The possibility of Weekend Raids?

[Darian]

While I am on US eastern standard time, my work schedule tends to preclude even bothering to come to the Monday and Thursday raids due to having to be in at work by 6:00am the next day (frequently the raids are not even entering the instance for 30-60 min after the intended start).  As such I quit bothering to worry about even qualifying to participate in many of these late evening raid starts.  It has also blocked doing a variety of instance runs also.

The only problem with the continuation on the alternating weekends that you are talking about is that those of us that cannot attend the first part of the run are going to consistently be missing the start of the instance.  As progress is made on being able to penetrate into the Molten Core, there will be progressively more and more of the start that a segment of us would never get to see and experience.
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I feel your pain, Ruv, and really wish you'd been able to join us. The problem, in a nutshell, is that the endgame in WoW (and pretty much every other MMO) is a total pain in the backside for folks who have real lives. Just to illustrate, when CA started the Thursday thing, it went kinda like this:

Nobody's ever on Friday night, and people often have plans Saturday night.
Tuesday night's a bad plan because the servers are never stable after maintenance.
Wednesday's bad because many of CA's folks work overlapping shifts, and the overlap day is. . . Wednesday.
Key people also worked Sunday and Monday night, so. . .

As for the 8pm Eastern start, I wouldn't object to starting earlier, but if anyone gets stuck at the office late (like me two Thursdays ago, or Anadrol last Thursday), they might not even get home until the raid's well under way. . . much less have time to get home, grab something to eat, etc.

I definitely want to try and accomodate everyone, though. One possibility: Next Thursday is an Onyxia night, the first of the two in that cycle. If we take her down then (and on any successive Thursday Onyxia run), perhaps breaking into MC on Sunday would be the thing to do.

And you make another good point (which will hopefully be alleviated as people get used to this) -- even with an 8pm start, 8pm is not 8:40. We've got to get better about getting things started on time. I'd recommend people plan to be logged in a half hour before the scheduled start, so that they can whatever they need to get done in town done and either get to the instance or get summoned and be ready to roll at the start time. Running close to the line on bodies, this is more problematic, but if we get to the point where we've got more than 40 people who want to go, being late is going to equal missing out.

What would really help is if we had a master list of when everyone can normally be expected to be available. . .