Loyalty to a guild is something I feel pretty strongly about. I’d say that I’m a fairly loyal person. If I’ve joined a guild, I’m not going to turn tail and jump ship on a whim. I may wind up leaving, I’ve left a few, but I’ll not do so when I feel there’s still a core of guild members/officers to be loyal to.

I am fairly certain that I am in a minority in the WoW universe. As a reader of this blog, you’re probably in that minority too. Maybe not, but I’d tend to think that the people who read my blog are somewhat similar to me.

I’ve found that there are people who will just guild hop. At the first sign of trouble they’re off apping at a more progressed guild. If the guild wipes on PP a few too many times, you’ll see this person less and less, and soon they’re applying to all the other raiding guilds on the server.

I do not understand this person. A guild is a community. It’s a group of people working together towards a common goal. It seems that to these guild hoppers, the guild is a tool that they can use to get to more raids and acquire more gear. Actually, I think I do understand them. I just don’t agree with their views on what a guild is.

Thespius over at WOM made a post about a raider recently who was not a team player. That story reminds me of many guild hoppers I’ve met in the past. As an Officer in Raging Daisies I had to deal with them on an almost daily basis. Whether it was someone leaving over something silly, or if it was an applicant bolting from their old guild, I had guild hoppers on the radar almost daily. I know they exist. I’ve seen them in action, but I just can’t fathom how it is that they could decide to act this way.

When I join a guild, I want to have some sort of bond to the guild members around me. Even though I’m quiet and pretty much the least social person in Vent or Guild chat, I want to know that these are people who I belong with. I’ve never been the type to just look at a server’s gild progression list, toss a dart and apply randomly. I have chosen my guilds for pretty specific reasons based around personality, rather than ability to get me loot.

When I joined my first serious guild I quickly became friends with the people who made it up, most of whom were together for a while before I got there. A couple weeks after I joined, I was made an officer, and I spent 2 and a half years in that position. I rode through the ups and downs of the guild and actually felt like it was a part of me. Guild success was more important to me than personal success.

You hear that concept quite a bit from professional Athletes such as Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. They will tell you that individual records pale in comparison to winning that trophy. They’ll tell you that it takes the whole team to win the big one. They tell you that no man is bigger than the team, even if he is. (See Joe Namath, Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning) I agree with them. It’s the same concept in the guild. I’m a part of this guild for better or worse, and everything I do, whether it also helps me or not, is to aid the guilds goals.

The feeling of community and of being a part of something is pretty enjoyable. I’ve been lucky to find it in a few places along the way. First in RD, then when I left there to play with my Cousins and their friends in Kohrruption I found the same bonds. When that guild dissolved, I was lucky enough to find another through contacts in the blogosphere and that felt like a home. Sadly it dissolved with most of the members slowly breaking off the sinking ship when too many people had RL pop up and steal them from the game. I moved on and found yet another guild that felt like home, only to have it dissolve in front of me, yet again. It earned me the nickname “Maerdred: Destroyer of Guilds” within the Blog Azeroth chatroom. Once that guild was sufficiently dead, I applied with another guild I had found through the Blogosphere and I’ve been here ever since. I don’t plan on killing this one, so don’t worry. It feels like home, and I am sure every member feels the same way as I do.

I know other people like me. Once they join a guild they will find it to be like a home and not leave. I know people who have been in one guild their entire WoW career. I’m not lucky enough for that to have happened to me, but I know you people are out there. I envy you. To find a place to call home, and still be there three, four, five years later is a special thing.

I have been lucky enough to play this game with some very great people. The Bad eggs have been few and far between. Perhaps that’s why I find it so easy to be loyal. I keep finding guilds which meet my desires and needs perfectly. The Community aspect of the guild is far more important than the ability to one-shot Elevator Boss… but it’s not a bad trait to have.

What about you? Are you the type to jump from guild to guild, or are you going to find one and stick with it through all the drama and turmoil? Do you have any particular ideas about people who play it differently than you? Are the people who guild-hop all selfish jerks? Are the ones who stick it out due to loyalty just a bunch of sappy idiots? Let me know. I’m sure it would be an interesting read.

“Rez Maer, he’s a dumb ass and died.” (I may have added the last part…)

Well. No. I’m not. But yes I am… But I dunno. I feel bad about it.

