The Rise and Fall

I know it’s a departure from the usual PvP stuff, but Jack over at The Casual Raider proposed a shared topic over at Blog Azeroth that really hit home with me.

I spent a fair amount of time on the game over the summer mainly because I had no job and had decided to return after an extended break from the game to pass the time. A lot of my playing time in WoW has been solo and guildless, sure I’ve been in guilds but they were quite frankly shitty levelling guilds which I couldn’t stand to spend more than a few days in.

Then all of a sudden while powerlevelling my blacksmithing in Valiance Keep one day, a guy whispered me with his guild recruitment macro and I thought hey, why not?

The Honeymoon Period

What really hooked me in the guild was my involvement straight away, I had a very high BS level and so was made a guild professional a couple of days in. The guild back then was very small, everyone was levelling still but there was a sense of maturity about the place that was refreshing. We all really got on well together and it got to a point where I was made officer and held a role just under the GM himself.

I think it’s fair to say that when you’re guildless you miss out on a lot of things. This game is an MMO so it’d be pointless to play if you don’t want to interact with people and with the new guild perk systems it’s even more useful to join a guild and be a part of a community.

The Rise…

Because of the atmosphere and the blend of old and new players we grew rapidly. We started to reach the level cap, run heroics and then we found raiding! Oh my how fucking awesome is this?! So we formed a raid team after I proposed we try ICC.

Pretty soon we realised that without voice comms organisation and raid leading can be a lot more effort than with it. I remember the first time hearing everyone’s voice and being nervous as hell, but strangely excited. These people were real after all and it was nice to put something human to those pixels on your screen.

…And Fall

We raided a fair amount for casual players and whenever you have more potential raiders than spots in your raid problems begin to arise. To say we hit a shitstorm of complaints would be putting it lightly. I would log in and receive about 5 whispers asking questions about raid times, raid slots etc. It was tiring.

The thing was, people in my old guild initially didn’t know about things such as hit caps, gemming and enchants. I was happy to help as I had read up on all this stuff but when you’ve given someone the tools and they refuse to use them that just pisses me off. Raid slots were sorted on the basis of things like this if you weren’t fully gemmed and enchanted I couldn’t bring you. If you weren’t ht capped you weren’t coming either.

We got to a stage where we were running 3 ten mans near the end of the expansion (yes you read that correctly I did say 3) and providing gems, pots and flasks for all raiders from a contribution system.

The problem with such a big explosion is finding the balance for things to do for the non raiders. We expanded the amount of raid teams; we did a 25 man for everyone regardless of gear before the new raid lockout system began and where possible we scheduled social events (but these never generated interest even though people cried out for them).

Changes

The problem with guilds is this, people’s ideas of what they want to achieve over time change some want progression some just want to fish and trying to accommodate things like these in one area without some give and take from people is damn hard.

After coming home for the Christmas holidays I fell into the middle of the final breaking point. There were a lot of new faces in the guild and that was daunting enough as is, but people had had enough. There were no hard feelings people just wanted to return to that original social thing we used to have and some of my very good guild friends left and formed their own guild. I was literally gobsmacked but I hadn’t been around while all the tension built up during the pre expansion blues.

The old fatigue set in and I quit the game (only managed a week though haha). By the time I come back I had already said kick my characters and so I faction changed and here I am. My old guild is still going strong and I believe we really changed the server for the better. When we first joined the alliance side was nonexistent and had no pride and now it is in full bloom.

I could’ve rejoined but I think the best thing for me to do was head on to pastures new, who knows what can happen from here.

Over and Out.