Guild’s dead. Oh well.
———-
I could just leave the post at that, but it would probably annoy some people. To understand why the guild went kablooey we have to go back a few months to before LK……
Anyone who was in a raiding guild pre LK, that wasn’t the top guild on their server or close to it, will understand what my guild was going through at the time. People were getting burned out, our raid roster had become a revolving door, as burn outs quit and frustrated raiders jumped to guilds ahead of us in progression so they could see Sunwell Plateau. Meanwhile, the people that stuck with it, along with a half dozen or so friends from another guild that had imploded under the stress were busy trying to finish off Black Temple before it got nerfed. We came very very close. I really do believe that if the nerf patch had come one week later, we would have downed Illidan pre nerf. Then there was some down time as people relaxed a little, the nerfed content was so easy we could full clear BT in a couple hours, so we cut our raiding schedule back. Right around this time I was getting ready to move, so I started spending less time playing.
Then Lich King hits, while I am literally in mid move. I think I was unpacking stuff when I took a break to go buy the expansion. I wasn’t able to play much at first and I could see that our quild was quickly breaking up into three groups. About a third of our raiders, including some of our most competent players speed leveled their way to 80 and started pugging raids with the server’s top raiding guild. Another third, including me, took a more leisurely pace, but were still leveling every day or two, but we weren’t in a big rush to start raiding. The remainder of our raiders took the exp launch as an extended break and looked like they would need a couple of months to hit 80.
Time for a little confession. When I made the decision to move back to Vegas and focus on my career, I knew that WoW would be taking a back seat. I was pretty sure that if I raided at all it would be a once or twice a week thing, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted the responsibility of leading raids or even a guild, because I wasn’t going to let anything slide in my real life as a result of playing too much. I was sure, however, that if I told people this before the exp hit, that the guild would quickly fall apart. I hoped that if I just quietly stepped back, people would step forward to lead raids, and they would find a way to keep the guild together. It seemed a shame to have come so far in BC with the late start we got, and then just give up on the guild.
But one thing I have learned over the years I’ve been playing this game, is that when you face the stress of raiding, only two types of guilds work.
- You can either collect a group of very good like minded players, who work together because they are all focused on fast progression.
- Or you can have a guild of varying levels of skill and commitment, with personalities that occasionally clash, and the guild only works with strong leadership.
We were the second type, and the less I played, the more I fell behind in leveling, the faster the guild began to unravel. It started slowly. One of our top raiders wanted to switch from healing on his priest to tanking on his warrior, and we were pretty full of tanks, plus he had issues with some of our guildies so he left when LK hit and started a small guild with a couple of friends. They were all good players, and some of our best raiders started running heroics and 10 mans with them when they hit 80. Pretty soon messages started popping up on our forums.
“It’s been fun, I’ll miss you all, but I’m not really happy here anymore, blah, blah, blah. Bye”
Some people freak out when members leave a guild, turning from best friends to sworn enemies instantly, but my policy has always been, go where you’re happy. The guild doesn’t pay your monthly fee, and any kind of loyalty that people think is owed to a guild in a video game, is laughable. So good, luck. Stay in touch. And once it started, the end was inevitable. Pretty soon we had lost about half of our really good raiders. The ones that show up knowing the fights in advance, put up great numbers, and always do their jobs. By the time we started raiding 25 man Naxx, our roster was so full of amateurs, we couldn’t clear the place.
So now the hardcore raiders who had stuck around, started getting pissed off. People started leaving without posting such nice messages. More along the lines of:
“You fucking suck at raiding. I hope you all die in a fire. I’m out”
Then the people that were left started finding real life stuff that was suddenly more important than WoW. I had been doing the same for a month already, so I could understand the appeal. Pretty soon the guild was a ghost town. No one logging on, raids not happening, no one posting on the forums, except to say goodbye or bitch about no one being on. And then this week, a couple of the officers called it quits, guys who had been there since the first Kara kill. And Sin, a horde raiding guild on US-Icecrown, quietly became a casual friends and family guild.
R.I.P.
19 responses so far ↓
1 Larísa // Jan 21, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Sad story. Its so weired the mechanism of guilds and guild life. I’ll never ever fully understand it. You spend so much time together. You fight, you laugh, you’re grinded against each other, almost like a family. And suddenly it all vanishes, gone in the wind like it had never existed. Only memories left. Oh well. You’ve made your choice already - a wise one - but I can still understand the pain you must be feeling. Even though you’re an “angry” hardcore raid leader…
2 Superdead // Jan 21, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Wow - I’m a casual reader of your site (ha), and see SIN all the time…sorry about the implosion. Best of luck to you (and if you ever need a priest…hit me up).
3 Jonny // Jan 21, 2009 at 8:29 pm
/pours a bottle of whine on the ground for my peeps
4 nordor // Jan 21, 2009 at 8:36 pm
all i can say is we tried. would have been better if i could been there more, retarded bosses will do that.
Its really sad to see all our hard work (pre 2.4 kael kill, kinda slow but we started very late) go to waste. However, knowing that we managed to clear what we did, with the complete tards that we had, probably made me a much better raider then i could have ever been being in a top notch guild.
thank you all for the experience, it was fun while it lasted.
5 jirschi // Jan 22, 2009 at 1:43 am
whats your plan now^^ moving on and trying to catch a place in an other raid guild? Or just playing on with random guys / friendlist?
6 freelancerbob // Jan 22, 2009 at 3:32 am
My sympathies. My guild was of a similar progression and attitude to yours, but fortunately we have several strong leaders, rather than just 1. I’m sure your whole crew will find another ship to sail on soon enough. Good luck with it all angry raid leader.
