Project Lore

Way back before Burning Crusade I was a founding member of a guild started on day one of the opening of the Darksorrow server.

Played with all the way to 60, a great group of people, just slightly not enough to sink in to Molten Core. 40 person raids were all the rage. But we were very close.

Guild Master decided to just jump ship (selfishly) and join what was then the biggest guild on the server. Leaving a good 70 of us stranded with no direction, out of this formed three guilds. Which all failed.

Was great to see him ride past with all the epics. Happens I guess. Shame he was such a nice GM too.

I know EXACTLY what you're talking about.

Just the other day I was running MGT with a few people, and a rogue from the guild said he had to leave midway because of real life commitments. Obviously we didn't stop him and said our farewells and found a replacement within 5-10minutes of it happening. This new rogue was doing wonders for our group and we managed to down priestess in one go, where as we had previously wiped 2 times on her.

So anyway we get up to Kael'Thas and who comes whispering for an invite? The old rogue. Obviously seeing how far into the instance we'd gone and the quality of the group, plus not wanting to create any more disruptions we apologised and said our party was already full.
Moments later he /gquit......

Talk about being a WoW Emo... it's not like we can't run MGT again the next day? Have a little respect for your guild members and try focusing on what would be better for everyone instead of your own personal gains.

I had a similar experience with my guild on Arthas. I also live on the West Coast, and Arthas is an East Coast server. I was in a great guild, where everyone seemed to get along with each other relatively well. We would occasionally get one of the "WoW Emos" but they never seemed to disrupt our experience very much.

Then our GM decided that he wanted to raid at a faster pace, took 10 other people with him, and formed another guild. He also ignored almost everyone else in the guild.

Why was this, you ask? The day before we had failed to down Gruul in our weekly run. Wow.

Some people take purple's too seriously.

Why so serious?

I was in a cool guild a while back, just after Burning Crusade, it had about fifty people in it for the huge raids and had a core group of around four guys, and each guy would usually head up one raid at a time or all four at once. These guys apparently knew each other in RL and were best mates, had been playing WoW almost since it came out, and I kinda grew up in that guild and learned how to PLAY WoW in it.

Suddenly, one day, some RL bullshit went down. It was something along the lines of one of guys having broken up with his girlfriend a while back and then the other guy trying to put the moves on her or something and a yelling match happened right in the middle of a raid for some rare loot. Well, our healer just up and left leaving us with no way to really complete anything and we wiped right in the middle of a boss battle. It was... suckage. Grade A suckage. Personally think they coulda waited until after the damn battle.

Haven't raided since really, been busy at my job and haven't played WoW for a while.

I've actually done a /gquit after not being invited to a raid.

It was in a guild, formed by only RL friends(13 of us), and we had been talking about doing Karazhan for a long time, then finally came the day, that we had decided to invade the dungeon, and rip the bad-asses from their epics. Well, the day I logged on, I noticed, what the hell ? Who are these like 30 other people in the guild(seeing we were roughly 7-8 online usually, it's a huge difference). Apparently, some hours earlier the others in the guild had decided to merge, with 2 other guilds in the last second, without informing everyone. Which ended up pushing out a lot of those people who had been hyped about raiding for the last couple of weeks(my self included) from the already decided raid formation. Well, I became damn angry of course, seeing as I was a co-founder of the guild. So I left them, and couldn't stand talking to them for a couple of days. I felt really betrayed.

I'm not sure if that makes me an "emo", but if it does, I guess there's nothing I can do about it.

Tss Emo

I was the guild leader of a twink guild (29 bracket only) We started with a bang, with a core group of around 10 extremely well geared twinks - perfect for wsg. We rocked it for about a month, but then... it stopped. People just randomly stopped showing up. Attendance slipped. Our numbers grew, but no one ever played their toon.

I could never explain it. We always had great runs - even against other twink guilds. We had two bank slots filled with chanting supplies and rumsey rum black label. We had a website that everyone visited often but it just... stopped.

I don't play my twink much anymore... now I'm giving my 70 the attention he really deserves.

Hey SaintGermain just though i would tell you that on your author page you spelled Azeroth wrong u spelled t it Azeroff.
besides that great posts

OK so I joined a guild we all enjoyed raiding Kara and ZA. After a couple months out guild master decides were gonna merge with another guild. Since i was to under geared to goto Gruuls i didn't find out that the other people got mad because we gave our Sub rogue the Tier 5 shoulder token for shoulders. The tank a Pally got really mad about it because he only had the Tier 4 shoulders even though he just got them a couple weeks earlier. So this showed all of us that the leaders of that guild were just in it to gear themselves so we all left the guild of course. All was fine and well for a couple weeks then our GM decides were not progressing fast enough so he disbands the guild

i was in a pretty good guild for a very long time. by good here, i don't really mean that we ran mc and onyxia every other night (this was pre-bc), but that everyone in the guild was just really cool and mellow. then there was some dissagreement one weekend about who had the "authority" to do this and that, and pretty much every one of the high ranking guild members left. at this time i was probably in the mid-30 levels, and the remaining gms decided to try to bring in some new blood to make up for the members who were lost. this new blood consisted of people who were members of the guild long ago, but switched to more raid intensive guilds. as a result, that guild became a more raid intensive guild, and i, as a mid-30 level, was kicked out.

