Could it be? Have we actually achieved a state of weather that could possibly be considered somewhat fall-like in nature?

Almost, my friends. Almost. When I walked out of the house this morning it was nice. It wasn’t that smack in the face “good weather is here!!” feeling, but it was close.

Of course, Tropical Depression Wendy is threatening to pay a visit to us some time next weekend as well. So it is not quite yet safe to let the good times roll and relax in the comfort that Summer is past us.

There really isn’t much in the way of “positive” to sell people on Florida Summers these days, is there? Not that there ever really was.

Had a bit of guild drama in Warcraft this weekend. Several of our upper level members left the guild to join a larger “raiding” guild. Long story short, for those of you who aren’t involved in the MMO world, this means that they wanted to be part of a guild that has enough high level members to regularly access sections of the game that requires 20 or even 40 people to go at the same time. The understanding, even tempered part of me says that if that’s what they want to do they are welcome to move on with my blessing. The emotional side of me is, quite frankly, a combination of angry, hurt and offended. A few weeks ago I made the decision to disband the guild that I created and merge our members with the current guild. This was done in an effort to prevent this very thing from happening to both of our guilds. The thought was that, together, we could take two like minded organizations (we were both social, “family” guilds) and work towards being able to do some of those higher end raids without sacrificing the things that we held dear as players. In the process of doing so, we lost several members of our guild, including 3 of the higher end players. In this recent exodus we lost another 6.

Of those 9 players, 8 of them left because they wanted to access the higher end content. If we still had those 8 players we would have more than enough with the roster that we still have to access the 20 player stuff.

Am I the only one who sees the irony here?

I know it’s just a game, but it’s hard not to take this stuff personally. You spend hours and hours working with these people, mutually helping each other. I can think of at least one occasion when I have either passed on items that have dropped or gone out of my way to help every one of the players who left. This is not to say they haven’t done the same for me, but that’s the point. The whole time we were working towards a mutual goal of improving all of our characters for the benefit of the guild, and they have taken all of that hard work and given it to someone else. What’s worse is that those things we passed on we still need. Yeah, they say they will still help. But they won’t. Not because they don’t want to – because they will be raiding. Hell, I went to the web site of the new guild this morning to see what they were about. They have a 20 man raid scheduled every night this week in the same place.

Where do your old friends fit in there?

I mean, the people who didn’t come with us to the new guild are our real life friends and we still haven’t had more than a handful of opportunities to do things with them since they left. Why on Earth would these people who know us as nothing more than pixels on a screen go out of their way to be more accessible than our real friends have been able to?

On the up side, the morale of those of us who has left seems to have rebounded fairly quickly. Last night in Officers chat the vibe was very positive and optimistic. It’s a setback, but those of us that are left still have a common goal in mind. And to be honest, even with the losses there are still more high level players to group with in the combined guild than my guild originally had. So we haven’t lost anything in that regard, and there are a whole lot of players in the upper mid levels that will be joining us soon.

And plenty of room for any of you who would like to join us. 🙂

Is it stupid to get upset over a video game? Yeah, to an extent. Unfortunately, this is the nature of a game that actually involves other people. Hell, we met xanyboi while playing City of Heroes. This is a man who lived in our house for over a month, and who currently trusts me with the key to HIS home and his security code while he is out of town. Our friendship was entirely grounded in a random meeting in a game. From that we found we had common friends and common interests, but had it not been for the game we never would have met in the first place.

So it’s more than just a game. It’s…

Hell, I don’t know what it is.

It’s fun, that’s for sure. Even with the occasional bump in the road. That’s what makes it so good, really. The other people. They just make it suck sometimes too.