Tag Archives: guild

Tawyn Is The Champion My Friends…

ChampionOfTheFrozenWastes

…toldya I’d get Malygos before Oculus. >.>

Funny story behind this whole thing actually; I’ve been sitting around needing EoE and Oculus for a really long time now. However, I haven’t had much good luck with groups.

Enter my new guild, which– have I mentioned recently that they are all exceptionally nice?– has been really itching to figure out a way to get me into some raids since my schedule does not coincide with their current progression schedule very nicely.

And so, one night when I was actually online (as opposed to mornings, when I am usually online), the guild pulled together a Malygos run… pretty much just for me, and for some guildies’ alts who also wanted the title.

Now enter the funny story. They wanted me to use Ventrilo, which is fair; I typically use Ventrilo for any raid that isn’t OS/VoA. Ventrilo doesn’t work for me on Linux so I told my guild it would be a moment while I hopped partitions over to Windows.

…guess who hasn’t used Windows since the patch? Guess what needed to download? Oh, and then guess who ran out of space on her Windows partition and had to rearrange everything?

Needless to say it was about an hour before I was actually back in game. My addons were completely borked, but at that point I figured screw it, I’d already left my poor guild waiting so long.

And so, before long I was on Ventrilo, the subject of a rather amusing (and truth be told, ongoing) name debate: TAH-win vs. TAY-win. (It’s TAH-win by the way. >.>)

And Malygos went down quite nicely! I had a screenshot of the achievement but it primarily consists of my broken addons throwing error messages in my face (no, seriously. I named it “What Your Addons See When They Die”), so yeah.

Anyways, a couple days after that, aforementioned Really Nice Guild* went to Oculus with me so I could, finally, become Champion of the Frozen Wastes.

It’s a spiffy title, if a bit long-ish, and since approximately 97.5% of the WoW population is currently using that title, I’ll probably retire it soon until a few expansions from now, when it becomes rare.

But it’s nice to have it! <3 P.S. Guess who signed up for Ulduar this week! /excited dance --- * Really Nice Guild, as it turns out, has a blog. They totally aren’t expecting me to link them, but I’m going to because I’m devious like that. /wicked grin

Both Sides Now

WoW_TamarynNaxx

The fact that we got this far, as a PuG, and on my first trip in there on my druid– and as one of just two healers for a good bulk of it, still hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Furthermore, that last Kel’Thuzad fight was one of the smoothest things I’ve ever seen, me half-asleep and yet somehow still feeling “in the zone” and Rejuv+Swiftmending those iceblocks… it felt amazing. I’m so glad I FRAPS’d it. I can’t wait to make a movie; “The Day Pike Played a Druid And Was Actually Good At It”.

…did I mention I got the [Safety Dance] achievement today too? Irony. Both my level 80s have it now o_o

Lemme tell you though, healing Naxx is nuts. It’s all improvisation. I am completely tuckered out.

Right after that was over, I hopped over to Tawyn, and was soon chucked a guild invite from the guild I was accepted to. Check it out, it lines up with my title + name and everything:

TawynOfTheRose

The second I joined I was met with several very friendly “hellos” and “welcomes” and lots of jovial banter. I felt almost bowled over with the niceness.

Also, I got a whisper from the guy who invited me. “Wanna come to our alt-run of 10-man Ulduar?”

I told him I had to go to bed because it was super late.

Bed is more important, right?

I can go to Ulduar later, right?

…riiiiiiiight? >.>

*twitches excitedly*

Nervousville, Population: Pike

After spending a good month or so sitting around waiting for a guild to fall in my lap, I realized I had to take matters into my own hands. Off I went, searching the realm forums in search of someone that was recruiting and that fit my criteria.

After a bit of looking I stumbled across a guild name that I’ve seen literally since I began playing WoW over two years ago. I know very little about said guild, other than the fact that they’ve been around forever, but their recruitment ad on the forums as well as their website painted them as a group of friendly and good-natured people who did stuff like roleplaying and both 10 and 25man raids! It sounded like as good a place to start as any.

Anyways I filled out an application and sent it in, and today found an in-game mail from an officer telling me that they’d liked the initial application and wanted to interview me! At that point they were in Ulduar, so I went and did other stuff and came back to do the interview later.

