While this is only going to make complete sense to those that play the game, I’ll go into a little back story just to try and clarify for those non-players on my list.

I’m the leader of a Guild called The Children of Midian. A guild, in World of Warcraft, is essentially a group of people who have the ability to stay in contact with each other in game and, theoretically, work towards common goals together. There two “types” of guilds you hear about more often than not are “social” guilds and “raiding” guilds.

Social guilds are, in general, a group of friends. Often real life friends at first, these guilds grow as friends of friends get added. The enviornment is very casual, and the rules are loose.

Raiding guilds are much more intense. They can have hundreds of members, and the primary goal is to experience everything the game has to offer (and beat the crap out of it).

CoM is a social guild. It is the evolution of our first guild (Mitternacht), and the failed merger with another guild (Tainted Legion). From the beginning, we’ve heard time and time again that unless we changed our focus as a guild we would never be able to experience everything the game has to offer. We’ve lost many people to raiding guilds because this train of thought is so prevalent in the game.

We have held on to the belief that the game could be enjoyable without going to a larger guild and sacrificing everything we have worked for in the pursuit of “phat lewts.” We have never held that content up to be the end all be all, and have always felt that if the opportunity presented itself to experience it we would do so, but on our own terms.

Last night, it happened.

We’ve been working with several smaller guilds who have the same philosophy as we do. People who want a more “causal” gaming enviornment but would like to experience these larger challenges. Last night, a coalition of five guilds took on the challenge of Molten Core.

Ok, so we wiped on the first boss. Three times. We got him to 20% health the first time, and 19% the second. The third was a cluster because we had added in a player who hadn’t heard the “remove all fear effects from your action bars” command and we got feared into the cave of “death by many fiery imps.”

But we’ll be back. Runs are scheduled on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday nights. We’ll get better in time.

There is no DKP system. Everyone goes into the instance on equal footing. The only issue that we’re still working out is the distribution of the rare resources.

Is it perfect? Nope. Will we be as good as a dedicated raiding guild? Nope.

It doesn’t matter, though. Hell, I’d even be content with never going back again. The sheer fact that we managed to make it there despite the overwhelming chorus of voices saying it would never happen is satisfaction enough for me.

But the fact that I got some Earthfury Bracers didn’t suck either.