Tuesday 28 August 2012

Back in the World (of Warcraft)


I'm back.  Feels like I've been away for years, although it's closer to 4 Months since I frequented Azeroth's hallowed pixels.

Whilst I've been gone several things have happened:

  • I've all but forgotten how to play World of Warcraft
  • My guild has stopped raiding entirely
  • Many of the people I know have left the guild including an officer
  • The remaining officers in my absence have recruited some social members
  • The forums have become an archive of a time when things happened in guild, with old and outdated posts showing the guild for what it is: a (nearly) dead guild.

None of this is surprising, I spent most of Cataclysm building the guild from nothing.  We were just 4 friends when we began, through a mixture of spamming /2 and forum posts and running instances we finally carved out a raid team in a little corner of our server where we had some of the best times we all ever had in game.  With very little drama.  However, when we lost 3 of our main healers just after conquering the first heroic boss in Dragonsoul, there were some tough decisions to be made.  I myself was feeling WOW burn out I had ever felt in my 7 years playing the game, the summer was looming over us, the content was old, and the grind to recruit, train and gear up and entire healing squad was too much for me at the time.  I kept running casual raids with the people we could muster up but we did not recruit the level of players in healers roles that would have been required for further progression.  Instead largely having to rely on offspec's and alts to put a team through normal Dragonsoul.   So as the weeks turned into months and there was still no word on Mists of Pandaria's release date people stopped showing up and raids got cancelled and eventually I called it quits and informed the guild that I wouldn't be scheduling or leading raids anymore, they of course were free to do so and should do if they wanted.  I was on sabbatical.

And so I have returned to find things not entirely as I left them.  This is entirely fair, people are paying money to pay the game and they have the right to move on if they are not getting what they want out of their guild.  It does leave me with a challenge on my hands though, and some questions:

  • Am I up for building a guild again?
  • Am I up for raid leading and raiding on a regular basis again?
  • Will any of the member s that left have had such a good time when in our guild that they will come back?
  • How will I ensure that if I want to take a breather again that the guild doesn't fall apart again?

I'm sure the answer to the first 2 is yes, the third is I hope so and the last one I have plans for also. 

To that end I have gotten stuck in and sorted out our forums, cleaned out some of the old and obsolete stuff, old raid tactics, posts from members no longer in the guild and generally any thing that was irrelevant when building from the bare bones again.  I have made some post, making what we all about easy for people to find so we can point the people in /2 to an easy to use guide to what they can expect from us, even made a post about new officers and as I'm typing this managed to promote an old member who has returned in to one of the vacancies.  And so it begins…...again.