Once upon a guild

This is a bump from Pike, the wonderful hunter blogger.

I think its a sad comment that life only ends in tragedy which is death. So to with guilds. Guilds come and go, and the coming is a glorious thing. I was instrumental in a guild-first KT downing last weekend on my druid; not my guild, someone elses. Still, it was fun to see them get the achievements and the loot.

Anyway, my first guild was Forces of Nature. I joined at level 10 on my first character, and i thought there was some long app process. Nope, just /ginvite. Well, it was a leveling guild and the GL was a nice guy, but a kid. Eventually the kids outnumbered the adults (which were three), and the GL got burned out (that was a key mover), so the guild just kinda dissentigrated.

Then there was Ancient Ones. My adult friend (husband/wife duo) moved over there, and they were a big raiding guild (full of fail, it turns out). But they were raiding! And in Kara! And I got to do kara. Oh did i do kara. Endless, endless runs of kara. This was the guild where it would take 30 hours of raiding a week to get to the last boss. Pulls took 30 minutes. The RL would disappear for 5-10 minutes each pull (he was the GL and MT, another problem). Eventually I got sick of wasting my life in kara (at that point we were raiding nearly every night, until 2 or 3 am)

So I transfered to DoubleFisted! A new guild, just starting up, full of people who knew what they were doing. Kara was cleared in 3 hours! I was rejoicing! We had defined raid times, 3x a week for 4 hours. Raids started and ended on time. That was in February of last year I think. We blew through T5 and beelined into T6, downing bosses every week just about. Still, there was alot of bosses. Then we were in Black Temple! And that was just awesomeness, the best thing there was in the game. You were Someone to be in BT. And we got up to Illidan! But time was against us, the great nerf of 2.4 hit about a week after we got to Illidan. They nerfed him so hard that we one-shotted him. About that time raiding collapsed on pretty much every server. See, raiders love challenge and new content, and we all knew our raid loot was going to be obsolete very soon (actually not so much). Anyway, when the challenge disappeared, the reason for raiding became lost. Still "we must raid". So we did, until wraith hit.

I think somewhere in here my RL best friend started playing horde (why'd it have to be horde?) , and started a guild Doctors of Philosophy in Earthen Ring. Now, I was really busy with the raiding, and leveling up another alliance toon, about fully commited. Yet playing with my best friend was tons of fun, so i joined him, started from nothing, and rolled...another hunter. Yes two, I dont know why. Anyway we formed a guild (actually he did), and i came onboard and eventually did more and more in teh guild. But for quite a while i would only play maybe once a week, while he was actively playing every day.

Wraith hit, and things changed, as I knew they would. The alliance raiding guild changed its nature, to a dark, ugly beast. The GL who quit and was an egomaniac, came back to lead the guild. Suddenly the guild was about server firsts, getting uber geared, and god help you if you are not in the raiding group. I decided at that point that I didn't want to raid like that. I worked extremely hard for 2-3 weeks, playing 40/60 hours a week, just to get to max level so I can raid with them (and i was already several weeks behind them). So i missed the boat, barely, and missed out on all the excitement. Suddenly I was a noob again, and my good friend on the guild took off, one by one. It had gotten too serious for them.

So i played more with the earthen ring guild, and lo and behold, the server just went insane from all the people coming back. 30 minute queues each night became the norm. So when server transfers opened, the hardcore of us jumped ship. At this point it was me, Jim, Jen, Tsu, Pesti, and we all would play together with whatever instance, just to do it. We did strat and scholo and other things. Was alot of fun. Then we reformed in dawnbringer, a new server. And oh lord what have we done?

I login to find a guild full of complete strangers. Dawnbringer in the early days was a melting pot; everyone was guildless. So we advertised and got just a ton of people. With such explosive growth, things happen. The hardcore of our old guild wondered what we had done, and were scared to interact with the new people. Some drifted away. Newbies came, drama occured because some had different ideals for the guild; the guild schismed. Now things are mostly petering out. We have a good group, but it gets harder and harder to run naxx with enough tanks and healers. People leave, but aren't replaced. I imagine we will need to recruit more people or stop running naxx alltogether. Now I find myself as GL, running the show, making the decisions, handling logistics. I'm pretty burned out too but want some escape from my current mad life. So, into the trenches once more.