It seems like theres always a bit of drama when it comes to raiding. I thought I had avoided it, but it was just a bit delayed.

I was a tank for my guild, and i was with them all through the progression in kara, into gruul, into mag, I was even one of the tanks that one shot nalrokk in ZA on opening night. We had a great group of people for 10-mans; all very skilled and all very fun, which is what raids should be.

When we started to run 25-mans on our own, is when we started taking steps backward. Most of the people I had progressed with started to slowly disappear, our MT left over some argument with the GM, and a bunch of new people came in. It got so bad, we couldn't even get pasted curator. Then one of our officers, whom I always thought was a better leader then the GM, just up and left out of the blue. Because this was right before my final exams, I couldn't deal with the bs, so I didn't log on for about 2 months.

I came back to see the guild has been filled with new people. The next day, i find that i'm not in a guild with a letter in my mail box stating that I wasn't loyal to the guild and they were looking for loyalty. Acctually, they were looking for obedience, I stuck with them through months of crap, I didn't complain over wipes, or when I was passed over for gear, or even when the GM would have really bad ideas about raid schedule, and i get kicked over an issue of loyalty...the drama is unavoidable.

Thats my horror story, I don't play my warrior anymore...for obvious reasons.

Just yesterday we had a WoW emo in my guild we dont roll on tier tokens we use the Suicide Kings system, its a list of people, the people up the top have first pick of tier gear but if they take it they go to the bottom. Anyway we told the guy the system (he was new to the guild) but he still rolled on it, we told him we didnt do it this way so he and his friend left the raid and /gquit. It didnt really matter he wasnt that good.

Our guild just fell apart, we have always had troubles with attendance, and no matter how hard we tried to recruit more, people just werent willing to run kara for a week or two to gear up new healers.

Anyone with the gear for SSC/TK has already gone and joined a higher progression guild that can carry them into MH/BT.

So close to WotLK, too many seem to not care for 'learning fights' and experiencing content the way its meant to - with a bunch of guys new to the fights, in gear comparable to what is gonna drop.

As an Officer of the guild, it really hurt when people didnt show, despite me logging on every night, trying to organise them into raids of ANYTHING just to keep people interested.

On Frostmane, talk to Paragon, Unite or Keebler Refugees. They're the only guilds I know that still raid anything before Sunwell Plateau.

Well my guild fell apart for many reason...
1. Someone agrue that our gm just wanted to gear there alts.. (which was somewhat true because they would put there alts in the good group and gear up faster... while the other people had to run with the less geared group and had to fight for gear)...
2. There was drama over a raid during while we raiding... they were cussing each other out on vent... (I myself just listening and hear the firworks)
3. It seemed our gm didn't care.... i mean i'm not playing my gm but it seem everyone left cause of them... people would whisper for me to leave cause those people only care for themselves...

I myself didn't want to leave but the guild was falling a part... i saw like all our geared folks leave in front of my eyes... we still had 70's but they never wanted to raid so i decided to /gquit.....

This is not one thing I am looking forward to, finding a good gear once I finally hit 70 to do the end game dungons. Apparently I am on the worst server to be thinking about PvE, The Forgotten Coast, because all the higher levels care about is PvP and only a handful of guilds do raids. Just last week was the servers first down of illidan or whatever his name is.

Man I wish I had 25 friends IRL to play WoW with.

When WoW first released, they showed the timezone of each server. The (US) coastal timezone servers were flooded in a massive tidal wave of players, while the middle timezone servers were pretty much ignored.

Instead of adding more PST and EST servers, Blizzard decided to hide the timezones on the "choose a realm" screen.

You can see a list of realms with timezones here: http://warcraftrealms.com/realmstats.php

There's also a broken-out set of lists here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Realms_List

I have joined a lot of guilds in my two months on WoW and so far they have been crap. So I decided just to wait till lvl 70 get some people together and start my own.

The problem with argurments within raids is that they tend to spread to everyone in the guild regardless. I got invited into the guild my friend was an officer in on my first ever character so i never went on any raids, just bummed along doing my own thing and then the guys would come out of a raid and then everything would blow up. They would start arguing and people would /gleave cos they thought people weren't taking their sides. Then these problems wouold go away but would never really be sorted and then blow up again over something really trivial. It always made me feel bad cos here were two people i liked arguing over something really stupid.

I think the problem is that some people have problems co-operating and uderstanding that they are part of something bigger than a raid group.

