Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘Guild’

You know how it is.

You get home after a long days work and you are tired and hungry and can feel a headache coming on.

So you ditch your fancy office clothes and don your comfy sweat pants and that t-shirt you spilled coffee on last night.

You settle down to tirade your partner about how some wo-worker of yours have been extra annoying today. You are venting your irritation and frustration and maybe you are not exactly fair and just and forgiving, you are feeling miffed and restless and you want it out of your system.

Who is it going to hurt anyway? The only one listening is your partner and he nods and comes with an occassional concurring mhmm at seemingly appropriate times. Mostly.

You would never say anything of this to your co-worker’s face because it really isn’t that big a deal, it is just one little straw in a whole haystack but spouting it out at home will make you able to come back to work tomorrow, cleansed, energized, able to be friendly and polite once again.

Your partner just has to suck it up and listen to you ranting. And he will, because he loves you. Most of the time, at least.

This is in no way the same as thinking less of people. I get mad at my dearly beloved husband sometimes (you know, the one who faithfully listens to me when I am tired/upset/miffed at something) and need to talk things over with a friend to get things in perspective. I would not want him to listen in on those conversations. Same for the kids, I can really blow my top at them and rant about how I am going to swap them for a dog and sell the dog. But I would never do that.

And of course I do not do this all the time. I don’t do it very often, even. But when I do, I expect my rantings to be forgotten as soon as I utter them. They have served their purpose and reiterating them to anyone would serve no purpose at all.

It is the same in a guild or any place where people come together. There will be clashing of personalities, misunderstandings, people feeling miffed, people making jokes that other people don’t find funny. In a game like this, where much communication is written, hastily written, by people from many different countries and cultures,  many not writing in their native tongue even, there will be upset feelings galore. Even in a so called mature guild, there will be drama because people will have different opinions on what is fair, what is polite, what needs pursuing and what can be let go.

You need a place where you can blow off steam or cry a little and people will nod and murmur agreement, knowing full well that once this has passed you will be your normal sunny self again.

If you are a guild member, you have your party chats and whispers and other ways to communicate where noone else will see what you are talking about.

If you are an officer, you have /o and probably a private officers’ part on your guild forum where you unload and where you collect yourself and get down to the serious business of trying to get your guild run smoothly.

And your discussions about things are done partly in the forum, partly in-game, partly on vent, partly on the phone and partly on msn.

Sometimes you agree, sometimes you don’t agree, but what you all expect, consciously or unconsciously, is that these discussions will not be taken out of your forums, whatever they may be, for other people to see and act upon.

Sometimes you discuss matters with a friend or spouse to get some perspective on it, especially if it is a matter that is important to you, but you do not ever expect said friend or spouse to chip in on these discussions to anyone else but you. You expect them to listen to you and advice you so you can handle the situation, you don’t expect them to jump in and pounce and have their say at everyone involved.

Now, consider a woman who has a husband and lately she has been finding herself unhappy in her marriage. The husband looks through his wife’s personal correspondence when he finds her e-mail open one day and finds a letter from her lawyer about a divorce paper she has asked for.

Drama ensues.

The husband is hurt and mad about his wife’s thinking of leaving him, the wife is hurt and mad about her husband’s snooping through her private correspondance.

And the husband chucks his wife and her belongings out on the street.

Two wrongs do not make a right, and while not being straight with your husband if you think of  leaving him may seem like the bigger wrong for many people, to encroach upon someone’s personal integrity like this is a major no-no to me.

Somehow it doesn’t even matter if the wife left the mailbox open and the husband technically had every right to go through it since the program was licensed to him, it would still be a huge infringement on her personal right to read it.

Reading anything that is not meant for your eyes is wrong. Acting upon information you have gotten this way is also wrong.

But acting hastily upon information like this is most wrong of them all.

It leaves no room for reconciliation, no room for thinking things through once more and come to an agreement.

It just slams the door shut with no sight of a window opening.

Now consider the guild again. The social guild where friendliness and having fun together was ranked as more important than “performance” or “progress”.

