Woody: What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?
Norm: All four cheeks and a couple of chins.
--from Cheers episode "Snow Job", 1984
One of the big reasons why I haven't joined a guild since my original time in WoW Retail has been the spectacular implosion of a guild I was in.... Twice.
Yes, the same guild blew up not once, but twice.
I wasn't one of the people directly involved or instigated the destruction, but after the second implosion I took Quintalan and Neve and split. Were it not for the Alliance guild that my other toons were in*, I'd have been guildless since roughly mid-Cataclysm onward.
I had absolutely no desire to get in the middle of --or, for that matter, be the adult in the room-- what seemed to me to be middle school drama. After all, I get enough drama at home, in the my neighborhood, or at work, so why have it in my gaming?
For the most part that has worked out well for me, especially since the MMO experience in ESO, LOTRO, and SWTOR isn't very dependent upon guilds at all. However, there are times when I do miss logging in and being greeted with "Red!!!" from about a half dozen or so people.** That connection of being with people who like you just for who you are is priceless.
Last night, I'd made plans to connect with another player to run an instance at 8 PM server time. He, like myself, is guildless, but we tend to get into groups together and we accumulated a friends list that is pretty similar. So when I logged in he whispered me and we grouped up to hopefully get a run in.
Well, that didn't work out so well. We quickly got a group of four together, needing only a tank (as usual), but then the DPS Warrior dropped group without a word and then a few minutes later the Hunter begged out.
So we decided to simply work on his quest for the Abyssal Dukes in Silithus.
I'll be perfectly honest: as a Wrath baby, I'd never seen more than maybe a dozen people at one time in that zone until last night. The place was a nuthouse, as both Horde and Alliance groups were rep grinding in advance of the AQ Opening event. That made acquiring the gear to summon the elementals a bit harder than usual, as everybody was competing for the same Twilight's Hammer cultists that dropped the gear. But eventually we got through enough of the grind that my friend decided he was going to go to the auction house and get the last piece or two so we could summon the Abyssal Duke.
Yes, we were intending to try to two man it, as we didn't have any issues taking down the lesser elementals as a Resto Druid and a Rogue. However, before we could bug out to the AH, we paused to watch another pair (Warrior tank and Mage) in the process of taking on one of the Dukes.
When I saw the Warrior tank get launched by the Duke about a good couple hundred feet (in game), I said in chat "There's no way we could pull this off with just the two of us."
Apparently my friend thought the same thing, so he reached out to the two of them to see about joining up. He dropped group, got invited, and then he in turn invited me to the group.
It was then when I realized who the Warrior and Mage were.
I'd run with them back when we were all in the L20s and L30s through several instances.
"Hey guys! I've not seen you two in months!"
"Az!!"
"Hey Az!! How've you been?"
We spent a minute or two catching up and then we proceeded to summon and then take down the Duke, completing a quest that we started on 3+ hours ago.
We chatted a bit more then waved goodbye, going our separate ways.
It was then that I realized that I'd missed those guild type interactions.
To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not planning on joining a guild anytime soon. Not for a lack of invites, but because I'm trying to play on my terms. I'm not really interested in raiding, although I would like to follow the Onyxia line all the way through, and there are enough players out there that seem mystified by that premise*** that I'm not really interested in having to deal with that in a guild.
And there is still the matter of that middle school drama that even erupts on the LookingForGroup chat. I know enough good people throughout all of the major guilds on the server that when somebody trashes the guild on chat I have to resist the urge to step into the drama and tell people to not trash an entire guild based on the behavior of one or two people. "I'm not an assistant principal," I have to keep telling myself, "The guild can take care of themselves." Then I imagine what it'd be like having that guild name above Az or Card, having to defend myself from that crap, and I take a deep breath and say "no thanks" to joining a guild.
*This was pre-Azshandra (Retail Version) for reference.
**None of the guilds I was in was ever very large, so the concept of gigantic guilds of 200+ people just seems to be almost obscene. By comparison, the mini-Reds' elementary school consisted of roughly 450 students from Kindergarten through 5th Grade, so when you get to guild sizes of beyond 40-50 people you start to lose a connection to everybody in the guild.
***"You don't want to raid? But this is WoW!" was the answer I got when somebody asked me about joining a guild. Yeah, that guy didn't end up on my friends list.
Norm: All four cheeks and a couple of chins.
