Okay, there is something I have been thinking about for a while lately. I know there are people out there in the WoW community who hop from guild to guild like I change socks, and that works out perfectly well for them, it suits their play-style. But I was never like that in World of Warcraft. As a matter of fact, my guild history is a pretty short list. However, that short list comes with a long tenure in each guild, usually reaching some form of officership, if not being the GM. As Cataclysm looms just over the horizon, and I feel different WoW goals tugging at my brain, I notice myself mulling over what my guilds have meant to me, and how the people in those guilds have helped shape the way I play this game. I guess ill put the break here, so click on the title link to read more, as always.
As I have said before when I started this online journal, when I first came to the digital drug that is Warcraft, I liked to role-play. Yes, I was that type of nerd. So obviously when I came to the game, I hopped on a RP server, and leveled a bit before joining my first guild, Crimson Rise, which in retrospect sounds like a menstruation thing. I cannot remember the RP point of the guild at all, but I remember having a lot of fun there, and more importantly I met the people who were going to come to be my close WoW buddies. Not all of them came right away, some a very long time after I started, but the people I met there would become my circle of friends in WoW. However, like many guilds do, Crimson Rise fell apart, and like some guilds do, it was because of the douchery of one of the central officers. He had a bad day or something and disbanded the guild on a whim. And I guess in the end that was the last straw for the guild, as the GM and the officer were having real life issues that prevented everything from being fixed. Fine, I guess it happens, and everyone knew the problems were there, but the people who stuck around, myself included expected those things to iron themselves out, not for an officer to go Broken Arrow and tell everyone in his own way to go fuck themselves.
I'm not going to go into my whole WoW guild history. It's a long route filled with annoyance and me having an eventual falling out with RP as a fun way to play the game. The other RP guild I was in for a long time, I was in for far too long. My want to keep everything together did help the guild a bit, but in the long-term just prolonged a bad situation. I more want to point out that the people I met up there in Crimson Rise were the people I was going to keep on running into, even after RP and I broke up. Almost all of them ended up joining the casual guild I made, Ride the Lightning. While the casual thing we wanted at first worked well, eventually we started raiding. And while that was fun at first, we actually caught up to the progression curve and finished the first wing of ICC before the second wing was released.
This is where problems started to creep up. Problem is that this guild is made up of people who mostly like to RP, or are never on a lot at a stretch, and have wildly varying schedules. So stress and burn-out set in quick, and arguments and the like broke out. Eventually, for some reason or another everyone ended ceasing to play WoW, including me for a bit. However what happened with that is what I find to be the odd, but awesome part. Even after we all stopped playing together and started doing other stuff, we still continued talking, a lot. I soon came back to WoW, playing with one of the people from Ride the Lightning sometimes. It was odd honestly. Usually when a guild falls apart in the complete way that Ride the Lightning did, it would be normal to go off and start finding a new guild, new people to talk to. WoW is after all, a social game. Playing the game in a 1-player context is to play the game in a diminished state, as it is a massive multiplayer game. However, talking to the people I was used to talking to, just not on WoW, while playing WoW made the game feel pretty much the same to me. Pugging seemed alright, and while I did try a different guild on a different server for a bit (The wow.com guild
In the end, I have to say what has happened is that I have stayed incredibly loyal to the friends I have made in WoW, past the point anyone should really be. I have kept Ride the Lightning together, honestly in the vain hope that the people would come back to WoW, or to the server and we could pick up again. Lately though, I have been talking to these people from RtL, and finding basically none of them plan on coming back to WoW when Cataclysm hits. With the expansion around the corner, I have been thinking lately that maybe it is finally time to hang up this guild banner and go out in search of what I want more out of WoW. This feeling is especially strong lately, since I have realized that no matter what server I go to, or what group I find to raid with, I am not going to stop talking to these people I have been with since I first reached level 20, and the people who came after but inserted themselves into my gaming life just as strongly. So really when it comes down to it, my WoW experience should remain unchanged fundamentally, and still be fun, even in the face, of change.
-Kesith
Hello, World.
10 years ago
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