Outside of my last post I haven’t mentioned World of Warcraft in quite a while, chiefly because I haven’t been playing it. In fact I had (finally) cancelled my account for the first time since launch mere months before the release of Mists of Pandaria, only reactivating long enough to level my main character up to 90 and complete a few miscellaneous end game goals such as grinding out a full set of PVP gear and some decent epic weapons. Now, with Warlords of Draenor on the horizon and the general urge to hit up an MMO again rising I dusted off my old characters and started to try to get into the the spirit of Warcraft once again. So far I’ve mostly spent time leveling up alts and PVPing with my main but one subject has been in my head a lot lately: guilds.
It’s no secret that playing with others can greatly enhance a gaming experience – seemingly everyone loves a bit of co-op. MMOs are ripe for this kind of thing as group gameplay is usually, at least to some degree, built into the core game systems. It’s odd, I’ve always been somewhat of a solo player in the MMO space. I know this sounds like a contradiction but I appreciate other people being around in the game world, making it feel more alive, and having the option to interact with them if and when I choose. That said, some of my favorite MMO memories have been with other people: all the way from meeting random players I eventually became friends with when PVPing in Ultima Online’s faction system (Minax for the win!) to daring coordinated zone raids in Planetside with The Praetorian Guard or cleaning house in Warhammer Online PVP scenarios with my guild there.
Even gameplay aside, I enjoyed those clans and guilds that had a high degree of “community” outside of the game. People that got along and even if they weren’t always on incredibly friendly terms but still felt like family all the same. One of my favorite ways to experience this was in private forums – in fact I selfishly volunteered to get TPG’s going and despite waxing and waning in activity over the years, they remained active throughout its lifetime. Even relatively recently as I looked for Age of Conan and then WAR guilds, a semi-active forum was one of my requirements. Sadly, between the push towards “social media” and the more instant gratification focused players that games like WoW have bred, it seems like private forums, or at least active ones, are becoming a thing of the past. You’d think they’d be more useful than ever with all of these serious raiding guilds and their complicated policies about looting and attendance and whatnot. *shrug*
You know, I’ve never really had a real guild in WoW which is pretty shocking considering how long I’ve played it despite it being a casual on and off kind of affair the entire time. When I started World of Warcraft I rolled with my old Planetside and America’s Army clan “The Praetorian Guard” of which virtually all of us were playing WoW. Unfortunately, it quickly became obvious that there weren’t really enough of us sticking around the same levels to really play together. That’s to say we didn’t have huge numbers in the first place but when some of us were powerleveling through the game and others playing multiple characters or moving at a much slower pace we couldn’t exactly run dungeons or even quest together. We didn’t have this problem in games like Planetside or Star Wars Galaxies where your level didn’t so strictly dictate what you could or could not do in-game but in WoW it was crippling.
Later, when we started reaching max level we soon discovered that there weren’t enough of us to experience end game “raiding” and not all of us were even that interested in doing so in the first place. This became a bit of a contentious issue which threatened to pull the guild apart as some of our main players plotted moving their “mains” to other guilds. I personally saw this as quite shortsighted and selfish but in hindsight I was being a bit shortsighted and selfish myself even if my heart was in the right place. I don’t really know what the ideal solution would have been, honestly – some of us wanted to be in a hardcore raiding guild and some of us didn’t. If we could have done some major recruiting we might have survived but our position as a guild, both internally and in the makeup of our particular WoW server, didn’t make that a very realistic possibility. Soon most of our top members (including our leader and practically all of the officers, tragically) went separate directions in the pursuit of bigger and better loot.
Since then my WoW experience has mostly revolved around either very casual solo playing (questing, PVPing, and working on professions and achievements) or playing with a few specific friends. In fact other than a few brief excursions into guilds with other games (often mentioned here) my multiplayer gaming as a whole has been pretty similar to that. Other than the occasional bit of pick up grouping when doing world PVP and the like I've barely got a glimpse of guild gameplay.
Sitting there with my WoW account thinking of the looming release of the latest expansion it only recently occurred to me: I really, really, REALLY miss being in an active clan/guild. It’s hard to describe to those who haven’t done it but playing a game, particularly an MMO, with a friendly group can be an incredibly social experience. It becomes a regular thing, something akin to a group of inseparable friends who spend almost every evening or weekend together. In this respect even the most casual/social group is still better than none at all providing you’re all friendly and get along. So, I’ve decided… I’m going in!
There are a few challenges with this. First, despite WoW’s immense popularity spawning all kinds of 3rd party guild finding sites and Blizzard themselves having added a in-game guild finding feature in Cataclysm it can be pretty difficult to really a gauge a guild from the outside. In my case I’m looking for an adult but not necessarily “family friend” guild of cool people. Even if the guild you’re applying to sounds AMAZING on paper you won’t really know how well your personalities mesh until you’re really in it. This is another reason I like forums – they’re a great way to try to figure out what the overall personality of the group is like before you even talk to any of them. One of my suckier community experiences was applying for a Battlefield 1942 clan that seemed to appeal to my tastes, making it through the application process (which included an intense and challenging tryout) only to discover that I had little in common with any of the members and, in fact, most of them were giant douchebags. Ugh!
Another problem is that I’m definitely not looking for some “serious” guild. I want a group I can socialize and level my alts in without constantly being criticized for not meeting some raiding, arena, or rated battleground criteria or item level or something… and I definitely don’t want a guild that makes massive demands of my schedule. Unfortunately most WoW guilds present themselves this way regardless of how casual friendly they really are. That’s fine though, I’d rather not be part of a guild where non-raiders (or whatever) are treated as second class citizens or something. Casual guilds in their various forms, or even social or “leveling” guilds aren’t too hard to come by regardless. The problem is that many of them are horribly unstructured which is a bit on the extreme side of what I’m looking for – a group of random people who simply all share the game guild tag is not my idea of a good guild.
My biggest problem is this area is probably simply that my server is dead. Fucking dead. Elune on the Horde side is a virtual ghost town these days. In fact, checking the Realm Pop statistics it's the least populace Horde realm in the entire US region. Wow! There are definitely active guilds there, sure, but my selection is relatively slim to start with and by the time I factor in what I’m looking for I don’t have much wiggle room to be picky with. I’ve thought about simply starting my own guild but that contains more variables than I’m comfortable trying to deal with at the moment. After a brief cast of my net out into the cesspool of various guild recruitment forums I've really only found one guild that seemed to strongly meet my requirements: have a decent, semi-roleplayed name, have a good community feel with mature, decent people, have good out-of-game website and/or forums, and have a decent amount of active players online without being one of those guilds who just blindly invites anyone without a guild tag. Unfortunately that guild is both on another realm AND Alliance instead of Horde.
Thus I begin considering the potentially expensive process of moving servers and changing realms. Actually, more troubling than the money is the fact that I've been playing Horde since beta. I love the Horde! I mean, I've had Alliance characters before, don't get me wrong, but ever since falling in love with series in Warcraft III playing anything other than a green skinned brutal yet honorable orc as my "main" in WoW has never crossed my mind... and playing a fucking Human? Forget about it! Ignoring the travesties brought by the Alliance on my beloved Horde and my own personal defeats to them in the various battlegrounds of the world, I don't really identify with or otherwise like many of the races on the Alliance side. They really are quite different. Most of all I'm worried that as I do my banking in Ironforge or Stormwind I'll have a sudden, inescapable feeling that I'm some kind of lowdown traitorous, sell-out bastard. Ugh!
Still, it'll be nice having people to chat with and an auction house with, you know, actual stuff on it... 