[Cue western music]
It was a hot day in Shattrath. A real scorcher. Tumbleweeds blew across the lower city pavement as a few lone dweebs argued semantics in [2. Trade].
The regular crew in the World’s End Tavern hoisted their brews, and cursed the heat of the day. Even the plaintive cries of Murdo, explaining that “It’s a dry heat!” did not lessen their annoyance.
Suddenly, a figure appeared, sillouetted in the door of the bar. She wore brown leathers, and held a staff in her hands that writhed with TENTACLES!
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Clearly, this was a figure of power and menace. You did see the tentacles, right?
As she entered the tavern, the crowd leaned forward, eager to see which guild this figure of power and menace hailed from.
Was it Divine Might ? Legatum Ignavis? The Bloodship?
No! The crew drew back in horror, for before them stood not a proud and valiant raider, vanquisher of the end game foe, but instead one of the unwashed, the unclean… the Guildless!
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Welcome one and all to a new day in the life of Windshadow and Cassieann.
Tonight, I made the break and left Legatum Ignavis, to head off into the cold, lonely world.
I doubt there will be any lessons for anyone to learn in any of this.
I just found myself in a difficult position, without even understanding how I got there in the first place.
I’ve mentioned before how I had left a previous raiding guild because the raiding tempo was too high. But I wasn’t going to leave my new guild, no sir.
So, WTF, you might ask?
It all comes down to a final epiphany, where I suddenly realized last night that I had absolutely no reason to be frustrated with the way things were going in the guild. It wasn’t a problem with the guild, it was a problem with my vision of what the guild was supposed to be.
Back when I was invited to join the guild, there were very few players that would be online at any given time. The highest aspiration any guildie could have was running in a ten man raid like Karazhan, and those were very lofty heights for a casual player like me.
Guild ranks start with Bum, go to Little Bum, Big Bum, True Bum and so on. The Guild Leader, the Raid Leader, the other players, were all fairly relaxed and laid back people. They were very skilled in playing their characters, but didn’t take things too seriously, they didn’t get all wound up. There would generally be a scheduled Karazhan raid every week, as the guild worked to master the instance, but other than that playtime was entirely unstructured and anything was fair game. And they obviously understood about family, the Guild Leader’s wife plays in the same guild, and he has a son old enough to raid (on another server).
This was an ideal situation for me. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again; I’m not about big raids. I only want to play with friends, or people that could possibly become friends. I do not want to play with asshats, and when you get 25 dedicated hardcore raiders together for a run, you HAVE asshats. You get arrogant, bossy, judgmental and condescending people that make me want to punch my monitor. Fun? Hell no.
So here was a guild that raided a few times a week at most, and had great people in it. A casual, friendly guild that sometimes raids, right?
Right there was my problem. In my mind, that was the heart of Legatum Ignavis. And I was dead wrong.
No one ever said that was what we were about. The Guild Leader and Raid Leader and others often said that what they wanted to do was get more people in the guild, advance through the content and take on the raids someday.
I just didn’t internalize that. Not emotionally. I heard the words, but I saw the actual gameplay, I saw the slackers (that I have ranted about in the past), I saw the casual attitude, and thought, “Yes, you have high aspirations, but it takes more than 7 solid players to raid”.
Now, we fast forward over many months. The guild has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams… but not our Guild or Raid Leaders’ dreams. We are finally reaching the point they always planned for us to get to.
I see Zul’Aman as the turning point. Once Zul’Aman was released, the solid players went into Zul’Aman and took on the challenge of beating the heck out of it. As the core players have progressed, other players on the server have joined in to see that new content. And as new players come in, more runs can be scheduled, more bosses attempted, and new progression is made. And new success brings in even more people in a domino effect. The better we do, the more folks want to join in.
Nothing succeeds like success, and I want to make sure the record shows that the people that made it happen, who started this and stuck with it, who never quit, never wavered, and never lost sight of forging Legatum Ignavis into a hardcore raiding guild were Whirlish, Joppers, Kellas, Rynadur, Gerolan and Elystia.
Others, like Occulus and Nawat took the guild a long way, but eventually had to leave for personal reasons. But those people started it, and those people stayed, and everything the guild is today is due to their hard work and dedication.
But this is the key to the whole thing. All those folks were up front about what they wanted; a hardcore raiding guild.
All I wanted was a casual, fun guild… and I had blinders on as things changed around me. I just didn’t see it happen.
As more people came into the guild, every single one of them came to raid. The guild is an absolute success.
A month ago, we had Karazhan on partial farm, usually being too lazy to take down Netherspite and Nightbane, and had the first two bosses of Zul’Aman down. The largest number of players online at one time, during peak hours, was 17.