First thing that the interviewer said was that he’d checked out my blog (which I’d briefly mentioned in the application) and that he really liked it. I was like “x__x;; /blush”

Second thing we talked about was loot rules and how raid signups were done and both of these more than met my approval.

Third thing we talked about was how they encourage spec’ing the spec you enjoy and do well with, and raiding with that spec. This really met my approval.

Fourth thing we talked about was how the current hunter officer in that guild “Really likes BM but is frustrated about getting it to work in a raid environment”, and this somehow segued into how both her and I tend to use MM when DPS is truly needed because both of us like it better than Survival.

Fifth thing we talked about was how I instantly met the hunter officer’s approval because of said previous facts.

Then… I was accepted into the guild. They asked if I wanted an invite right then, or wanted to think about it. I told them I wanted to think about it for a day or so. Partially because I do, and partially because the thought of joining a big raiding guild without my friends sorta scares me. Oh, my friends are always there. We all have our chat channel. We all hang out outside-of-game, in Ventrilo and in AIM chats and on forums. Heck, just today three of us went on a Kara stomp (guess what failed to drop off of Attumen, again?) and it was the most fun I’d had in weeks.

But going off and joining a whole new guild filled with whole new people, for the first time ever, is still a scary prospect. I really hope I make a good impression, and almost more than that, I really hope I don’t step on anyone’s toes. I mentioned my blog a few times in the interview, in a purely logistical fashion (“Would I have the permission of the guild to occasionally post screenshots or how-to movies featuring the guild on a site that gets over a thousand hits a day”, etc.), and because of that I have this fear of coming off as some “high and mighty blogger” or something, which I don’t think I did, but I worry anyway. I probably worry too much, to tell the truth.

Honestly though, I think this may just be “the guild”. The one I have been looking for. I felt like I had a rapport with the interviewer and I really liked what I was hearing about how things were run and about how they raided. It truly weirds me out that, outside of doing Karazhan fiftybazillion times in Burning Crusade– this will be the first time I’ve really been in a raiding guild. Who knows, maybe you will be hearing Ulduar stories from me soon, if my schedule allows… o.O

Sometimes a hunter's gotta fly alone

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There is no longer a guild tag under my name. It was not due to any sort of drama or conflict so much as it was due to the sort of communal realization by everyone in our friends circle that a chat channel would serve our socialization needs while allowing us to, well, go off and do what we wanted to do in game. The /gquit itself was not nearly as hard as it was last time, although it was rather sudden, but I do feel somewhat lonely now. Most people left with a clear goal in mind of where they were headed, some raiding guild or other being the most common answer.

Me? Guess I’m just a leaf on the wind. Time to see if I can soar…

Once Upon a Guild

Our server’s top raiding guild since forever recently disbanded, and while this doesn’t affect me personally at all, it did get me thinking a lot about my past guild. Now I’m sure the story is one I’ve told millions of times, and as such I don’t want to recount the specifics in much detail here. However, I find it interesting that months later, the emotions are still there.

My current guild is one that is made up mostly of the “closest” of us from that particular old guild. So, I still have my best friends with me. In a way, the guild still lives on. But it’s different now. It’s small, it’s “casual”; it’s more of a “hangout in guild chat” type of place. There are (well, were) guild raids, but we had to look outside the guild and invite our “honorary guildies” in. Not saying that is bad at all, by the way. It is just a different modus operandi. Lots of times I log on and I’ll be the only one online.

Back in my old guild, there were always people online. At least five or six, often ten or more, and usually a good chunk hanging out on Ventrilo as well. People were clamoring to get into our weekly Karazhan run; we usually wound up short some role or other (tanks or healers most of the time, natch) but the other roles would be overflowing and we’d have people “on standby”.

There were “cliques”. There were the people that wanted to roleplay and there were the people who wanted to raid, and for whatever reason we had very little overlap. The result was groups within our guild that would stick with each other and not branch out very much. But we were friendly and very welcoming and brought in people from everywhere; the tired, the poor, the huddled masses so to speak, which may have been the root of the problem, but we couldn’t help it. That’s just how we were.

There was drama, oh there was drama. Some of it coined a phrase which turned into a little inside joke: “It’s not just epics, it’s T4!” due to the issues that ensued more than once when somebody– usually a guild newbie– would throw a fit after not getting that coveted token from Curator or Prince. I can’t remember whether or not this was our fault on just not making loot rules clear enough, but I do remember the drama that ensued.

