StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Okay, this is a topic on something a bit more specifc then talking about "Horde rules, Alliance sux!"...as I have done both and honestly I like them both but really, they could've made the Orcs look better (Quasimodo is not an intimidating look), though the Epic Wolf is a fucking awesome mount.

Guilds.

Love, hate, do not care they are a quintessional part of World of Warcraft. Without them usually you are beholden to friends for help, materials and the dreaded PuG(Pick Up Group). Guilds are great because if you are into raiding of any sort, be it PvP or PvE...it either makes it go smoother(PvP) or essential (PvE). Sometimes they are lead by a commitee of people who have a brain cell, other times power mad suck ups who can barely grasp that to be an effective leader.

My view is they can be decent but that it's something the game definitly forces upon you because of how high ends work regardless. If anyone wants to debate this point be my guest because usually the best PvPers have equipment that is only gotten through raiding efforts.

My horror story usually are of that some guildies are just dumb when it comes to five man, and we still have wipes regardless of how much they have nerfed Dire Maul, LBRS, and UBRS. Such as a druid who thinks that going five man LBRS with Shadowcraft Gear and trying to out tank me is intelligent.....when said druid is the ONLY healer class in said group. There are others, but right now that one personally annoyed me.

So what are your views of Guilds and any lovable horror stories?

I was in a very good guild that fell apart because cloth classes were all in demand. We had a much higher proportion of cloth in our guild than most others and everybody got them into their Molten Core raids before we assembled one.

When we did get around to organising a guild Core group, we had no cloth because our clothies didn't want to give up their other raids.

Nowadays we just do five-mans. We like them, because raiding honestly is so easy it's not entertaining at all.

Hope this is open to non-wow players too ;P


Guilds are nice to have, you can be organised and such but they are not essential. Laehn of nimue got to realm rank 10 as a pickup. Sucess depends mostly on who you know, how good you are and when you play.

I'm in what I consider to be a very good guild. It's not the best guild on the server--PvP or PvE, but it's decent and we're getting much better in a hurry, with Molten Core down to "farm status."

I guess the funniest/most terrifying thing that happened with one of my guildies was when we were doing this run through MC, and on teamspeak we got on the topic of ice cream. Someone reported that they had just bought an enormous tub of the stuff for $12, and reported that "it's good ice cream, too. Not like the low-quality stuff that usually comes in the plastic tubs." Other people chime in, and he finally goes, "Problem is, I don't know if it's going to fit in my freezer, and I don't think I can eat it all in one go."

Other good moment--one of our priests (played by this really sweet woman) became "The Bomb" and in a fit of panic ran to where she didn't see anybody... which happened to be right next to our main tank who was fighting Baron Geddon (which contributed to the fact that there was no one there). No one really knew what happened to the tank, but we all saw him go down to about 600 health and die before anyone could get a flash heal off, so one of our off-tanks rushes in and picks up for him. Then we hear this little voice over teamspeak, "Did I just kill Bags?"

I think Guilds cane become a very bad when one begin to dominate a server. In my server, one guild had come to dominate the high end raids and such and if you wanted to to raid you would have to have some of their members in your group since they had the vast amount of raid people in it.

A couple of their competition had collapsed and members absorbed (My guild was one of them, basically some people wanted to merge into a smaller guild with us losing our guild name even though we had the greater amount of people. Some of the people in the guild didn't care about guild name and respect that a guild name had generated. When these people, some core people of the guild left it led to a wave of people just quitting and giving up) so there was real little competition for control of end game content.

As such, since they didn't have to answer to anyone, most of the members became rude snotty assholes that enjoyed pissing off other people and didn't think anything about ninja looting non-guildies. For them ninja-looting was a joke, the leader would just give them a slap on the wrist removing a few dkp points. Fortunately, during the time I had quit the game, the leader stole all the gold from the guild bank, disbanded the guild, and rerolled alliance.

the Guild I'm on, is ok we're quite small guild but we generally make that up with quality (only problem that I got is the lack of my lvl chars in the guild but that's being fixed (by me getting to a higher lvl)).

Guilds are generally beneficial/neccessary. The thing about bringing people together, though, is that you'll inevetably bring dumb people together. You'll get people playing with and relying on classes they know nothing about, or worse, have formed incorrect ideas on. Luckily, this leads more to laffo then anything. Many are the tales of Mages porting people to the wrong cities, or Warlocks summoning lower level guildies into, say, the Badlands, or the middle of the Great Sea.

I play On Dreanor EU and the problem we have on the horde side of things is that 3 large guilds have swallowed up near enough all of the smaller ones. This means that they get free run of the instances, making it neigh on impossible to get blue or purple drops above level 55. However after some planning on the official forums the remaining smaller guilds who refused to become a number in a oversized guild are gonna start forming alliances so that we have a chance of getting a share of the good loot.

The two guilds I've joined (and promptly quit) were run by childish idiots and their inner circle was the same. In the first one, the guild leader actually logged on as a new character and joined the guild then started saying crap about himself to see if us other members didnt like him. How fucking childish.

The second guild was great on the first day, since we organized a raid with three other guilds and hit the Crossroads then ran through Stonetalon and Ashenvale hitting the Horde where we could. But after that, three 60's quit and the other upper level characters did ZERO to aid lower members, and a few actually went so far as to bitch about guildies asking for help. That and a little after I joined they started bitching about dues, which apparently you had to pay, which they never mentioned to me or a few other members. If its a solid guild with an actual guild Armorsmith/Swordsmith/etc then I can understand and respect the dues system. But when its in an incompetant or disorganized guild, you may as well put a "do not join" tag under your guild name.


