My WoW History, Part Two
A good guild is essential to any new WoW player’s success and enjoyment (and that is also true for experienced players as well.) I’ve always known if I was serious about an alt that I started based on whether or not I looked for a guild to join. If you are new to WoW, you should definitely find a good guild quickly - the advice and experience that the other players have to offer will be invaluable. If they are not helpful, then find another guild to join. Life’s too short to go without friendly guildies.
I joined my first guild on my (super unique) NE hunter around level 10 or so. It was called R I S I N G S U N and was a fairly small family-type guild. We had around 10 to 20 active players and I really had a blast with them for a long while. We got to know each other pretty well (even sharing some real-life details) and had tons of fun grouping and questing with each other. We seriously were one big happy family. The only problem I had with it was that it was a rather small guild and I sometimes found myself LFG for a long time to run dungeons and quests. I wondered how my experience would change if I was in a larger guild.
So I rolled a dwarf warrior with the intent of finding a good larger guild to join to see how that would change things. Eventually I found my way into Hand of Palandine. HoP was a larger guild (40 to 50 active players) but it was still (at least to start) a family-type, although with a bit more emphasis on leveling. I joined on my warrior around 15 or so and leveled him up all the way to 60 with HoP.
Around the time I was getting close to 60 on my warrior, HoP started to get in to raiding. At the same time, RisingSun, whose numbers had slowly been dwindling, finally broke up for good (this was due to some drama between the Guild Master and the 1st Officer, who had been dating in real life… but that’s a story for another day=) ). So I brought my hunter into HoP and soon after got my first taste of raiding. We started out running Zul’Gurub a few times a week and would also occasionally run Ahn’Qiraj (20-man). Raiding was an entirely different beast to me. I enjoyed it because HoP was full of great people and the point was always to have fun and not be too serious. I also liked being able to experience more content of the game that I had not seen yet and enjoyed tackling and overcoming new challenges.
The main problem that I had with raiding was that it involved a whole lot of standing around doing nothing: waiting for everyone to get to the instance… waiting for instructions on TeamSpeak… waiting on buffs… waiting for the AFK’ers to get back… waiting on rebuffs that ran out while listening to the instructions and waiting for the AFK’ers to get back… Overall, I enjoyed the time we spent raiding but it was because the people I was there with made it fun; not because of the loot.
A couple of months passed - I hit 60 on my warrior and was now raiding on him more than my hunter. HoP was still kicking and we’d even made it into Molten Core. I noticed an interesting phenomenon occur once we started raiding: The first few raids we did, we often needed one or two more to fill out the group. So we’d ask in Ironforge for a couple members, and once we’d gotten them to join us for the raid, they often ended up leaving their guild to join HoP. We didn’t try to recruit them, and as far as I know, didn’t even broach the subject of guilds with them. None the less, probably six or seven of ten guys (and girls) that raided with us ended up joining HoP for some length of time. Our membership grew from around 50 active players to 70 - 80 in the span of a few weeks.
It was an interesting thing to see happen and I’m not sure exactly what to attribute it to. It’s possible that we were just a super awesome group of people that everyone loved to be around… but I think it’s more likely that the new people were on the hunt for a raiding guild and jumped at the opportunity to join one (even one that was just getting started). I say this because the retention rate for the peeps that joined us after a guest spot in a raid was probably only around 50%. They jumped at the chance to join us and raid, and then something new (better?) came around and so they jumped at that.
The next big thing to happen was the release of The Burning Crusade in January of 2007. I was excited about the x-pac coming out, but (even though I didn’t realize it at the time) I was starting to get a little burned out on WoW. All the raiding and PvP (especially after Patch 2.0, with the new honor system — ZOMG Free Epics –) was starting to get a bit repetitive. I got BC a couple of days after it came out, and even though I really enjoyed the new content, things were not as much fun as they used to be. I was ready for a break. So, about one month after BC came out, I decided it was time and I quit playing. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be for good or not but I knew it was going to be for a long while.
Next post - Part Three - I’m back, baby! New race, new faction, new server, new goals.
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