Consider all these discussions, finished and on-going, all the rants, justified or not, all the general orating that takes place in the officer’s forum, this not-public forum for a few people’s eyes only.

Consider the posts you have made where you have opened you heart to your fellow officers in a matter that was important to you, doing this because you trusted them enough to understand, or if not understand at least not laugh at you or scorn you for being silly. They may have thought you were dead wrong and you might have gotten into one of those no-win internet arguments to be solved only when the initial fluffed feathers were smoothed by some of the other officers, and you would have come to an agreement and moved on.

It is kind of like an on-going multiple person diary.

Dear Diary, today I had to spend 15 minutes explaining to our new recruit why he didn’t get that shiny sword that dropped yesterday, and then another 15 minutes listening to him ranting about the unfairness of this – gief pixelated earplugs.

Dear Diary, I feel sorry for the guildie who drama-quitted last night when I heard his brother had recently been in a car crash which can explain his suddenly volatile temper, shall we throw out an opening to come back to him?

Dear Diary, why did my fellow officer act like that yesterday, it really pissed me off!

Dear Diary, I think we are on the wrong track with this new award system, I think it will lead to jealousy and unnecessary strife in the guild, I want us to go over it again.

What is the defining characteristic of a diary? That’s right, it is private. And because it is private, you can freely pour any emotion or silliness into it, because nobody is going to laugh at you or think you are silly. Or you can keep it rather neutral, avoiding any emotional outbursts, but it would still be your private thoughts, not meant for anyone else than the people you show it to.

Now, how would you feel if someone took your diary, your thoughts, your conversations and your opinions and published them for the world to see? Throwing open all those short and long entries, the things you’ve said and felt and argued for, letting everyone, all those people you meet every day, in to have a peek and giggle and get mad or pity you when you stand there without make-up in your sweat pants and the coffe-stained t-shirt.

Would you feel upset?

Would you feel betrayed?

Would you feel violated?

I don’t like rules.

I think we have way too many rules in our lives, detailing every petty little thing of what you can or cannot do, trying to cover every eventuality. But as we all know, you can’t cover every little shade of grey, you will encounter new situations and unknown events and the rules won’t be there to tell you what to do.

So, I try to live my life by one simple rule:

My right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
Your right to swing yours ends at mine.

(Thank you Oriniwen at Artisan Level for reminding me of the original quote, which describes my way of looking at things so neatly.)

I don’t care what colour your skin is, I don’t care if you prefer men or women, I don’t care if you want to spend your life stoned and numbed and never able to feel true love’s first kiss when sober. (Well, I do care about that last thing but I am not gonna preach. Well, not preach too much anyways.)

You live your life the way you feel is right for you and as long as you don’t hurt anyone doing it I am going to be happy for you and treat you as good as I can.

I am going to swing my fist as much (or as little) as I want but I am not going to hit your nose. I am not gonna put my own interests before yours, my desire is not going to outrank your suffering and my gratification will not matter more to me than whatever distress or anguish may be caused to you and yours by my actions.

And I expect the same from you.

Real easy one, is it not?  (Living by it is a bit harder though, sometimes you can’t stop the momentum of your swing, sometimes you really don’t want to, and sometimes you fuck up, but I am not going into that now.) 

So why do we always end up with so many rules? It’s like most people have a natural tendency to spout rules whenever possible.

I think it’s because rules can be a great help in our every day life. Call them rules, guide lines, agreements, whatever you please, but they help to organise our daily doings and our responses to our surroundings. We don’t have to sit down and think about how we are going to react to something every time we encounter it, we will react automatically because “this is the way we have always done it”. For good or bad.

Rules are handy when there are several people in charge of running something as well, because it negates the need to discuss every incident to find a proper response and they give consistency in the responses.

Like in a guild. Having guild rules will let the members know what will happen in certain stages or events in the guild.

“You start out as an Initiate and are eligible for Member after 30 days”, “Members can sign up for the Raid Core and withdraw mats from the Guild Bank”, “Loot that drops in a guild raid will be distributed according to a /roll”.

