Azeroth vs. Tyria part 11: A Guild For Every Purpose

Quick little break from the race posts to talk about something people might actually be interested in: guilds.

For our little group, we've looked at most guilds as sources of work. We'd take up a contract with whatever guild was willing to pay and treat it like a normal job, just with dragon murder instead of meetings. I'd say no paperwork too, but the boss never gets to avoid that stuff. Once we were off the clock though, that guild tag might as well not have been there. Sure, we had friends in the guilds we worked for; usually they're the ones that recommended us in the first place. There's a difference between being a guildmate and a contract laborer though. A guildmate will usually put the guild's needs ahead of their own. Contractors however look at the bottom line: if someone on our team wasn't being sufficiently compensated for their work, we either renegotiated or cancelled the job. Friendship is great and all, but we're running our own business here and I can't pay Orgrimmar rent with friends. Well, maybe if I was a goblin.

We were in an actual guild back in the old days though, The Greyside Gang. We weren't the biggest guild in the world (setting up a Karazhan run took a bit of creative planning some weeks), but we had the most important thing I've found for guilds that last - we actually liked each other. Whether it was from a shared sense of humor or just the timing of everyone finding a group where they could complain about their old guilds with others that shared their pain, this small group just clicked.

The only guild runs we've done as a group since those days have been a few Sartharion runs back in Northrend and the occasional 5-man dungeon there and after the Cataclysm. Some of us, like my team, have moved on to working for other guilds in the years after we stopped raiding. That didn't stop us from hanging out though. Even after all these years, we still get together to talk about other work we've found or to reminisce/complain about the old days. We may not have been on the cutting edge of raiding, but I'd be hard pressed to find many guilds that still do that after all these years. After some nights of raiding with other guilds, it was nice to head over to our meeting place and vent about some of what I'd seen.

Speaking of other guilds, you might ask why we ever did the contracting thing if we were perfectly happy with the Greyside Gang. Well, it's the same reason why anyone might go job hunting despite really liking their coworkers - if there's no work, you're not getting paid. There's also the matter of staying on top of your game too. Hanging out in a bar in Orgrimmar is fine for the occasional brawl, but it's not exactly up there with fighting a dragon. You usually lose money at those brawls too (that or in the drinking beforehand), so it kinda compounds the whole "no income" problem. As such we all had to take up with other guilds that weren't quite as good of a match for us personality-wise. Sure I got along with most of the officers and usually the other tanks, but we're talking big guilds here since that's what Sol and I usually got called for. It's hard enough finding nine people you like that know their jobs, let alone 24 plus all of the backups. Combine that with some of the rougher learning nights and there was usually a chain of whispers going between me/Sol and whichever one of our friends was on to laugh at our misery.

Looking at this, you can see the dilemma we've got: run with the guild that your friends are in or run with the guild that gives you work. You can only have one guild in Azeroth and, with the addition of guild reputation/leveling/achievements/etc., it made the decision to stick with one that much more of a pain. Tyria handles things a bit differently though.

Let's stick with my example of a guild for work and a guild for fun. Normally I'd be stuck having to choose which of the two I would represent. Whichever one I chose would be the only one I'd show up for on the guild roster (everyone else would have to "friend" me) and that guild would be the only one to benefit from any of my exploits. In Tyria however I'm no longer constrained to just one guild. Yes, I can only represent one guild at a time, but I can choose between them at will. Whichever one I'm currently representing will see me on the roster or talk to me through guild chat and I'll be able to use the tools they've unlocked through achievements and influence, such as the calendar or guild storage. Once I'm done there though, I can switch over to the other guild and do things with them. You could have a guild for running dungeons, one for structured PvP, one for world vs. world PvP, one for friends - as far as I've been able to find, there's no set limit at the moment.

