TwentyFifthNovember and Professional Gaming

As of last night(ish) all of the current content is cleared for WotLK. Assuming that all of the members leveled in 36 hours, that's one raid tier cleared fully in less than 8 days of progression attempts. To me, this highlights the cutthroat capitalism that permeates people everywhere. No matter what the activity is, someone will turn it into a business.

Part of me is saddened by this, since it's a game and should be fun. But most of me is just jealous. If I could describe my perfect day, it would be just sitting around gaming. Not just WoW, but all kinds of RTS, RPG, FPS, TCG (and other TLAs), puzzle, and board games. While my education (for the most part) has been in mechanical engineering, my passion (somewhat obviously) is for playing games. Sometimes I even dabble in the underlying mechanincs of what makes great games great. Dabble. Dabble. I'll try not to splash too much.

But even with all this, I'm not being paid for it. The players of TwentyFifthNovember, from what I understand, are. They get equipment and salaries for being the best gamers out there - at least at WoW. I guess the next best thing to simply playing games all day is to design and build them. Maybe once I'm 80 and raiding I can pull back the throttle on the playtime and shift more towards thinktime.

So while I'm entirely too jealous of their ability to do this with their lives, I still have a great amount of respect for their gaming prowess. Grats on the world first clear of content, TwentyFifthNovember!