7 Ronboar // Jan 22, 2009 at 6:22 am
Hmmm…
My guild has been close to collapsing also…Now it’s so incredibly casual that we will get destroyed at the first hint of a challenge.
Sometimes new air is good for everybody. Especially if it’s retard-free new air…
8 Darraxus // Jan 22, 2009 at 9:49 am
The previous guild I was in was a guild that raided BT etc and had been together for a long time. We had the same thing happen. A few powerleveled to 80, started pugging heroics and raids, and eventually left to join the groups they were pugging with. This led to more and more people leaving until the core members started leaving as well. It probably didnt help that the GL kicked out everybodys alts. That guild is back raiding again as several of the old members returned.
9 Flour // Jan 22, 2009 at 10:09 am
meaningful comment: RL > WoW
10 Bradley Nash // Jan 23, 2009 at 10:03 am
Sucks man. I enjoyed reading this blog. When I started WoW I was casual to the extreme. I started with BC and it took me 2 years to hit 70. 2 fkn years!! But then I got in my rl friend’s guild and got hooked like I never thought possible. We stopped raiding a month before LK after doing The Eye one time, and whiping on lurker (we’re not supposed to talk about that though, kind of like how we’re not supposed to talk about whiping on chess). So it was cool to read about actual raiding. I hope you at least get in good with another guild, so even if you aren’t leading you can still bitch about stupid crap.
11 Jarkatel // Jan 23, 2009 at 3:50 pm
was an amazing run for as long as we kept it together but with the mix of 10000000 new raid guilds and our lack of ability to recruit nonretards it just didn’t happen i wish it hadn’t of fallen apart. Being as besides the guild leader i think i was one of the last people in sin that had been around since kara ./tear
12 Misamane // Jan 23, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Lol! Wiping on chess!!! Rofl!!!
Yeah…my raid group in my last guild…we still talk, but we don’t talk about that either
hehehe. We went down hard at chess once, and it was hilarious. Classy times.
13 Meugly // Jan 24, 2009 at 3:20 am
Bummer things went sideways over there. I think there will always be shakeups after an expansion, but I wasn’t expecting Sin to be a casualty.
I was looking forward to the posts you would have had in a few weeks as the boredom of Naxx farming with nothing new to kill set in!
We are going to be taking our alts to fight the impending boredom, all alt Naxx runs! I think a couple of your gang might come along as well. Heck, come along and blow some stuff up as a bunch of pretty good raiders, playing classes they have never raided on, and undergeared to boot, unleash chaos. Probably mostly on ourselves!
14 Oriniwen // Jan 27, 2009 at 2:21 pm
We had a rocky journey into WotLK as well, and lost s few members. It felt bad at the time,but to be honest, we lost the members that were causing all the drama and now there is no more drama, just dead bosses.
It was a miserable, nasty Decemeber, though and we did come very very close to disbanding the guild.
I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t make it through the tough times. I’d love to offer you a spot in Imposs, but you’re a dirty Hordie, so I don’t think it would work out
15 Tassular // Jan 28, 2009 at 6:07 pm
wow this reminds me. i had a frined who was in the best raiding guild on the server, one day just BANG! the guild was gone and 20 ppl (inclouding the guild master) was deleted. and dident exist more. it was a dark day for that server… that day we did not yell ” For the hord!” ..
16 world of warcraft guilds // Feb 12, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Sorry to hear about this. Always sad to hear about guilds breaking up.
17 Lauran // Mar 19, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Sorry to hear about the break up man. I follow the blog regular, makes me chuckle, even though I’m on another server. Our guild is really type 2, and makes me thankful I think we’ve never let ourselves become the first type. Thanks for posting,
18 Rob // Mar 23, 2009 at 11:12 am
Sorry to hear about the break up. My story is earily similar. First, know I’m in two guilds, a ‘casual’ horde guild started with my RL friend, and my serious alliance guild. Things were more or less fine for a year, as i would raid on the alliance guild and level alts on the horde guild. Then Wraith hit, and I was like you in the middle of a move. All my alliance guild-mates (well 90%) powerleveled to 80 within a week or two, and I got to see all the guild firsts as I blazed to 80 as much as possible. Those were nights of 5,6,7 hours just leveling like mad. Finally, i hit 80, but then I started evening classes. So, basically I stopped raiding, and a few weeks ago I even server transfered from a guild that was #1 in progression. That really sucked, but they got to be too much for me, very angry and serious.
Meanwhile, my horde guild moved with a bunch of others to a new server, and immediately got a ton of people (we’re now one of the largest guilds), and started doing naxx. Well, i only have alts on that server, but it was decided I should be RL, having the experience and all. At this point though, I was in no rush to powerlevel to 80 yet again for a bunch of people so I can lead naxx raids. Another guy who was a recent transfer ended up leading the raids. Finally I get to 80, go on a raid, decided i really didn’t like the new guy, and have only raided sporadically since then.
Now with 3.1 almost here, all of our well-geared Naxx raiders decided to move on to greener pastures, having been killed by a twice or thrice weekly raid schedule. So now, long story short, I have no raiding to do at all! Unless I pug! Which I’ll probably do tomorrow. Sigh. It’s sad that naxx is such a guild killer and its pretty dang easy too.
19 Chris // May 15, 2009 at 4:02 am
“”The guild doesn’t pay your monthly fee, and any kind of loyalty that people think is owed to a guild in a video game, is laughable. So good, luck. Stay in touch.”"
when i think about an older rant you said something like “staying in touch and we stay friends are just words when people leave guild”. out of the guild is out of your mind…. what changed? becoming soft?
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