Last Saturday night, 4 married middle aged men got permission from their wives for a Boys' Night out.  No, we are not going to the bar or your local pool hall or poker room -  we are getting together on the Internet.  This is the new boys night out.

If you could see my face, you see a "BIG GRIN."  I had a fantastic weekend of WOW.   I had arrange the first get together between 4 friends to do a WOW Instance ( a really hard quest where the monsters have 3X more life and are more powerful than the normal garden variety).  This is the first level Instance attack plan by moi.  The group have been working towards Saturday night.  The Herbalist was making potions, the leathermaker was busy with crafting armour and the blacksmithing was busy making axes for everyone. 

At 9:30 PM we met on WOW and started our preparation to go inside RageFire Chasm.  The Elites were Level 13 to Level 16.  We were Level 18, Level 15 and Level 14 (moi).  We got Skype running in the background and we were all conference in.  We spent about 2 hours slowly working our way to the end of this Elite Dungeon where there was a Level 16 Elite as the end game.  By my experience of good measure of how good you are as a player, you should be able to take down an Elite 3 level below you.  So, we did not have a player that could do that.  But, we have two others slightly below the Elite Boss.  We tried 3 times unsuccessfully.  

Finally, the 4th player who was suppose to join us did after the Saturday Hockey Night ended.  We conference him in and off we go.  Other than the fourth player had been drinking while watching hockey, the real problem became apparent to moi.  I was hosting the conference call on Skype maxing out the conference call capabilities to four participants.  As we were inside the Instance, I experience latency of 5 seconds or more.  I kept saying "It's really laggy."  But, no one else was experiencing what I was going through so I kept playing.  We were unsuccessful, which is the result of latency in my system and poor player execution. 

Skype was great for 3 players or less.  Once we added the fourth player, the PC acting as the conference server came to a crawl.  We found this out after everyone started to listen to my complain of lagginess.  We switched the conference hosting to the fourth player who had the most powerful PC and his PC came to a crawl.  The solution for this weekend is to host the Skype conference call on another PC that is separate.  Hey, every gamer should have at least 3 PC at home   I have 2 PCs and 2 Notebooks  

The real solution is to find a VOIP conference service than can hook-up 10 players .  If anyone knows of a free solution for this problem, please let me know - I am all ears.