Yet another in a long series of posts that pretty much only make sense if you play the game
[WoW] All Good Things…
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Tag Archives: warcraft
[WoW] – Patience pays off
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.
Fall?
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.