I've seen it all. I was part of a core that built the raiding population on my server from next to nothing (2 guilds horde side raided - now there's like 15+). It started with a bunch of small guilds, cooped and built a raiding setup so we could do MC/BWL etc, like the "big boys". It was painful but we got the job done. It had tons of spinoffs, and it later partially imploded. I wound up joining one of the larger guilds as their senior raid manager (along with my crew from my old small guild) and we've been there ever since. It's had 5 guilds splinter off to form their own guilds, because well, raiding messes with people's heads. So I can say with some honesty, a lot of the guilds on my server exist because of raids I helped lead or lead myself

So this is what I've learned from those experiences:

First off as a raider, you raid so much that eventually you get a sense of entitlement. You want to do your job well, so having the best gear matters, so if you see a drop you need to upgrade, well it gets tough to keep a sensible head about it. You get left out with No explanation from the leadership, and it means you've sacrificed time you couldve spent with loved ones on the game for nothing. That makes some people very angry, especially when they are dedicated to moving progression along. WoW raids aren't easy, they take dedication, commitment, and large amounts of time. If you have a job/gf etc, you're sacrificing that time for your guild. That's a huge sacrifice. To feel it was for nothing, well that makes people a little angry.

Alternatively some get so committed to doing stuff for themselves they lose sight of what's important for the guild or it's progression and wind up focusing on selfish desires (like offspec gear, for every alt they have). That eventually leads to rifts, anger and all sorts of suck. And usually forces a gquit when people realize how selfish they're being.

A lot of these problems stem from the way the loot distribution system was designed. There is NOT enough loot to divy it up fairly so everyone can get a reward for their efforts. That basically means some people will go to raids for months and never get Anything. That also causes problems because some guilds get so focused on progression, they will leave those people behind. Because it becomes a matter of (lets get everyone what they want) taking 6 months to gear everyone from one instance before moving to the next. 2-3 Drops per 25 man is laughable considering the time and gold required to learn the bosses (so is 2 off a 40 man).

Really, Blizzard needs to reevaluate how it handles raids over 10 people so that loot distribution is more fair. It will solve a lot of the problems that stem from raiding.

Oh yea, it also doesnèt help that nobody wants to tank and few want to heal. And Everyone wants DPS gear even people who have no need for it.

With the severe class imbalances, and the needs for adjusting raid loot distribution a fundamental shift in how Blizzard manages these things has to be addressed or we can just see more of the same with WOTLK.

People expect reward for effort. You attend a raid, even if you wipe, it should net you something so people feel it was worth it. Otherwise why do it. And if you down the boss, it should be dropping plenty for everyone, not just a pittance only useful to a few people or that everyone wants but only drops once a year. Or they put massive amounts of caster drops on one boss, Nothing for melee, so if the boss is skippable, the tanks wont want to do it, so the casters get screwed. WHY do that

I mean, I have 130 dkp right now, I cant even get an upgrade with that, but a druid comes gets a drop every other run, for 1 dkp because they are the only druid, and dps are a dime a dozen. Said druid could take whatever DPS gear I need for their offpec but I wont be able to get it for my main (thankfully Im lucky and our druids are respectful but not all are). Thats hardly fair but you need DKP to keep complete noobs from just showing up rolling on gear you NEED for progression and then never coming again. It really is fundamental flaws in the loot distribution and loot design :(

Short form!

Blizzard made raid loot too much of an unnecessary time sink creating MUCH needless drama.

Scratch that: the way they designed Raids in general is too much of a time sink.

So yeah i was in a guild on Hellscream that my fiancee and I had joined because he knew one of the officers through work. So we joined and we were happy, lots of rl friends and family playing together. We were in that guild for over a year. We told them we were going to have to break for a little while because we were expecting a baby and life gets really hectic after you have a little one. "No problem!" we were told, "Take all the time you need!" OK, great, thanks guys, be back asap.

Fast forward 2 months later, when we finally got the baby on a semi-decent schedule and were able to play again. Log on to find half the guild gone. Apparently, the (married irl) GM had been flirting and cybering with another member (also married irl) who was not in the rl friends and family circle. The whole thing fell apart when the chicka ran to her hubby, the rl friends and family of the GM backed him up, the officers who weren't didn't, and the GM took his family and friends and formed a seperate guild. We followed because the guy who got us in the guild was his brother-in-law and went with him.

To top it off, what had previously been a little clique-y in the first guild but not anything to really be upset about became very in-crowdish in the 2nd guild. So, if you weren't in the main core of the friends and family you didn't raid. Wonderful :P And then they wondered why it was so hard for them to get enough people to go to the 25 mans when they deigned to set one up. Cuz the rest of us weren't geared enough, duh!

Anyway, we moved from that server when we moved across the country. They were on way earlier then we were and the rl connection went away. And now, the new guild we have been with for over 6 mos. is also falling apart cuz I was made an officer before someone else who had been there longer but hadn't ever shown an interest in becoming one until suddenly, "Wtf she is an officer before me?!" Long story short, she left and took more then a few of our well-geared, active players with her. *sigh*