I know what some of you are thinking though. You're looking at all of these lists of people and thinking, "I'm never gonna get a moment's peace in Tyria. There's always gonna be a list of people that can bug me to go do something from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep." Worry not! You'll also have the option to go incognito and represent no guilds. We've all had those moments where we just want to get something done without interruption and the Tyrians have seen fit to allow for just such an occasion.

That about wraps it up, but I do have one more quick thing to say about guilds. Remember the world vs. world PvP I mentioned earlier? I haven't talked a great deal about it yet, but those details can wait. The important thing here is how it's related to guilds. Right now there's no guild halls in towns like some of the bigger guilds have been requesting, but for those guilds that are into PvP? In those zones where world vs. world PvP occurs, there are keeps. Keeps that your guild can conquer for themselves and proudly display their flag for all to see. Keeps that your guild can use influence to upgrade and fortify against enemy incursion. I'm not sure how big of a role these will play in the grand scheme of the battles, but the idea of having a fortifiable base of operations in the middle of a battlefield sounds great. Would've been nice to have somewhere to coordinate from during the handful of battlegrounds I did in Azeroth, rather than using BG chat and hoping they would read it.

Summer Slowdown, BlizzCon, and Podcast Question

Gotta love the summer slump - makes it a pain for me to line up work for the guys, which in turn makes for slow blogging. Most of what I've been able to find has all been one-shot jobs a friend of mine has found. Some of those go quite smoothly and everyone gets what they want out of the run. Others end like... well, like Medeleth's last run. I think he still holds a grudge over that one. Unfortunately from the looks of the guild roster most evenings and the way some of them talk about being bored or disillusioned with the whole war against the Scourge, I don't see an end to our PuG adventures in the near future.

The obvious solution to this would be to look for a new guild to contract one or more of the guys out to (or me even - I could use a break from doing paperwork for the rest of the guys). It would give us a new source of work for at least one member of the team and we'd have an inside line for any jobs that come up that require the services of someone else on the team. The downside though would be that whoever got transferred have to leave behind the guild members that still show up and we're friends with; there's nothing physically preventing them from staying in touch, but anyone who's ever changed guilds knows that it's never quite the same as having that green text going back and forth.

If push comes to shove and I end up having to find new homes for some of the team, I do have a couple of leads. In the meantime though, doing the occasional PuG should keep the team in fighting shape, barring any more spectacular failures like Med's last adventure. Well, that and it should keep them from complaining to me about being bored (can't be bored when something is trying to kill you).

In other news, we received our confirmations for BlizzCon today, so everything is ready for the trip now. I'll be bringing a camera and a camcorder with me, so hopefully between the two of those, there'll be something worth posting. I'll also try posting some on Twitter while the show's going on, but any pictures I put up there will be restricted to the iPhone's camera and that really only works on things within Charge range.

Lastly I've got an idea for something for the blog, but right now it's just an idea. I was reading Rilgon's blog today and he posted a proof of concept podcast where he covered hunters and the various things affecting them at the moment. Awesome show by the way, so I recommend any hunters or those interested in hunters take a listen (it's about a half-hour, so it'll give you something to listen to while doing your dailies). Regardless, while listening to his podcast, I started thinking about how it sounded like a lot of fun and maybe I should try my hand at it. Med could round up whatever program I need to record this, we've got a fairly decent microphone that I picked up to discuss raiding strategy (read: yell at people in void zones, make fun of people not in Ventrilo), so all that leaves is the actual content.

There lies the question: what to talk about? Certainly can't talk about hunters like Rilgon. For one he's got that covered, but more importantly our hunter can't even come up with decent pet names, let alone figure out what raiding hunters should be doing. That leaves talking about tanking or posting audio versions of the arguments/discussions we've used in the other posts. Tanking would probably be best, but I'm open to suggestions. While we figure out what to talk about, I'll work with Med to try and figure out how to actually record something. Once we've managed to make something presentable, I'll post it here... well, once I figure out how in the Nether I'm supposed to post audio here.