I have always said, both to myself and others, that the thing that makes MMO games special is the possibilities for social interaction that they present.  These days, before you hit the level cap, being social is largely optional.  You can group up to tackle tough quests and to run dungeons, but if you want to just log in and focus on grinding out that next chunk of a level, you can, and many people choose to play this way.  However, once you hit the cap, the things you can do to progress require a group of people to accomplish them.  This is where is pays off to have a guild or group of close friends who can help you out with this content.  More than anything else, the fact that I am experiencing the end-game content of WoW is due to the fact that I have friends in the game who play with me.

However, recently, the guild I was in faced a meltdown of sorts.  A handful of our key players defected to a different guild, leaving us unable to run the 10 and 25 man content we had been running.  The guild leaders spent a week trying to recruit new members in to fill out the ranks until one day I logged in to an empty guild and a MOTD message saying that we were merging with the guild that all the key members had originally left for.  Only … this wasn’t exactly true.  The guild leader and a couple of our remaining top players had merged.  Everyone else was on their own to beg for a position.  For a couple of days I was upset and angry about this.  However, after a couple days I realized that the guild I was in was little more than a group of buddies.  There was no structure or focus.  Scheduled events would be changed/canceled at the last minute, despite constant reminders, requests for help from guildies would go ignored for weeks, and so on.  This was a group of friends messing around and not a guild, focusing on balance and progress.  It is no wonder that we had top players leave.  They wanted to progress and were being held back.

I spent a couple days bugging the leader of the new guild for a place.  All I wanted was to play in the same place as my buddies were.  I was told to be patient.  I was told that they wanted “only the best players” in their guild and that they were reviewing the requests on a one by one basis.  Eventually, I stopped caring about it.  The kicker is that my former guild mates were responsible for getting me hooked back into WoW, which caused me to lose interest in Aion.  I learned the other day that the guild leaders that had decided to abandon our guild to “merge” with the new one were now no longer playing WoW, but had moved on to Aion.  So our entire guild was destroyed, and a week later, the people responsible for it are not even playing WoW anymore.

If I sound mad, believe me, I am not.  At one point I was mad, but now I am looking at this as a good thing.  I am now free to join a different guild, one that I can do some research on first.  It sucks that I wont be playing with some of my friends, but maybe the guild I do join with be more focused and responsible towards the needs of its members.  This whole experience really drove home the responsibility that guild leaders have towards their fellow guildies.  Yes, in the end it is just a game, but the potential for a lot of hurt feelings is very high if you are not careful and dilligent.