I know why I died every time I died. The first time? The moon was standing in the wrong place and I got hit by the ice block thing.

The second time? I was running through the center of the dragon to get back to the raid. Or what I THOUGHT was the center of the dragon, and I got hit by the breath.

The third time, Again. Running through the front of the dragon, not the center of the dragon.

It’s worked 20 times. but not those two. I don’t get it. I’ll just have to run up the stairs next time. It’s just easier to hit auto run and go under her and come out the other side…

It’s NOT my fault we keep dying!!! I promise!

This DK is my first to make it past level 59, and I don’t know why. I am enjoying the Blood DPS spec and am having lots of fun. I leveled through Outland both via questing and random dungeon queues as DPS and had a pretty good time with it. I plan to stick with Blood DPS and try and pepper in some Frost Tanking, but I still don’t have that spec or gear for it, so I’m very gun shy.

Back to Monday night. I logged in and saw that I wasn’t on the list for the 10-man the guild was running, so I grabbed the DK to start Northrend. I’d already sent him to Dalaran with the help of a Tome of Cold Weather Flying, so I headed on down to the Borean Tundra to get started questing again.

After about 45 minutes of that it got a bit old, so I queued for a Ranfom Wrath Dungeon and shortly (pretty quick actually) I was standing in Utgarde Keep with a 72 Warrior tank, a couple of 70-72 DPS and an 80 Resto/Balance druid. Oh Boy! How fun will this be?

I have got to say, pretty fun. I was very slow to build up my DPS at first, not knowing the skill level of the tank, knowing how easy it could be to pull agro with a DnD if he’s not gotten all of the mobs with a Thunder Clap or two. What’s a DK to do? Feel out the Tank, Figure out if he’s the type to run through the mobs and let the DPS see their backsides or if he runs up TO them forcing the melee to skirt around to their backs. For the record, he was 50/50.

The Resto druid would pop wild growth, then hurricane, then wild growth, then hurricane. It was hilarious. The healer was Top DPS all night. I was pretty low on the totem pole, but hey, my gear sucks. I started to do better when I felt comfortable enough to actually pop DnD.

About halfway through the dungeon the healer asked if we all wanted to just keep group and do another random after this one was done. We all said yes. So we did it. Then we did it again with the mage stepping out. We got a Warlock for the third try and the Druid went full Balance. Shuffling off Tree form for Boomkin form and pretty much destroyed the place; pulling off the tank every pull while keeping everyone above 70% health the entire time.

At the end of the wing full of Proto Drakes and Drake handlers our Rage starved tank had himself a tantrum, pulling the whole room and porting out of the instance. Tank Tantrums are silly. It’s like, “I have no Rage in in the game, but a full rage bar in real life, I’m going to ragegasm all over you and leave the instance!”

Stupid tank. We all ran back to our corpses and rejoined the queue waiting for a tank.

“Hey DK, go frost and we can 4-man this bitch”

Uhhhh. I don’t have a frost spec or tanking gear. This is a DPS alt I can use when I don’t want to think. But I guess I can hit Frost Presence and pretend, as long as the three of you know I’m going to suck.

“Do eeet!”

3 pulls later a tank joined and there was much rejoicing(from me). I don’t have to pretend to be a tank anymore! Yay!

5 pulls later, bitching to myself that this new tank sucks and can’t hold agro at all I see the little Frost Presence button is still lit up…

Dumb Maer. Blood Presence NAO!

Hey look, I’m not pulling aggro with white damage anymore!!!

The rest of the group had a nice laugh when I announced my stupidity. We then made it to the final boss, and in Blood Presense, against a level 80 moonkin(who was also healing) I did top damage!

About an hour I had been in that group. Three runs of UK and one failed Maertank moment all I wanted to do was go to work and tell all my friends… None of my friends play WoW. I have to blog about it instead. So that’s what I do.

You guys are my friends, right? You have “real” friends who play Wow, don’t you? I am so jealous!

Now I know after reading this I’m most likely going to get some comments from some of the more level-headed folks out there telling me to calm down and stop bitching about partially completed BETA content, which is in the process of being worked on. I know that some of the more level-headed readers are going to implore me to just wait it out and see where things go. I know that some of the more level-headed readers are going to inform me that ranting and raving won’t sway Blizzard to my side, and that I should come up with a reasonable response to what I think they have broken.