These kinds of rules makes it easier to run the guild because you don’t need to make individual decisions for every person who joins the guild, or who wants to go raid, or who should get the shiny peppix that just dropped.

But it can easily go astray and the rules will become more of a hindrance than a help.

It’s like drinking beer, if you’re having so much fun and get this good-looking and smart and sexy by having drunk four beers, you should be absolutely god-like if you have one more, right? Or two, or three, or maybe even four more! And before you know it you are on your knees throwing up with your wallet stolen or waking up next to a stranger with a throbbing headache and no idea how to get home.

Let’s not go down that path with the rules, shall we?

For example, in my guild we used to have a simple loot rule in all of our pre-Ulduar raids.

“Roll if you need it, mainspec before offspec, if you have already gotten a shiny today the next top roller gets it.”

Easy as pie. Only thing you needed to keep track of was who had gotten what and there are handy addons for that with a paper and pen backup.

The (perceived) trouble with this rule was that since we run pretty open raids people could come in and snag a drop one of our regular core raiders had been wanting for ages just by a lucky roll.

So after some discussions in the guild we decided to go for a simple DKP system with fixed values, and drops would go to the one with the highest DKP, thus favouring the regualr raiders who had had a chance to pile that DKP up.

Well, I say simple because it seemed simple. Turned out it was a lot of work to keep track of the dkp values, especially for benched people, people not staying for the whole run,  and for the different extras for being late, bosskills and such. 

For me, the work associated with DKP clearly outweighs the possible benefits of it (after all, one of the rules of raiding is: It will drop again).

So, “Howdy stranger, who are you and how did I get here?”

One of my math teachers in University always said “Simplify, simplify, simplify” and he was right. Finding the lowest common denominator makes any math problem so much easier to calculate.

Or to quote Albert E himself,

Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler.

This is actually a vital thing if the rules are supposed to make your decision maker easier and faster and not mire you in endless discussions about interpretation or or if something constitutes an exception and needs special examining.

You will want as few and as simple and as all-encompassing rules as possible if you want to run the guild as smoothly and easily as possible. The more rules, the more discussions there will be and the more time will you spend in discussions and arguments than playing and having fun!

Skip honorary ranks, throw the detailed guild bank access rules out the door, leave the DKP-allotting mired in its on bog far behind you, and go for as simple rules as you can find! You don’t need to specify loot rules for armor proficiencies and you don’t need to have to have a rule saying “don’t abuse the common chat channels” if you have one saying “be nice to each other”.

And with too many rules there is always the risk you forget one of them, which will lead to you know what, yep, that’s right, people complaining, officers getting annoyed and spending a lot of time discussing and rectifying or making amends.

If you look up Political Corruption on Wikipedia, you will see a map detailing something called Corruption Perception Index, which is a (debated) telltale of how much corruption (abuse of entrusted power for private gain) is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians in different countries. A top score on this index means very little corruption among officials, and the lower the index the more corruption there exists.

There are three countries sharing the top spot on this list, and I come from one of them, so you will not be surprised when I say this:

The last but actually the most important thing about rules is:

They need to be followed by everyone within their scope.
They need to be applied to everyone that falls under them.

Be it a rule for Initiates, for Members, for Officers, for people who leave the guild or for people who come back, the rule must apply to every single person in whatever cathegory it addresses.

You can’t suddenly just ignore a rule to give a piece of loot to someone you like instead of someone you don’t like. You can’t suddenly just pick another person for your raid groups because you don’t like the one that signed up first. You can’t suddenly just promote someone because you like them and refrain from promoting others because you don’t like them.

If you do this, the officers will lose the trust and respect of the guild members for what will be (correctly) perceived as favouritism and nepotism, and the officers themselves will be uncertain on how to act, if rules sometimes apply and sometimes don’t.

If you start making exceptions, this will lead to discussions among guildies and officers and a lot of time will be spent on this which could have been spent elsewhere, looking at airplanes, cooking dinner, playing WoW or whatever you fancy.