Last night, while two Karazhan teams were in and moving forward, there were forty level 70 players online… at 11:00 PM on a weeknight.
Times change fast.
You know how overwhelmed Cassie and I have been feeling. Cassie has felt like she could sit some stuff out, but I have been just taking on the additional raids, and continuing to push. I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated, to almost rage proportions, when I try like hell to schedule raids in advance on the website to instill some order and stability to the way we did things, only to have raids thrown up at the last minute, taking up my few nights off.
This is where I was dead wrong. As a reader pointed out yesterday, the majority of players on the server would kill to be where I was today, a counted on, relied on, stable and welcomed member of a successful raiding guild, amember that had been there from the start.
But I still felt, emotionally, that I was in a casual guild. I don’t WANT to be required to play that much. Five, six days a week when you count multiple nights of ten man content are just insanely way too much for me. I still felt that this was all a mistake, that we were being way too busy and raiding way too much.
But we weren’t. The guild is raiding just fine, and the players are loving it and kicking ass.
It was only me that had my head up my butt about our plans and where we were going.
I finally realized this last night, when I was talking to our Guild Leader. Something he said, when he was talking about why he had to remove a player, finally made something click in my head.
He has been, all along, taking what actions he thought were necessary to make the guild a strong place for serious hardcore raiding.
And those of us that are casual players at heart are not going to be of much help in the long run. Not if I resent the time I’m spending away from my son.
Like I said, I finally ‘got it’ last night.
So I had to leave today.
It should come as no surprise that I have some strong opinions. But I am also decisive. If I think something through to figure out what is right for me to do, I act on it. Period. I make the decision and I take the consequences for my actions.
And I will not screw people over.
I knew today that I could not stay in a hardcore raiding guild. It’s not good enough to say “Oh, I’ll just not raid some nights.” A hardcore raiding guild needs dedicated, reliable people. Especially in the officer class. Anyone who is not pulling their own weight is not helping the guild progess.
So I knew I was going to go.
I think that when a person no longer intends to stay in a guild, the person is being dishonest if they remain guilded, coasting along, while looking for and applying to other guilds. That’s crap. If you’re in a guild, you are part of that guild. If your heart ain’t there, get the hell out and stop wasting peoples’ time.
But there was another reason why I could not wait another day.
Tonight was a Gruuls Lair run. And I was going to tank. I hadn’t signed up, but everyone knew I’d be there.
And I have max DKP. Most other people in my bracket have gotten their loot or used their DKP.
And chances were very high that my Tier 4 shoulder token would drop from high King Maulgor.
I WILL NOT be a person that takes an end-game raiding progression armor piece and then /gquits.
Not now, not ever.
So that set the time frame for me to quit. I had to take action prior to the raid so that I didn’t take loot that needs to serve the guild, and also so they had time to organize around a new tank.
I got onto Teamspeak and was lucky enough to be able to get the Guild Leader and Raid Leader and some other officers and good friends on so I could tell them in person, or at least in voice, what I was doing and why. It is the best way, I think, to make sure that, as much as possible, misunderstandings are avoided.
Then I let everyone online at the time in guild chat know what I was doing, and to thank everyone for basically kicking ass and making my time in the guild be so damn cool.
I have a lot of friends in Legatum Ignavis, and I wish them all the best. I know they will continue to kick ass without me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss them.
I’ve been through this once before. We can all say we’ll keep in touch, but the fact is that when you aren’t bumping into people on guild chat or Teamspeak, you tend to form new friendships in the game, especially when the friends are hardcore raiders. You log in, see they are online, go to say hi, and then note they are busy in SSC or Gruuls, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll whisper them when they get out.”
It’s sad, but true. I hope I will see them around and have the pleasure of chatting with them again.
But, it is done, and there you have it.
Big Bear Butt is now back in my little alt guild Sidhe Devils along with Cassieann, there to bum around mostly solo or in two person teams, doing quests and dailies and the other things that the game has to offer that are not WoW.
In time, I’m sure I will find some new friends, and they will want to have some fun in 5 man content, and we’ll start the guild game anew.
But let’s be honest here… I doubt I’ll ever find a guild that fits our rather unusual dream.
“Looking For Guild; Feral Druid and Rogue on Kael’thas looking for a guild that is not raiding hardcore, and doesn’t ever really want to. Must consist of mature, friendly people, preferrably married couples or having children, but being emotionally mature and possessed of compassion and patience will do nicely. Interests include Karazhan runs for group activites once every week or two, occasional heroics and regular 5 man instances, doing dailies and chatting and questing. Must be willing to be patient when we have to go beddy bye time during the week. Must love Irish music and Guinness. Be prepared to have anything and everything that you do be recorded or blogged about without warning. PST.”
Yeah, we are so totally going to be guildless forever, lol.
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