I know that you level-headed readers will say those things to me.

To you, oh so level-headed readers I say “Phooey!” I want to bitch and moan in an over-the-top manner as if I don’t realize that it’s a BETA, and that things are in flux and won’t be finished for months. I want to forget the rational side of my brain and I want to act like a complete imbecile.

Let me act like a dickwad. It’s the Interwebs and Blizzard’s not going to give away my name to everyone on the planet, so I can be anonymous and dickwaddish as I want.

Yes. I just coined the term “dickwaddish”.

I’m not sure how I feel about it yet.

Check that. I didn’t coin the term. Google found 61 other instances of it on the interwebs in .2 seconds.

But still… Blizzard, your Beta is broken. Fix it or I swear I’m going to stop paying you.

oh… WTB BETA invite!

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime
CEO & Cofounder
Blizzard Entertainment

This is very good news and proof positive that Blizzard does listen to their paying customers. Privacy is a HUGE topic on the internet, and I am proud of Blizzadr making this change to their plans. I have been out of the loop for a week or so when it comes to Blizzard news, so I/m not sure what has come before this, but this is a great thing for everyone involved.

Bravo Blizzard. I, for one, no longer feel the need to cancel my account over this subject.

Trash right after him? Wiped us. OK guys. CC stuff. Hey Stop DoTing my sleep target! Wipe. OK. CC this Specific Stuff, in these Specific ways. (of which there are a TON of options. Don’t bring the class bring the player FTW) Oh, so those Assaulters Cleave… Nub Tree(me).

Next up was the next mini boss. Fun. Dragons are cool.

Ok. He’s dead. We have another big pack. “Let’s mark them up and do it just like the last one”

Maer: ok, so wipe three times then kill it?
Rest of raid: lol
Trash: we’re totally wiping you bitches!
Maer: Crap guys I was just joking!

The rest of the trash and the final mini boss were cake. It was time to go for the big Baddie.

We got to phase 2 each and every time. I am proud of that. LOL. We got to Phase 3 three times? Had the dragon down to 17mil health at one point, then he started healing himself. I think. I’m not sure. I was dead.

One note: Staying outside in phase 2 is Boring as fuck, so the tank and I had some fun: dancing, telling jokes, betting on who would die first (actually I’m not sure he saw that. he was far away and I said it in /say)

When you are outside in Phase 2 and the rest of the raid wipes, you have to go into the portal to die. Or, go into the portal where your Paladin tank can DI you and you can watch your mini-pet die… It is sad. Mr Pinchy, it’s not my fault that I lived and you died!

We wiped and we wiped and we wiped some more.

I like this kind of wipefest. We’re all learning the fight and even in our wipe we learned something not to do next time. The kind of wipefest I hate is when it seems like half of the raid is on zombie mode and not thinking, Wiping on Professor Putricide before phase 3? Yeah. That pisses me off. People know the fight. They know how to get away from the Orange Ooze thing. They know how to get away from goo. But they don’t. That’s what I hate.

But, last night was fun. we learned, and I like that.

It was Liberating, but also a little surreal.

I am an addict.

I golfed instead. It was fantastic.

No It’s not the email account that’s associated with the blog.

No I will not just tell you hackers what my Battle.net email address is.

I will use Real ID. Keeva’s post over at TBJ is probably an eye opener for many of the people who were going overboard before this feature showed up.

I’m not adding everyone on the planet. If I know who you are and If I like you, I may add you. If I know who you are and I like you, I may not add you. Don’t take it personally if I don’t. I’m pretty lazy about most things. If I don’t know you, I’m going to deny the request, but you probably don’t have my email address, so that’s not really an issue, is it?

I’m not going to give anything away about it, but it was pretty darn fun! The lead-in quests are pretty cool, and once the fight starts that’s really fun.

The only thing I can say bad about it was lack of direction. There were ties when people got ahead of the fighting and it was hard to tell that things were going on behind you.

Oh, and if you didn’t know where to go get the quest there was very little direction. I’d add more Gnomes wandering around the cities who you can ask what the hubub is about, who can lead you to the quests.

I promise I’m not dead, and I’m not dying. I’m just busy doing other things.