Of course, exceptions can be made if you think it is a special case and you are following the spirit of the rule if not the letter, but if you can’t be arsed following a rule that you and your fellow officer decided upon, if exceptions becomes the rule rather than the, eh, exception, you seriously need to rethink the rule and the need for it.

Note: I am not talking about the fairness of the rule itself, you are perfectly free to have rules that says “Every piece of loot that drops goes to the GM” but then you will need to obey by that rule. If you start handing out loot to someone else this will be perceived as unfair, and it is this un/fairness I am talking about.

A good tip here is to not make any special rules for friends in special circumstances, because sure as hell that rule will come back to bite you in the behind one day when it is someone you may not particularly fancy who happens to be in that very same circumstances and you will be up shit creek without a paddle. You’ll have to bite down and give those special circumstance boons to everyone if you want to keep the trust and respect of your guild.

Would have been easier to just stick with a simple rule for everyone, eh?

So all officers need to present a united front, you can’t have someone giving friends special treats when officering and other officers taking their job seriously and putting their feelings of friendship or animosity aside when officering to be able to treat all guildies equally and impartially.

I know its a game we play and we don’t play about life-or-death, but your action defines who you are, be it in-game with pixelated friends and guildies, or out of game with flesh and blood ones.

All animals are equal,
but some animals are more equal than others.

 You don’t want to end up on the farm of the above quote, do you?

The first time I understood it for what it was was when I read Phaelia’s goodbye post to the blog and WoW community some weeks ago.

The realisation that I will not be playing this game for ever. That some day I will log out and never log back in.

Ever since I started playing I have of course known that this game won’t be in my life forever, but it has been an abstract knowledge, something remote, unfixed in time and unanchored in reality, like the knowledge that I will die someday. I know I will, but not today and not tomorrow, and, come to think about it, not ever, actually.

But that day I read her post I could almost see the remote, I could almost see that day when I quit before me. For the first time I felt it was not just an abstract thing, it was a certainty.

I have played WoW for three years and I have blogged about it for a year and a half and I have spent countless hours immersed in this fictional fantasy universe.

These are not wasted hours, I have had great fun and I have met great people. I have enjoyed fiddling with macros and spell rotations and writing posts and working on different layouts for my blog. It is not something I wish undone.

But nowadays I sometimes find myself thinking that this game has lost its sparkle. I don’t want to join the QQ’ers who keep whining about the game being dumbed down, and that everything was better in the good old days, when the young people treated their elders with respect and didn’t hang out on the lawn with boomboxes, I think many aspects of the game has been greatly improved over time, but somehow it’s a bit lacklustre.

Maybe it’s just the fact that after three years it is not shiny brand new anymore, no matter how many times we get new varieties of spells and mobs and gear, the underlying game structure is the same. After levelling an alt or two (or three or four) you know the world, the fights, the tricks and the shortcuts. Sure, you find new things and new tricks, but it’s a far cry from that first time you levelled when everything was new and every step you took was a step into the unknown.

And then there’s the social part. I play with my husband a lot, instead of watching a movie or playing Trivial Pursuit we play WoW together. I’m rather shy and not big on going out a lot, so those nights when my husband is working and I am all alone I find comfort in logging in and level an alt and chat a little with my on-line friends, without having to leave the comforts of my own home. Those nights would be pretty lonely if I didn’t have this game and breaking those social ties would be hard.

Or perhaps it’s the warm sunshine on my face when I ride my bike home after a long work day, after a long grey rainy winter, that makes me increasingly reluctant to sit indoors in the darkness and hunt pixels.

Whatever the reason, I know now, really know in my heart and in my mind, that someday, sooner or later, all my accumulated gear and gold will be like dust and all my girls – my little babies! – will be like dolls in a forgotten toy cabinet.

I know now that there is a life after WoW. I wonder what it will be like.

When I log onto my WoW and am greeted by Hello Tessy or JOOL or hi tess! or whatever my guildmates call me before I’ve had a chance to type in anything in gchat, I can’t help but smile and I get that warm fuzzy feeling inside. My guildies are happy to see me!!

