My disagreement with the server is arithmetical in nature. Prime time on Valor is the evening, Moscow time. Moscow evening is already deep night for me, and once you add a warehouse shift that ends at two, what is left is a window from half past two to six. At six I have to go to bed: the forklift is waiting again at four in the afternoon.
For the first two weeks I was convinced I was playing a single-player game with somebody else's scenery. Dalaran empty. The bank empty. The auction house like a museum: display cases, no traders. Two messages an hour dropped into the general channel, both from a man looking for someone to open a lockbox for him.
Who is here
The night hands over its own people gradually. First you memorise nicknames from the adverts, then from who is standing by the bank at four in the morning for the third night running.
The first was a druid called Poldnik. He typed in short bursts with a delay of about two minutes, as if with one hand. A week later it turned out that it really was one hand: the other one was occupied with a child who was being carried up and down the hallway at exactly that hour.
"Just do not invite me to a twenty-five," he wrote. "I can vanish at any second. Literally."
Then a hunter came along, nickname Smena - a dispatcher, twenty-four hours on and three days off, playing from her work machine during the quiet hours. Kefir the rogue got up at half past three for an entirely respectable reason: he is a baker, and his dough is ready at five. And Vatman the warrior, for whom this was an ordinary daytime, because he lives nine hours to the right of the rest of us. Vatman was the only wide-awake person in the group, and we quietly resented him for it.
The night charter
The rules formed by themselves; nobody wrote them down.
First: no "let's go". Instead people state the time to the minute - "I will be there at three forty". We are, I think, the most punctual company on the server, because being twenty minutes late costs a fifth of my entire gaming life for that day.
Second: voice is optional and almost wordless. Kefir once set up a room in Valor Chat, and we did join it, but the sound level was that of a library: somebody's fridge, the rustle of a keyboard, the occasional "taking the left one". Poldnik never turned his microphone on. Once two syllables did come out of the room, and he immediately typed: that was not me, that was him waking up.
Third: nobody asks why you are not asleep. It is considered indiscreet, like asking about someone's salary.
Twenty past four
Keystones piled up slowly and somewhat shamefacedly. They drop from heroics reliably enough, but at night a heroic gets assembled from whoever is around: the same four of us plus a random fifth who ten minutes later types "sorry, falling asleep".
Smena had been saving up for the keystone bag from Burevik. Two and a half thousand gold is not a heroic sum, but she had nine hundred, and it was accumulating at a rate that made waiting for winter look like the easier option.
"Let us all chip in," said Vatman. "I have got nothing to spend it on anyway, it is two in the afternoon here and there is nobody around."
We chipped in. The keystone that came out was a low one, and the affixes were the kind that make you think rather than press buttons faster. Vatman suggested going one level higher, just to try.
"I can try right up until the first squeak from the other room," Poldnik replied.
We ran the one we had. We beat the timer by a minute and a bit - no great feat, but at twenty past four any minute at all looks respectable. Kefir vanished on the last boss without warning, and a minute and a half later he wrote: sorry, dough.
Morning
Around half past five the server starts waking up. Sleepy questions appear in the general channel, somebody is looking for a group for the evening, somebody is complaining about prices. By that point we are packing up: the night shift has its own lights-out.
Once one of the daytime people asked whether we sleep at all. Smena answered that we take turns, and that was closer to the truth than to a joke.
Poldnik left without saying goodbye - which meant the boy was awake. Vatman went off to have lunch. Smena got a call and disappeared in the middle of a sentence. I stayed behind to sort out my bags, because sorting out your bags in an empty Dalaran is the best thing that can possibly happen at ten to six in the morning.
"See you Tuesday," Kefir wrote.
"Three forty," I answered.
In the guild notes next to my nickname there is still a single word: "nocturnal". That suits me fine.
If your arithmetic looks similar: where to begin is on the start page, and mechanics breakdowns are in the guides.