And perhaps this is just me, but I think that having a broad range of levels within a guild, especially a small to medium sized guild, I think is a bad idea. Since most 50+ won't want to run Deadmines or Scarlet Monastary to aid a guildie unless its a personal friend, theres no real benefit for a "lowbie" joining a guild populated with high-levels.

Lately there are three guilds who my Warrior ( 58 ) has been frequently teaming up with to do instance runs, and for me, to be in good standing with multiple guilds is nice, even if I arent a member of any of them. Its been beneficial since I get all of the instance runs without any politics that might be playing out within a guild

Guilds, like anything else as folks have pointed out, can be good and bad. I had a lot of bad experiences in EQ, so when I came to WoW I decided to make my own guild and I've been damn fortunate since then. A few of the things I did that really helped is...

a. I made a clear set of expectations for all new and existing members to follow. So folks know what they are getting into and those who don't follow them are asked to leave. Though it's not been a problem so far.
b. We refuse to recruit actively via poaching from other guilds.
c. We put in a mandatory age limit of 21, though there have been a few exceptions.
d. We instituted a DKP system to eliminte the loot arguments and reward participation.
e. As part of the expectations the most important one is that people deal with their own interpersonal conflicts with guild members and not involve the officers until they've attempted to do so themselves. i.e. if you aren't willing to solve your shit yourself, then why should I or one of my officers?
f. Encourage people to stay off the damn boards. Read fine, but posting leads to drama and that just gets old and is pointless.

i.e. the objective is to provide a structured environment with clear rules and follow'em, but don't be an ogre bout'em.

Sorry to toot my own horn here, I'm really proud of my folks, specially since we just nailed Nefarion tonight on our first night of tryin. But it has worked out REALLY well, and we have pretty minimal intraguild conflicts. We've been around for over a year now (formed 2nd week of release) and it really has worked out great.

Oh, the final bit of advice...never ever take yourselves to seriously. I recommend a purposefully somewhat silly name for this, cause with a name like Gnomish Special Forces, you just can't go around stroking the e-peen with a name that ridiculous.

NeoGoomba wrote:The second guild was great on the first day, since we organized a raid with three other guilds and hit the Crossroads then ran through Stonetalon and Ashenvale hitting the Horde where we could. But after that, three 60's quit and the other upper level characters did ZERO to aid lower members, and a few actually went so far as to bitch about guildies asking for help. That and a little after I joined they started bitching about dues, which apparently you had to pay, which they never mentioned to me or a few other members. If its a solid guild with an actual guild Armorsmith/Swordsmith/etc then I can understand and respect the dues system. But when its in an incompetant or disorganized guild, you may as well put a "do not join" tag under your guild name.

Dues is a big WTF?!? However, the thing about not helping lower levels. Its not a problem when every few days someone asks you for a bit of help. What becomes a problem tho is that, when you have a large number of lower levels, combined with trying to meet some goals as a guild and the low levels asking you to clear a path thru an instance for them every day it gets you jaded. You got to see it from the higher levels point of view. Someone asks you for help. You check the guild roster and see that there are 15 people of around that level online currently. You ask them why they aren't working together instead of everyone doing their thing. Silence. Then a few come up with lame excuses. Now, if you know the guy asking to be someone decent you will probably still drop everything and do a run-thru with him helping him out, however if it is someone who just joined the guild and hasn't really showed himself to be decent up until that point you are likely to just tell the level range in gchat to work together because that is what they should have been doing in the first place. The main point that lower then 60 should understand is that lvl60 players don't log in to help them out and that doing the instance properly for the first time is much more satisfying then getting a run-thru. Not everything is in the items.

Now, I got lucky with my guild. It was formed very soon after release by a dozen of us who left the community guild of the largest Croatian gaming site (well, basicly - it was the place that coordinated the creation of the guild) since that guild was obviusly not working do to retarded (pre)teenagers. It's suprising how much fun can a guild bring when everyone is mature (and by this I mean not screwing your guildmates, not being retarded in instances and similar mature, not not-joking-or-having-any-fun mature). That worked fine (with a slow increase in numbers over time, most of who were good people) up until the dreaded end-game content need for 40 people. Long story short, after a merger, temporary alliances and recruiting we are now a competent Molten Core-farm-status (well, except Ragna) guild, and do to the merger I've "met" some very nice people all over Europe (and some surprisingly old people considering the usual audience for MMORPGs). But there were crisis along the way. A lot of them. Oh, and that community guild fell apart over time do to their 60's proptly leaving for the mega-guilds once reaching 60

My advice for people looking for a guild is not to get greedy (well, unless you feel being decked out in phat loot is the entire point of the game) and find a guild where they feel the core players are good people and someone who you could play with. The core people set the atmosphere so if they are spasmatic teenagers led by such a GM who decided to make the guild just so that he could feel what its like to wield some (imaginary) power, its unlikely the guild will see better days (dues?!?). Oh, and if you feel that the guild is not worth your time, be sure to give them an goodbye in chat explaining the reasons for leaving. That is likely to leave a much better memory in any of the decent people that might be stuck in the guild instad of just typing /gquit.

Last night on ZG we were yakking on our way to Hakkar the wuss and someone was asking about what would LoTR look like if it was in WoW terms. Here's her answer:

"You must take the One Ring to the fiery depths of Molten Core, and destroy it. Accompanying you will be 3 Gnome Rogues, 1 Dwarf Warrior, 1 Human Warrior, 1 Human Paladin, 1 Night Elf Hunter, and 1 Human Mage. You must go in with no more than that, and fight your way to the place where the One Ring was crafted, Ragnaros's Lair. Good Luck Halfling, you only have a paladin as healer. And be warned, you will have a wretched little leper gnome following you, as well as the threat of the 9 Undead Warriors pursuing you. You're definately screwed, except for the paladin. He can shield hearth at any time."

And my response:

"and beware - the Paladin is a ninja looter."