And I try to reciprocate.

When I see a guildie log on I greet them with a hearty hi <insert name here> =). I am glad to see them come online and I hope they feel welcomed.

It doesn’t take that long and it really works wonders towards making your guild feel like a little sheltered friendly place online, that home within your home.

If you don’t get a ping! and a yellow message in the chat window when a guildie logs on, do like this:

Escape > Interface > Social and check the Guild Member Alert box.

Ta-daa! Now you can see when your guildies log on and give them that warm welcome!

Of course, even with the sound and chat message I miss it sometimes, when I am fighting or AH-ing and have my attention on other things or maybe I am just alt-tabbed out, so of course it it happens that I fail to see people come online and thus don’t greet them. This doesn’t mean that I am not happy to see them, it just means that I didn’t see them.

And I know this attention-elsewhere-thingy happens to other people as well, so if no one greets me, well then I just have to say Hi all! loud and clear in gchat and then the hi’s will start popping up.

But still, no greetings beats those first ones :-)

How well do you know yourself?

I see myself as a rather lazy and corner-cutting person, social at times but really introvert and reclusive at others. I guess the socialising of an on-line game suits me pretty good because there I can mix bouts of gchatting with long periods of questing silently on my own.

I don’t see myself as a leader of any kind, I rather let other people do the talking and follow their lead. But maybe I project some big-sister-aura that makes people think I am more competent and friendly and bossy than I feel myself? Or maybe it’s my habit of writing long rambling posts about just about everything that sorta fools people into thinking I actually have a clue?

Because I’ve gone and done it again. This is where I eat my words and promise myself never to say never again!

A long time ago I swore never to have anything to do with running a guild ever again and I steered well away from anything even resembling officering. Any hints towards me becoming an officer I clearly rejected, I said in no uncertain terms that I was not interested.

But, well, you know, even bad memories fade and AT is a very relaxed and easy-going guild, with a steady population and a pretty good mix between raiding and more socialising play. Sure, we have drama, lots of it on occasion, but so far after every major argument we have somehow ended up more loving and caring and good to each other. (Sounds like a bad commercial I know, but it’s true.)

A few people have left during my time in AT for various reasons, but those who have stayed have been willing to make an effort to make things work and don’t expect the world handed to them on a silver platter.

So when I was approached with a direct question I didn’t say “no” straight away, I said I’d think about it. I was a bit curious why they wanted me, because I don’t want to raid lead and we don’t do any active recruiting and I thought the officers were doing a splendid job at managing the guild without me. Not that I not wanted to help out, but I didn’t really need to be an officer for it. Discussing it with a friend, I was almost set on turning down the offer.

But then I had a bit of discussing with our GM and I understood that he wanted me to help promote the social side of the guild, to help keep our balance between raiding and more casual play of all sorts. I wouldn’t have to raid lead (not all officers do that anyways), and the rest of the work (applications, warnings etc) was divided between all officers.

I am in the Raid Core and raid at least two days a week, but I like all aspects of the game and the idea of being a “social officer” sounded intriguing. I think the social aspects of how to play is just as important as the technical ones – even more important even in a casual guild like ours. And that day I read an article about group dynamics in WoW  posted by Larísa from the Pink Pigtail Inn which sort of clinched it.

Social dynamics are important – we don’t want to lose our not-raiding members by focusing too much on the raiding, and we want our raiding to flow smoothly dps-wise and drama-free. So if the GM and the rest of the officers felt I could help out with this, then count me in!

(Or maybe all this is some sort of justification for me getting corrupted and power-hungry?)

So last night’s Guild Message was as follows:

Thanks for the confidence in me! And the n-word is forever banished from my vocabulary!

Real life raiding! 

The bold and the brave – Kaitsja with his wife, Dalno, Portshia, Paxinarion and me and Petson – met up on the Silja Line ferry going from Stockholm to Helsinki on Friday afternoon the 20th of February to spend some afk time together. Was good to get a face to some of those voices I’ve been hearing in my head for many months now ;P

By a cunning combination of asking nicely in swedish and being more direct in finnish (chopchop! bottoms up! move along!) we secured ourselves a table at the ferry pub and started introducing ourselves to each other and discussing important things like why would anyone buy a cheap whisky just to get a coffee for free with it?