There was burnout. Officers who felt overwhelmed by their duties. Active guild members who disappeared or went on hiatus. One of these “active members” disappeared relatively early on in the guild’s youth; when he finally came back towards its twilight weeks he looked around for a day or two and realized the guild was no longer the same guild, and quietly left. He was right, though.

Because somewhere along the way we had in fact turned into something different. Like an Oscar seeing a Needlefish from behind and assuming it’s a minnow (I have seen this happen at work by the way; don’t laugh at my analogy! >.>), we had bitten off more than we could chew. Tossed a snowball down a hill and found ourselves unable to stop it.

And so it was that the guild turned into sort of a big mess and my friends started leaving one by one and then the boyfriend (and guild leader) gave leadership to me in an attempt to see if I could salvage it, but it was really too far gone by that point. Plus, I didn’t like logging into the guild anymore since it now just seemed to be full of unfamiliar faces, so I spent the bulk of my time hiding on alts on other servers. Eventually I realized that this was just acerbating the problem so I passed guild leadership to a friend, hoping things would be fixed. Again, it didn’t happen. Most of my friends had already /gquit and not long after this my boyfriend did too, and while I hung on for a while I finally, late one night, quietly left myself– one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not long after that, the guild dissolved.

warcraftrealmstawyn

I spent a few weeks guildless as I pondered what to do before realizing that my friends were actually the main reason I enjoyed the game and so I joined most of my closer friends from that first guild in our new, small guild. I’m happy now. Guild chat is sparse, but friendly; we still have the same Ventrilo server, although it is quieter now; and the biggest job the officers have is to come up with the wittiest possible theme for guild ranks. Plus, I seem to have fallen into the aforementioned “honorary guildie” status with a few other guilds to allow me to get my raiding in. Life is good.

Still, there are times when I miss what we once were. Being a part of something huge and big and seemingly omnipresent. Feeling like I was helping to lead a well-oiled machine. The machine fell apart in those last months, which is why it all started to go downhill. But at our peak, we really were something.

It was a train wreck waiting to happen, but like your first love, you can never quite get over it anyway. So here’s to you, Entelechy, wherever you are in the nether of the past.

entelechyposter3

LFM to play with minipets in Naxx, PST

wow_whenyouarebored

I had a Naxx run scheduled for last night with my guild– unfortunately it failed to ignite due largely to scheduling problems and the result was a bunch of us hanging out in the instance playing around with minipets and toys for about an hour before we decided to just scrap it.

Here is where I start talking about something tragically ironic: specifically, the fact that right as work has finally decided to give me a schedule that would enable me to raid with my own guild and not random groups… my guild has ran into a bit of a wall. People are having schedule issues, people are more interested in playing alts, people are burned out… that sort of thing. I am not trying to say that any of this is bad, by the way, just that it’s terribly ironic timing for me that my guild has effectively stopped doing much raiding now that I am available.

The boyfriend has branched off (on good terms with all, so don’t get confused) and made a new guild and while I don’t want to steal his thunder by talking about it prematurely, he hopes to make it a more “serious” raiding guild as opposed to the more “casual” groups he’s been leading the past few months. Whether or not I’d be interested myself is something I’m actually still thinking about. I have never considered myself to be much of a hardcore raider. Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy raiding, but I enjoy my heroics and my alts and my silly sidehobbies like minipets every bit as much. When I do raid, it’s because I enjoy spending a relaxing night with friends or at least nice people, having fun and not worrying about things like complicated loot rules. As such, I don’t know if I could dedicate myself to “serious raiding”, especially since my job could decide to rescind my latest scheduling luck without notice whenever they want to.

So, while I’m going to continue to try to push myself into Naxx runs with PuGs or other guilds, with the goal of ultimately providing good blogwriting fodder, my own future as it comes to raiding is somewhat unclear. I’d love to raid casually with my current guild but as the philosopher Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.

In the meantime, while my raid future sits around in limbo as I wait to see how things go with my guild, the boyfriend’s new guild, and my own schedule, I’m having a lot of fun playing alts. My horde hunter Lunapike and my resto druid Tamaryn are both level 72– I’ve purposefully kept them neck-and-neck rather than picking one to grind to 80 and I’m having a lot of fun seeing the same zones from different perspectives.

Have a good weekend all!