Tuesday (16 Jul) - The Naked Race

Tuesday (16 Jul) - The Naked Race

I reported on "The Naked Race" on October 3rd, 2005. Wild was a level 52 and running with what he would later call his "cabal" in his longest running guild. This is as much a tribute to "Jo" (Jomamma) as a revisit to a time when the game was still new and fresh.

"Our guild is pretty loose, despite the end game focus, so loose in fact that I have yet to figure out who the real guild leader is. The de facto leader, though, the 60 that is online most of the time and encouraging and helping everyone, is Jo. She is fun, and funny, and a little flighty at times, but everyone likes her and she is continually looking to come up with things the guild can do together. Starting to get the picture? Jo decided that it would be a fun guild event to do a naked race.

So on saturday afternoon about twenty of us gathered at the northern edge of Un'Goro Crater. Not just high levels, but there were some 30s and 40s there too. Some of them had yet to even visit Tanaris (you generally get to the Crater from Tanaris) or Gadgetzan, the closest city to the Crater with a flight path. Jo burned a lot of shards porting players directly to our location in Un'Goro. For those unfamilar with Un'Goro, the mobs are level 50+ and numerous. It's safest to move along the edges, and folly to go straight through the center. The exit from Un'Goro is at the southern end. The finish line, though, is at Gadgetzan, so not only do you have to traverse the entire Crater, it is a very long run across the desert of Tanaris (high 40+ level mobs) to get to the city. So, the course is from the farthest edge of Un'Goro Crater, out of the crater and across the Tanaris desert to Gadgetzan. No mounts allowed. By foot only. No speed buffs, no travel form (darn, that's what I had in mind), no ghost form for those shamans, nothing.

Did I say nothing? I mean REALLY nothing. Once we were all gathered Jo passed the word - Everyone, Get Naked! Off came every piece of gear. Ok, a quick disclaimer. WoW simply does not allow a character to be "completely" naked. Everyone wears "woolies" in the expected places that are not removable. Think diapers (that's what they look like to me anyway) and (for the girls) bathing suit top. Seeing twenty of us sans armor was frightenly funny! We should have done this on Halloween, what with the Undead showing their bones and us Taurens towering over everyone in little more than our fur. And just as a final reminder, without our armor we are like - well, undefended. Easy prey. Dinner for anything that catches us. You get the picture.

The actual start of this race was sort of staggered. We all danced around for a few minutes making fun of each other, and then Jo said GO! And eventually we all did. I tried to follow Jo, which was a mistake. What I should have done is played it smart and run around the edge of the crater, which I know well since I've been completely around it's circumference a couple of times and know what to avoid. No, I followed Jo and a gaggle of others straight into the center of Un'Goro. Did I mention that us big Taurens are slow on foot? In seconds the group of twenty was spread all over the place, mostly because we were trying to evade or outrun the mobs that were already anticipating a fine meal. In less than a minute I was all alone as the 60s outpaced me and with mobs everywhere there was no such thing as a straight line.

I was surprised, to say the least, that I made it as far as I did before the first mob targeted me. Evasive maneuvers worked that time, as it did the next couple of times. Did I mention what the bulk of the mobs are in Un'Goro? No? Dinosaurs. Lots of them. Big ones. With teeth. But every move to avoid one mob raised a greater risk of attracting more, and it wasn't that long before one caught me. Ok, I'll admit, at that point I cheated. The mob stunned me, and I bounced in and out of travel form to remove the stun and to get a little distance on the thing. Ok, I'll admit, I did that more than a couple of times. But I was ALIVE, and still running. Chat typing got nearly illegible as folks tried to joke and scream at the same time they were being run down by things much larger than them.

I was just starting to think that I was going to make it to the Un'Goro exit path when a family of raptors decided I was just the snack they'd been waiting for. A level 52 tauren druid, even without armor, has a few tricks and is pretty hard to kill. I used them all, and I could see the waterfall that marked the exit trailhead when they brought me down for good. Well, that ended any chance of me winning the race (not that there was ever any chance of that). I rezzed, recovered my body, and started off again, determined to at least finish. Which I did, and we all danced in Gadgetzan to the amazement/amusement/disgust of all the alliance hanging around that neutral town.

Sometimes you just have to do crazy things in this game to stay sane."