While the men were getting involved discussing the whisky questions us female raiders decided it was time to get the show started with a little pre-raid of our own. We worked our way down the ferry promenade and found a promising shop. Skillful and experienced as we are, we one-shotted the shop! It dropped loot for all of us, a pair of boots for Kai’s wife, a bag for Portshia and a very bling-bling bag for me!

(No, this is not the bag that dropped, but it’s about as bling as the one I got ;P)

You know what they say, time flies when you are having fun, and before we knew it it was time to go freshen up and get dressed for dinner.

We had all made reservations at the buffet, two hours of unlimited food and wine and beer and it was very good actually! So we ate and we drank and we talked more or less non-stop.

Somehow we managed to miss the karaoke but we did try out both the live music dance floor and the discotheque one. The first one was pretty lively and you could dance pretty much any way you wanted, the second was more or less dead but at least you got a lot of elbow room there ;P

The black jack casino raiders emerged victoriously too this night, having defeated the BJ boss against all odds! More drinks for the people!

Those winnings did seem a little less attractive the morning after though, when resurrection sickness – dry mouth and sore head – reared its ugly head. An abundant breakfast buffet helped remedy that a lot though. 

Petson had explored Helsinki before and I’m not that much of an explorer so we headed back to the cabin for a while to get us some rested bonus while Dalno, Paxi, (edit: apparently me and Petson were not the only one gathering rested bonus, see comment below!) Portshia and Kaitsja defied the sub-zero temperature and earned themselves a new achievement: 

Congratulations to them!

When the explorers returned we all teamed up for some serious buffing. Kai took us to the Zetor restaurant where we all enjoyed delicious traditional finnish food (and a lot of it! the servings were huge! Real gonna-go-chop-wood-all-day servings!) in traditional finnish surroundings. The restaurant is allegedly owned by the Leningrad Cowboys but we didn’t see any of them around.

Anyways, for starters we shared some savumuikkpurkki, which is smoked vendace in oil on toasted rye bread. Really really tasty!

For main course I had blinis with sour cream, onion, smoked reindeer and roe (yummy!) while the others had some more muikas,

and Petson, the brave soul, even dared the creamy finnish hash, also known as Dr. Feelgood’s Creamy Super Mega Unhealthy Dish.

(No wonder he was not hungry for the rest of the trip, eh?)

Mikazh joined us at the restaurant at about this time and treated us all to a mana refill – cheers!

Before we headed out again to engage and defeat the lurking shopping mobs, Kai introduced us all to another finnish delicacy, consisting of oven-baked cheese in caramelsauce and brandy-marinated arctic cloudberries. Not bad!

We had one more stop before we headed out to engage and defeat the lurking shopping mobs, the Ateljee Bar at the top of a tower hotel. The view was truly breathtaking, and we all got the ka-ching! of yet another achievement;

The view from the bar’s bathroom is equally breathtaking I hear, so if anyone plans to spend some time in such a facility this might be the place to visit. But don’t take my word for it, ask those who did spend some time there…

By this time we were overdue for some serious shop raiding, so we said our goodbyes to Mikazh and headed out our separate ways to find the rare shop mobs.

There were quite a few shop trash mobs but I successfully steamrolled through them all and finally I encountered a worthy shop boss! It put up a semblance of a fight but I pwned it with my enchanted magic card and a pair of black leather jump boots dropped for me!

Muahahha!

Heading back from the successful raid I suddenly spotted a rare shop mob lurking stealthily on a street corner! Taking a few minutes extra to stalk that one my magic card once again did the trick and the mob dropped another pair of boots for me!

Muahahahaha again!!

Before we ended our Helsinki raiding we visited the Karl Fazer Café where Kai and Dal had the best hot chocolate I’ve ever seen! Melted chocolate in a huge cup, served on a tray with whipped cream, hot milk, crushed mint chocolate, cinnamon and cardamon to mix to perfection! I was still soo stuffed from our lunch but I was really envious!

