My favorite thing about raiding: after the kill remembering the first attempts where upon engaging the boss the entire raid drops faster than Illside downing a cock-shaped toaster strudel with the word "BOYS" written out in the icing.

Of course, as always the road there looked something like this:

As I am writing this front page a pitched battle is afoot on our member forums between The Paladins, where they strive to outdo each other by comparing one another to increasingly retarded animals. It goes something like this:

First, Amber finds a picture of a tiger that (as Alex put it) "doesn't look quite right". This goes into a post titled "If Brock Was a Tiger He would Look Like This". Brock then fires up Google Images and queries the internet for "Autistic Water Buffalo", the results of which get put into a post cleverly titled "If Amber Were A Tiger She Would Look Like This Thing That's Clearly Not A Tiger".

Then Reginald appears. Reginald the Englishman. Reginald who, being from Her Majesty's noble country is above these shenanigans, and is genuinely disgusted by our conversations that start with "if you pee on a hedgehog…" and our leftist-liberal approach to dentistry. Reginald, who I expect more from. Reginald comes along and says "no THIS is Amber" and posts a picture of a wild sea cucumber shaped like a penis with the subtext "this is a sea cucumber, if surprised it ­will ejaculate on you".

At some point in the past week, while farming turtles for Traps I came to a stunning realization: I am in charge of a zoo. Raid nights basically consist of a cross between Animal Farm and The Metamorphosis, where I'm a fucked up Hungarian man that woke up as a giant cockroach surrounded by talking horses and geese and militant pigs with communist inclinations. And together we sing "Beasts of England" and travel to a land that doesn't exist to battle a snowman in a metal igloo.

And then when the horses get put down and made into glue and we have to recruit new trials they ALSO turn out to be animals. They have no idea what the fights do or where they are. They are essentially a confused baby orangutan that has been strapped into a life jacket and thrown into a swimming pool with a wild hook-nosed tapir which immediately tries to make friends with it and the orangutan yells "no help me where am i" and the tapir paddles over and says "how about i… zuck yo dick?". And the tapir is Bear's People.

Here, I'll end the debate forever. If Amber was an animal, she would be Illside's cat "Gusgus" but with a cape:

And then there's the Mutes. I don't even know who or WHAT the fuck they are. I imagine a scenario where a computer keyboard has been left unattended on the windowsill of an open window. Occasionally a breeze rustles the nearby trees, and an errant branch pokes through a window and presses a few keys. If we're lucky one of those keys will run the attached player to the right when I say "run right" and we have one slightly sloppy ice block instead of say, 24 simultaneously. I guess it's a good thing that while in an iceblock I cannot see the rest of the raid, because I swear if I ever got a GLIMPSE of the ice-forest my brain will say "fuck it, we're done here this evening" and go into self destruct mode and my body will turn itself inside out on the spot in a spray of drool and fecal matter.

The worst part of course is being unable to field a full raid in the weeks before the kill. Believe me, I tried. WE tried. The player quality outside organized guilds has become unreal. There is a borderline zombie apocalypse out there, where everyone has eaten their own brain and become worse than useless. "I have an idea guys. We'll run groups, organize runs, pick out potentially competent individuals and promise them the gear that we otherwise shard." And then you see a man named Frogstomper keyboard-turn-clicking his way up the tunnel in Pit of Saron, doing something I like to call "reverse tanking", where he is actually helping the mobs kill the rest of us faster while playing connect-the-dots with the falling icicles.

You know there's a problem when the best you can do is look for "potentially competent".

I try to make it easy for these people. I get a whisper saying "yo kan are you guys recriuting?" and I say "sure we are, listen here." I tell the man to apply. I give him some names and say "okay look up these men on armory. copy their gear, spec, gems, enchants, and glyphs EXACTLY and you will get in NO PROBLEM." The next day I see an application by a hunter equipped with a tanking sword main hand, a caster dagger offhand, berserking enchant on both and an empty ranged slot. I say "???" and he says "lol those guys you sent had pretty good stuff but i made some improvmints on stuff they overlooked."

He made.

Some fucking.

"Improvmints."

I hate these people. I would line them up and run them over repeatedly but there is not a bus in this world big enough to run over all of the people I hate. And the worst part? Most of these clowns have ALREADY found their way into the guild and raid with us every single day. Some of them have made it into officer positions (you knew this was coming).

This image here is an artistic piece, I call it "Officer Chat While The Rest Of You Are Wiping", or "Why Ready Checks Never Come Back", or more simply "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things."

You know what? I don't even care anymore. I can do a lot of things. I can fight Korean Zerg all day. I can take a net full of literal squids, duct tape them to keyboards, and teach them to kill bosses. I can listen to Conq ramble on for 6 hours about secondary crime scenes and mercenary hackers. But THESE PEOPLE are impossible to fight. So that leaves me moving towards an early death due to multiple aneurysms while I collect their shining moments and assemble them into front page updates. Except there is not enough bosses in the game to fully communicate the scope of their retardation.

Of course I COULD also join this zoo and maybe work towards getting a reverse-blowjob from an anteater. Fuck it, that actually doesn't seem like so bad a plan. Pack your bags Brock, we're going to Madagascar.