So I realized recently that when 5.4 comes out, this will be the first time that:
- I’ve been playing WoW for the entirety of an expansion with no breaks
- I’ve been in the same guild for an entire expansion
Those two things are related.
My guild history has been a little rocky, to say the least; after leaving my very first guild for a guild that offered me a raid spot, I ended up going from guild to guild, watching things explode. In one, we absorbed another raiding guild only for them to poach 90% of our members and leave to form a 25s guild; in another, the guild leader had some kind of conniption fit and I got the joy of logging in each day to watch friends get kicked and badmouthed behind their back. I tried running my own guild for a while but I am so not cut out for that shit. I think the only two guilds that didn’t blow up were my very first guild (still going strong) and Jed’s guild (which is on the emptiest server ever, not a faction I enjoy playing, and did I mention it’s on the emptiest server ever). Each time I lost my guild, I lost interest in WoW; this is why I missed all of tier 9, the end of tier 10, pre-nerf tier 11 and most of tier 12, and so on.
In late Cataclysm, I reached out to a pretty popular blogger because I found myself interacting with several of his guild members on Twitter, and wondered about joining their guild. I even filled out the application - it’s still sitting on the forums, totally unresponded to, amusingly. TTGF is pretty laid back about formality, and I think Rades was slightly concerned the guild’s laid back nature and, um, let’s say brash chat at times might offend me in some fashion, but unbeknownst to him I’d actually already migrated all my (max-level) alts to Drenden. SURPRISE, I’M ON YOUR SERVER, PUT ME IN YOUR GUILD. So one thing led to another and I subbed into some late Dragon Soul runs, and I went from pretty shitty (I was horribly out of practice) to only kinda shitty, and then Mists of Pandaria came out and hey, what role did I want to play in the upcoming raid team?
TTGF isn’t the biggest guild, or the most active guild, and sometimes we’re pretty bad at this game. The laid back, almost structureless nature of the guild could be pretty offputting to people who need that kind of officer-raider-member structure to make it through the day. But it’s almost exactly what I would’ve done if I’d had my head on straight when I made a guild, and somehow it still works. Occasionally we have to fight the attendance boss, but we’ve beaten each raid tier this expansion in time to nail the Ahead of the Curve achievements (usually with plenty of weeks to spare), and even tackled a heroic boss (the fickle nature of our roster unfortunately foiled attempts at more, as well as the fact that apparently EVERYONE had things going on at the end of August/beginning of September, including me).
So I guess I just wrote a bunch of words to say thanks to my guild for giving me a bunch of good reasons to stick around the game, a bunch of inside jokes that no one understands (BWALO), and a bunch of dead bosses. Here’s to many more.