Back on the boat some of us attempted some spa raiding but were told that additional instances could not be launched, please try again later.

That night we went to the Happy Lobster, where they served the mother of all seafood platters,

although some of us went for spicy shrimp soup and rare steaks instead.

The spicy shrimp soup, although tasty, was about as spicy as a bowl of oatmeal, but informed sources told us that finnish people generally don’t like spicy food, so we guessed the soup was finnish-spicy variety and not generally spicy. Good to know for future reference.

After dinner we headed over to the karaoke bar, and suddenly all my preconceived notions of how a cruise on the Finland ferry should be turned out to be true! Damn, I felt old there! ;P

We studied the clientele for a while, sipping champagne, and then we headed over to the other nightclub, where we gambled at the black jack and danced the night away to the tunes of Frank Sinatra.

All too soon it was Sunday morning, the ferry was coming back to Stockholm and it was time for us all to say goodbye for this time =(

So, what are my impressions from this my first RL raid (was actually the 4th Ascendo Tuum RL raid, the AT gang has been in Dublin, Gothenburg and Glasgow those last two years)

• It was great! I had such a blast and I am looking forward to our next one already!
• While we were only six that could make it this time, it was pretty good actually because you got to spend a lot of time with each and every one, getting to know them a little bit more than if we had been more.
• I like the game a lot already but I am sure I will like playing even more now, because now we have some real great afk experiences that will knit us closer together.
• I was a bit worried beforehand that we might snow in on non-stop game-talk but we actually didn’t talk very much about the game at all, we talked about our families and work and hobbys and habits and dreams and past trips and travels.

So if anyone out there is trying to decide whether to join up for a real life raid or not, I can only say one thing: Do it!

Yesterday as I logged out of WoW my msn chimed with a tell from a friend, excitedly telling me he and his guild had just downed Sartharion with three drakes up in the 25-man version after three days of tries. He was now sporting the fancy title Twilight Vanquisher.

I was happy for him and congratulated him heartily on their success. He was really happy too, but yet something seemed not right, and sure enough, right after his joyful shouts of success he said “the guild is shit though”, there was too much shit talk and stupid arguments.

Some guildies were mostly talking about bitches sucking their dicks, others were giving detailed descriptions of their bathroom breaks. Whining and loot drama, general rudeness, blaming others for your own mistakes, that sort of asshattery seemed to be around a lot.

And after they finally managed the kill last night it had all erupted in a big fight amongst themselves about whom was to be allowed to roll on the mount instead of joyful cheering and celebration. Sort of puts a dampener on the whole occasion, doesn’t it?

The way he described his guild, it sounded like the worst of pick-up groups – they may be coordinated enough to kill a hard raid boss but they didn’t have any social skills whatsoever.

I asked him how he could stand it there, and he didn’t have a good answer.

He said it was cool to be in an end-game guild, but then he said, quite disillusioned, without the fun what was the point? 

That got me thinking – what is the point? Why do people raid if they don’t find it fun?

Is that last moment of success and triumph when the boss keels over really worth spending hours and hours on end in the company of people you don’t know and don’t care about and don’t like?

For me, there is only one answer to that last question: No.

I had just logged out from an unsuccessful three-hour 15-tries attempt at Malygos (albeit followed by a nice clean one-shot of Sartharion to get our spirits up before we called it a night).

People in my raid made mistakes but noone blamed them on others. They owned up to them so we could learn from each other and maybe come with suggestions on how to avoid doing them again.

I screwed up once when I was on tank healing because I popped my heroism at a bad time losing precious seconds moving my mouse back and forth and on the global cd there, losing my tank in the process, wiping the rest of the raid as Malygos ran rampant among us. I told my fellow raiders what happened but noone shouted at me or called me names, they told me not to worry about it and we buffed up again and went at him again.

I tried to imagine my screwing up happening in my friend’s guild, and I shuddered at the thought. 

