health of the corp.
On raid night, the corporation could have everyone (who is available anyway) get together to work as a team on a task. For some corps that could just be a huge ore, ice, or gas mining jamboree. For other corporations, it could be putting together PvP gangs and running around looking for targets of opportunity to kill. Whatever the corp decides to do, it would probably be useful to get people together on Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, working toward a common goal.
In fact, because Eve is a bit more flexible about roles than WOW, raid night is probably even easier to pull off in Eve than in WOW. For example, if your Orca pilot can't make it to a mining raid night, you don't have to cancel the entire operation. This is not the case in WOW, where if the main tank or other key player can't make it, you might have to scrap the whole run.
Anyway, I strongly advocate the institution of Eve corporate raid night. If you are in a corporation that has something like raid night, please let me know. I'd be very interested in how it is working out for you...
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I agree that a "raid night" would be good for corp cohesion. Some complexes, level 5s, and mining ops can fill this role. However, eve doesnt really have anything like WoW or EQ(that I used to play) where you can just get some guys and go do a group "dungeon".
ReplyDeleteMy corp does have scheduled mining operations, PvP training excercises and PvE mission runs. We don't have a scheduled PvP escapade though... Probably related to the difficulty in finding worthy opponents on a scheduled basis....
ReplyDeleteThat's good to hear. Just wondering if you have a standing appointment every week of do you just use a calendar system to schedule operations ahead of time?
ReplyDeleteRegarding PUGs, I agree that Eve's dangerous environment does not lend itself to pugging. If I'm not mistaken, someone in your fleet can kill you without consequence.
Standing appointment.
ReplyDeleteSuddenly Ninjas has 2 weekly 'raid' nights, and other one's scheduled whenever someone wants to lead one.
ReplyDeleteThe 2 weekly ones are always on Thurdays and Saturdays, others can be whenever.
So they happen, but I agree with you that it's not a common accurence in EVE like it is in WoW and other MMOs...but that's because EVE isn't like those other MMOs...there's no endgame dungeons to do to get your tier 554392.4 gear...