Fifty-First

By Christ, I'm knackered today. We were at a wedding all day yesterday - we left around one and didn't get home until around eleven.  Still, it was cool seeing some old friends that I haven't seen in years.

I've got a graduation party to attend this evening. A couple of the guys that used to run my tabletop wargames club with me have graduated from university, so they've invited me through to my home town for the joint  party they're having. It'll be quite cool seeing the guys again, they're good people, although I'm a little apprehensive about that fact that I probably won't know many people there (if any). Still, I was quite touched that they'd invite me through, being that it's a few years since we all hung out, so I didn't want to say no, despite the fact that I'm stoney broke just now.

So, I haven't spoken much about WoW recently. Big changes there tbh. In short, I've quit my guild and plan to fly solo for the foreseeable future. I havan't really been happy or comfortable in my (ex) guild for a while now, but I haven't really bothered doing anything about it. Like most guilds, they're focused on raiding, on pushing forward through the end-game content, taking down new bosses and grabbing phat lewts (sorry). That's fair enough, plenty of guilds out there are doing exactly the same things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but it just isn't really my bag any more.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I've been less than happy with some of the leadership decisions that've been made (or not) in the past by the GM (Guild Master) and officers. Just before and after the release of the expansion, the guild almost fell apart, and a few people left to form their own guild which was supposed to be better than ours, and accomplish all the things we never could. It didn't, and their guild fell apart shortly after, there was talk of most of the players transferring out to another server or cancelling their accounts.
Time went on, and we all started to level up and hit the end-game, and all of a sudden the 'ringleaders' of the players who had left were wanting to come back, prompting much discussion within the guild as to whether or not they should be allowed back in. I was against it to be honest, they had certainly been  important to the guild, but when they left, a lot of things were said that were completely unnecessary, and as far as I was concerened, couldn't easily be taken back, forgiven or forgotten. The prevailing mood was against me though, and they were welcomed back as regular members.
The guild leadership around this time started to waver as well, with our GM moving back home to Canada, taking him right out of our time zone. Authority for a whole load of topics was never delegated correctly, which meant we had several officers all trying to do the same things; recruitment, probations, raid organisation, etc. It was chaos for a while, some of the people that applied and joined were, by turns, useless, incompetent, stupid and offensive. One even thought it was funny to post a shot of his new desktop picture which proclaimed, "Rape - Think of it as Surprise Sex!". That particular one was never actually dealt with officially by any of the officers or the GM, despite many of us complaining loudly about it.

Eventually, things started to shape up. The GM must have finally clued in to the fact that he hadn't actually been 'leading' us for a while, and overhauled the officers, demoting a lot who had the power but no responsibility, and promoting the ones with the responsibility but not the power. Around this time, the officers really started to push folk into the end-game. Again, nothing wrong with this, the guild needs to progress, and people need to be reminded what they have to do to accomplish this. There was a lot of pressure for people to get attunements done (if you're a regular reader, you'll remember the attunement chart I posted a while back) but nothing was being done to actually help get the attunements done. It really was a case of, "let's pull together as a guild, as a group, push through the end game and make a name for ourselves, so everyone get attuned, but get it done yourself, and don't bother trying to organise anything in-guild to do it." which really annoyed me.
Fair enough, the onus should be on the individual to get attuned, the guild shouldn't be expected to hand-hold people through the content, but a little bit of help would be nice, yes? Oddly enough, all of the officers seemed to be attuned in a day or two, but a lot of us struggled - the attunement for Karazhan, the entry-level end-game instance, is reasonably stright forward, but it still involves a good few five-man instances to ge there. I managed to organise a couple of groups to get it started, but they always seemed to fall apart just before we started, or not start at all. To this day, I'm still not attuned for Karazhan.

This wasn't really a problem but it left me with the 'outside looking in' feeeling, as the guild started to get stuck in, leaving us un-attuned players behind. When my girlfriend and I decided to get Otis, I knew that my time for WoW would be seriously cut down, so I told the guild I wouldn't be around for a while, again, no problems there. After we had taken Otis back, I had a good hard look at my place in the guild, and I realised that even though I was in the guild, I wasn't really part of it, so I didn't really see any point in staying there, keeping the tag over my characters' heads but not really doing anything with the guild, not being attuned to the same instances as them and not raiding.

So I left. I politely informed them of my intentions and thanked them for being cool, but that I felt I had to head out on my own, but I didn't bother ranitng about how weak the leadership had been, or how I was disillusioned with the way they had handled the transition to the new end-game - I'm not the kind to cause drama just for the  sake of causing drama, so I left it at that.

I'll leave it at that just now, I need to go eat lunch - I'll hopefully pick up tomorrow about what my plans are.