I know people play this game for different reasons, and to each their own of course, but there is no question in my mind whatsoever, I would never ever raid as much as I do (which is not much compared to some, but still two set nights a week and usually an old raid or half guild/half pug VoA raid or similar) unless I felt the journey was worth as much as the destination.

No sirrah, no thank you, not for me.

And the journey would be worthless without friends along to share the joy and success.

I may never get to see Sartharion lying dead on his three drakes in the heroic version but I am confident I will see it in normal.  I know the feelings of joy and triumph when I do so will be oh-so-sweet-and-lovely, and it will be twice as sweet-and-lovely because me and my guildies will be cheering and celebrating together!

So, my dear sweet Twilight Vanquisher friend, I really hope you will find an end-game guild with nice and friendly people (they are out there, you know), and I really hope you will find your future raids as fun as I find mine.

If not, maybe it is time to consider this poem I found on the O-boards (thanks Kai for the link to the thread):

You ain’t got no life.
You ain’t got no friends.
And I know you want to spend your weekend with 40 people you don’t know,
And some guy named Puff telling you what to do!

/hugs

Tessy

‘Twas a bright and sunny day when the merry adventurers gathered at the guardian stone lion keeping his silent watch in the beautiful harbour of the humans’ capital of Stormwind.

The old world was explored, its adventures experienced, now a new world was beckoning- but you can’t leave the old world behind without a going away-party!

Our bold adventurers said their goodbyes and eagerly awaited the coming of the boat that would take them to Northrend – a land of ice and cold and questing and new shiny bright fortunes!

Inspired by the moment (and maybe a little carried away by the free drinks provided ) the daring crew came up with one master plan after another!

Others were more concerned about their own immediate safety.

But we all made it safely across the cold Northern Sea and arrived in Valiance Keep.

A whole new world out there, to explore and discover and to make new friends (and the occasional enemy) in! Northrend beware – Ascendo Tuum is about to hit you!

To be continued…

(And yes I know I am late posting this)

Have you ever noticed that the npc’s in WoW seem to interact with you in more ways than one, ie the normal responding when you right-click on them.

Take a look at this screenshot from a guildchat conversation:

Doesn’t it seem just like that Goblin Commoner is responding to me talking about excess gold lying around? It’s really good timing, is it really a coincidence?

Is Blizzard monitoring our conversations and making the npc’s respond to it? Or am I being paranoid? And btw no thanks, I am not cold, I don’t need that extra jacket, and it doesn’t really look very comfortable anyways with all those straps on it, and why are you coming at me with that needle thingy, aaaargh get off me get off me, get aaaaargh….

This here is my guild!

Well, almost half of it anyways, about 35 of the 85-ish unique members of Ascendo Tuum joined up this night for a guild photo shoot at the top of the stairs to the Dark Portal to mark the momentous occasion of the upcoming expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Quite a few of us were there on time and I, being a good warlock, had brought 2 huge bags full of Soul Shards, so as people logged in we invited them to the raid and summoned them to us.

(I am the small one on the left in front in the pretty purple dress.)

This was not my first guild photo session actually, I took screenshots on another momentous occasion some time ago too: The drunken Silvermoon City Raid!

We started out with a picnic in Blade’s Edge Mountains.

(Note Jools’ pretty summer dress that sparkles and flames when she dances.)

A guildie had been rising in the ogre ranks and was now hailed as King of the Ogres! He invited us all to join the party and we all took to quaffing a lot of Ogre Brew.

Quaffing has a side effect though, it makes the surroundings blurry!

We were gonna have us some fun in this highly inebriated state! We hearthed to Shatt, took the portal to the isle and flew off to Zul’Aman!

Ogre Brew stays in your system for a loong time! And no, we were not going to ZA, we had a slightly higher aim than that – we we’re going for the Belf boss!

And the Belf Bashing was a great success! Their leader was going dooooown!

But the Belfs were calling in the reinforcements and suddenly we were the ones going down instead…

And this was my very first Ascendo Tuum guild photo ;P