--from Cheers episode "Snow Job", 1984
One of the big reasons why I haven't joined a guild since my original time in WoW Retail has been the spectacular implosion of a guild I was in.... Twice.
Yes, the same guild blew up not once, but twice.
I wasn't one of the people directly involved or instigated the destruction, but after the second implosion I took Quintalan and Neve and split. Were it not for the Alliance guild that my other toons were in*, I'd have been guildless since roughly mid-Cataclysm onward.
I had absolutely no desire to get in the middle of --or, for that matter, be the adult in the room-- what seemed to me to be middle school drama. After all, I get enough drama at home, in the my neighborhood, or at work, so why have it in my gaming?
For the most part that has worked out well for me, especially since the MMO experience in ESO, LOTRO, and SWTOR isn't very dependent upon guilds at all. However, there are times when I do miss logging in and being greeted with "Red!!!" from about a half dozen or so people.** That connection of being with people who like you just for who you are is priceless.
Yes, I'm old enough to have watched
Cheers when it was first on television.
This supercut of Norm's quips when
entering the bar has always stuck with me.
This supercut of Norm's quips when
entering the bar has always stuck with me.
Last night, I'd made plans to connect with another player to run an instance at 8 PM server time. He, like myself, is guildless, but we tend to get into groups together and we accumulated a friends list that is pretty similar. So when I logged in he whispered me and we grouped up to hopefully get a run in.
Well, that didn't work out so well. We quickly got a group of four together, needing only a tank (as usual), but then the DPS Warrior dropped group without a word and then a few minutes later the Hunter begged out.
So we decided to simply work on his quest for the Abyssal Dukes in Silithus.
I'll be perfectly honest: as a Wrath baby, I'd never seen more than maybe a dozen people at one time in that zone until last night. The place was a nuthouse, as both Horde and Alliance groups were rep grinding in advance of the AQ Opening event. That made acquiring the gear to summon the elementals a bit harder than usual, as everybody was competing for the same Twilight's Hammer cultists that dropped the gear. But eventually we got through enough of the grind that my friend decided he was going to go to the auction house and get the last piece or two so we could summon the Abyssal Duke.
Yes, we were intending to try to two man it, as we didn't have any issues taking down the lesser elementals as a Resto Druid and a Rogue. However, before we could bug out to the AH, we paused to watch another pair (Warrior tank and Mage) in the process of taking on one of the Dukes.
When I saw the Warrior tank get launched by the Duke about a good couple hundred feet (in game), I said in chat "There's no way we could pull this off with just the two of us."
Apparently my friend thought the same thing, so he reached out to the two of them to see about joining up. He dropped group, got invited, and then he in turn invited me to the group.
It was then when I realized who the Warrior and Mage were.
I'd run with them back when we were all in the L20s and L30s through several instances.
"Hey guys! I've not seen you two in months!"
"Az!!"
"Hey Az!! How've you been?"
We spent a minute or two catching up and then we proceeded to summon and then take down the Duke, completing a quest that we started on 3+ hours ago.
We chatted a bit more then waved goodbye, going our separate ways.
It was then that I realized that I'd missed those guild type interactions.
***
To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not planning on joining a guild anytime soon. Not for a lack of invites, but because I'm trying to play on my terms. I'm not really interested in raiding, although I would like to follow the Onyxia line all the way through, and there are enough players out there that seem mystified by that premise*** that I'm not really interested in having to deal with that in a guild.
And there is still the matter of that middle school drama that even erupts on the LookingForGroup chat. I know enough good people throughout all of the major guilds on the server that when somebody trashes the guild on chat I have to resist the urge to step into the drama and tell people to not trash an entire guild based on the behavior of one or two people. "I'm not an assistant principal," I have to keep telling myself, "The guild can take care of themselves." Then I imagine what it'd be like having that guild name above Az or Card, having to defend myself from that crap, and I take a deep breath and say "no thanks" to joining a guild.
*This was pre-Azshandra (Retail Version) for reference.
**None of the guilds I was in was ever very large, so the concept of gigantic guilds of 200+ people just seems to be almost obscene. By comparison, the mini-Reds' elementary school consisted of roughly 450 students from Kindergarten through 5th Grade, so when you get to guild sizes of beyond 40-50 people you start to lose a connection to everybody in the guild.
***"You don't want to raid? But this is WoW!" was the answer I got when somebody asked me about joining a guild. Yeah, that guy didn't end up on my friends list.
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