Thoughts on Guilds
The old idea didn’t work, so forget that.
Guilds.
When I first began playing, I wasn’t going to join a guild. Not being remotely familiar with the game or how it worked or what function a guild would serve, I just didn’t see the point.
The friend who introduced me to the game had his own guild, which he let me join. He was the only other member, and he closed his account shortly after I began playing due to a weight of other life demands — so I had the guild name over my head, and a guild tabard (achievement!), but I was still playing completely solo. My Guild Chat was silent, and my Friends list (which was composed entirely of my friend’s toons) was always inactive.
I suffered through the PuGs for dungeons, never realizing that most players preferred not to PuG, or where they could possibly get other players for groups if they didn’t.
I took a lot of abuse for my newbie ignorance of things that more seasoned players already knew as givens, but I had nobody else of whom to ask questions for things I didn’t understand except the other members of the PuG groups I got into — and some of them were helpful, and some of them were rude.
Some of them were obnoxious as only teenagers can be when they desperately want to be recognized for accomplishing something, but they haven’t actually accomplished anything worth recognizing because they’re too young, so they get overly invested in meaningless in-game accomplishments and overly defensive when those accomplishments do not receive what they consider to be proper recognition. Those types were always fun. *eyeroll*
Then one day, a complete stranger with whom I was temporarily grouped so we could share kills for a quest instead of competing for them invited me to join his guild.
At that point, I’d been playing for maybe two months, and I was finally beginning to understand that although the game could be soloed to 80, I would be missing out on a lot of things if I couldn’t at least sometimes get a group together. So I was relieved and even excited at the invitation, and I jumped to accept it.
I got just enough of a taste for what a guild could be through that experience.
But it was mostly from watching what the other members had, and not because I really got to enjoy any of those benefits myself.
Oh, people were nice enough, if I asked a direct question.
But I wasn’t part of the “core crowd”, so I was never invited to the dungeon groups even when I was of a level to participate. (My shaman by this time was in the 70s.) Nobody ever responded to my hopeful invitations to start or join a group for anything.
The lowbies were more than happy to call me hither and yon to run them through Shadowfang Keep or Wailing Caverns, and felt more than entitled to get pissy with me about it (which significantly dampened my enthusiasm for doing it at all)… but the high-level group content was as out of my reach in this group as it had been when I had no group.
It was like they let me in, but they still weren’t going to play with me.
Eventually I got frustrated with that, and I got on the forums and started actively looking for another guild.
And I found one — a guild which, if there was any truth in their advertisements, was ideally suited to me.
I switched servers, I joined the guild… and I’ve never looked back. My game experience has taken on a whole new dimension of enjoyment and fun.
I will be the first to admit that my requirements for the “ideal guild” were not easy in the general WoW environment.
I am not a teenager, and I was tired of grouping / guilding primarily with teenagers. I was sick of children flexing their attitudes at me, playing at being adult like they had a clue. I didn’t want another guild full of that crap. I can get enough of it in Trade chat.
I wanted a guild that didn’t feel like another trip through junior high every time I signed on. My first trip through was enough, thanks.
I wanted a guild that actually felt like a group in which I was included — which meant I would have to like the people in the guild, and since I have a very low opinion of people in general, I didn’t actually expect to find any such group.
But I did. They’re really out there!
I occasionally met other adults while I was playing who were similarly disenchanted with having to tolerate so much childish crap just to play the game, who were also wondering if there was any corner of the game world where they could get away from that.
Take heart, fellow wanderers.
You don’t have to close your account just because you’ve had it up to here with e-peen.
There really is a corner of the game world that can suit you too.
