This weekend I came to a rather sad conclusion. The guild I’m in is going nowhere. They’re all great people, good pvp’ers and very helpful – but they’re going nowhere. By nowhere, I mean they’re not going to be progressing past the Outland 5 mans. Individuals in the guild might see Kara, but it will only be because at some point down the road, they’re going to attune themselves and jump to a different guild. Beyond that? Forget it. Right now – I have good money that says more than half of them will never hit 60 – much less 70.
Now in the past, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest. For the two years or so that I have played this game I have been an unabashed master of ALTs. *Progression* was a dirty word for me and the skum-sucking bastards that left guilds in order to do more end-game were the worst sort of WoW-player imaginable. Now, after all this time and all the drama-dragons and end-game bashing I’ve experienced, I find myself in a particular quandary.
The coin has been flipped. My alts languish, my main levels at a dizzying rate. I want to raid.
Progression. I crave progression. I want to sheath my Warlord’s Bludgeon in the brain-pans of instance bosses, I want to breathe the rarefied air of the places only a small percentage of WoW players go, I want to be a champion of the naru and to stand, calm and proud in T6 gear while mongoose enchants flicker and spark off of paired epic battle-hammers.
Seriously though, I’d just be happy if I could get my guild-mates off of their alts long enough to get through Slave Pens.
I know the life of a raider isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be. The guild infighting, waiting for slots to open up in a run, gear drama, dkp, wipes, repair bills. Worse it probably also means that my enhancement Shaman will have to retire his matched battlehammers and replace his +STR and +AP gear with +Healing a shield and a kilt of flowery-heals. But I’m ready for it.
I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m in the military and that I’m going to deploy this year. I will spend a good 9-12 months with no WoW at all. This time constraint coupled with my ALT-itis going into remission seems to have galvanized me. I have goals – I want to run instances. I want to progress. This sudden focus has caused me to look at the game and the guild I’m in with new eyes.
The irony alone is enough to make anyone who knows me to /snork a little. Most of them know me from my time helping found and *build* an Alliance guild that is currently running two full time teams in Kara and progressing through Zul’Aman. They will progress further. It’s just a matter of time. I raided with this crew back in the pre-BC days and enjoyed it as much as someone that would rather be on their alt possibly could. In the end, I moved on – they were focused – I was not. If I were willing to go back to my Alliance toons and finish leveling them I know I’d have a raid slot on their B-team. I know the company would be good and the drama minimal.
But I’m Horde at heart. I’ve committed a lot of time and effort to leveling my Shaman and continue to chug along, my current guild tag still in place. Every night I try to schedule an instance. We have enough mid 60’s that we could be running a myriad of Outland’s plentiful 5-man dungeons – but we rarely do. My favorite druid healer has rediscovered her troll-hunter and is pew-pew-pewing in Alterac Valley. The rest of the guild are either folks that just can’t seem to get out of the 30-39 bracket, or they’ve shelved their higher level toons in favor of grinding battleground rewards in 10-19 Warsong Gulch. Our guild leader has been benched at 59 fully intent on gathering both warlord’s 1-H swords and the full epic pvp armor set before heading into Outlands. He’s been at it for about three weeks now. I fully expect him to start (another) alt either halfway through this work, or immediately upon achieving his goal. He’ll never tank or off-tank an instance with us.
The most bitter pill to swallow in all of this is that each of these players is me. They’re doing things I’ve already done. Just because I’m suddenly all bug-up-the-butt concerned with raiding and running instances doesn’t mean they need to change their game to suit me. It also means that I know how little luck I’m going to have in trying to get (any) of them to follow a schedule. I’ve tried. When go-time comes around the players that committed to the run are nowhere to be found. One or two show up late and are obviously hesitant when I shoot them an invite. No, no – our healer hasn’t logged in yet. Yeah – go ahead and play on your ALT – I’ll let you know when she logs on and we can go.
Normally, I end up pugging the instance – or having to forgo it altogether. The necessary team-members either never show up or show up so late that it’s obvious they never intended to go in the first place. Lately, when I try to schedule a run, my queries are met with silence. It’s that nasty silence – the kind you get when your newest level 15 recruit is crying on guild chat for someone to run them through Wailing Caverns. Everyone heard you – and everyone is feigning afk in hopes you’ll just go away.
Part of me figures I just need to relax. Spend the next few months finishing the drive to 70 (not much longer now) and play casually until the deployment hits. After all, the game will be here when I return and there are *other* things to do besides WoW. Another part of me wants to at least get a shot at running some regular instances with folks that know what they’re doing. I don’t need the perfect tabard and I’m not particularly worried about dkp. In fact – I can even forgive a really pretentious Latin guild name if it means that I can clear Underbog and Slave Pens together in one night.
So give me grief, call me a faithless guild jumping hypocrite that’s getting exactly what he deserves. Who knows, you might even be right. But until then, I’m looking for some guildies that know how to finish what they start and who can keep even the most minimal of schedules. I’ve been in plenty of fly-by-night “family friendly casual raiding guilds” and know that most of them (are) family friendly and (aren’t) raiding guilds. A the same time I doubt I can commit to the brutal schedules of the hard-corp raiders.
If you are:
- Horde
- Raid 3 nights a week between 8-12 CST
- Not Ass-Hats
- Need an enhancement shammy or even a (cough) resto shammy … Heck – I even have a 65 warrior that I could toss in on the bargain
Give me yell. We can tear stuff up together.
Zany,
That sounds like a pretty sucky situation, and one that I’m afraid we have to leave up to the other readers for an answer. I am one of those alt-aholics and really want to run end-game without it taking over my life.
One suggestion is to make a WordPress site/forum for your guild to get Google hits for people looking for guilds that match your ideology and methodology.
Feel free to link up anything you create here and I’ll see that it gets posted. If there is enough interest, I’ll do a guild recruiting post for those interested in plugging their guild.
Growl finally says hello from Afghanistan
/hello
It’s interesting to see how much this thread has grown since I wrote it all that time ago. The problem of guilds, guild hopping, and progression haven’t gone away – but I like to think that as a player, I’ve gathered some perspective. First off – I’m deployed to Afghanistan right now and no matter what – full on raiding just isn’t in my future. We’ve managed to hook up some frankensteined satellite Internet on our FOB that works relatively well, but even with that – on a good day – my ping sits around 900-1200ms.
Ouch.
Still – I’ve managed to log on a couple times and chat with friends – and have a sinister plan to corner the crafting market with one of my toons. Farming and playing alts are easy to do even with high ping. My battleground endeavors are probably stymied until I get home though – no Conquerer title for Skychaser it seems.
Anyway – about that perspective – the urge to progress has dulled (obviously) but the love of the game has not. I popped into one of my favorite places in all of Outland (Nagrand) and simply road around the countryside on my Frostwolf. I found that I missed the simple act of being in that world, the magnificent vistas, the islands in the air. I even tried to stop and pet a Talbuk and got a taste of its horns for my trouble.
The point (if there is one) is that sometimes it’s good to step back and love the game for the game. The grind gets to all of us and the progression bug is sure to get to me once again when I finally get back home. I think I can manage to survive it though. In the end – I never left my guild – and they’ve grown and we’ve gone more places. I’m happier with that decision ultimately – as good people are hard to find – and ultimately – for me – they make the game.