Guild History

What always amazes me when I play wow is the amount of emotional investment people put into some guilds so that they often become an almost living and breathing extension of themselves. I'm pretty sure that on my main I've been guilded close to 100% of the time since my first guild and it was only reading Tam's and Amber's posts on Cliques and their effects, and then Jen's post on why she loves her guild that the idea for this post really fleshed out in my mind. There's a guy I raid with who loves to talk about the history on our server. As in how and when things happened and all the old drama. I think it's because like me he wasn't in the guilds challenging for server firsts at that time and wants to understand why the raiding scene is the way it is.

Well my story starts as a massive noob to be blatantly honest. I joined my first guild Loyal Hearts at around 30ish on my second character which is my main now. I went back and looked at my first character, a dwarf hunter and it's hilariously terrible so I've left it as a sobering reminder that I wasn't always clad in purpz melting faces. Like most levelling guilds this one eventually died once most of the higher levels hit 60 and joined another guild. Almost 4 years on the old GM is in my current guild as an inactive and still logs on every so often to say hi. I'd come from a background playing another MMO called Matrix Online. I still had friends from that game I'd occasionally see but most of them rolled on another server and I'd put too much work in to move by the time that became apparent.

After a long haitus, where I went travelling and saw a bit of the real world, I came back and started playing again. Dropped the guild which was essentially dead only to be picked up for another on the off chance which saw me introduced to a great number of friends I still see today. Arms Arcanorum was a great place to level but as I hit 60 and started trying to get the guild raiding together instead of with other organisations it got more and more frustrating and eventually I left because I wanted a fresh start to try and get a raiding guild going. A bunch of the people left Arms to follow me to the new guild just as TBC came out. This is when I got the raiding bug and started tentively researching rotations etc. I would I still speak to 5/6 people semi regularly and considering they are internet friends from 4years ago I think thats pretty impressive.

Chaos Ltd as we were called gained a rather poor raiding reputation because we'd gear people and they'd go on and join other guilds that were better progressed. We managed I think server No6 in kara but the leap to 25mans and Gruul proved too trying. My officers and core would be playing well but the 10-15 or so cannon fodder were awful. Our best wipe on gruul was 2% when one of our officers shouted "DI the tank" meaning Lay on Hands and a silly paladin did it - OT dies melee dies, everyone else dies and I die a little inside. We were casual but some drama between me and an officer (D) spread in /g . He kept inviting back a shaman and I kept kicking them. When he removed me from our arena team before the S1 titles so the shaman could get some points I lost it and left.

The bulk of our guild surprised me and followed me to Earth Wind and Firewater (even D with whom I had the argument with) who at the time were similarly placed to us and welcomed the influx of recruits. Sadly the guild hinged around their MT and after making inroads into SSC and TK the guild was disbanded when he stopped playing.

A lot of my friends stopped playing at this time and I joined a more raiding oriented guild called YOGS ,again with D. Sadly missing too many attunements and standing in bad meant I wasn't cut out for them. I was raiding on a terrible machine and after I missed the last kael raid for vials I stopped playing. The one thing that had happened at this time was that I was min maxing for the first time and not making do or slacking.

Eventually returning to the game, I went casual and messed about with friends. Some old Chaos members had joined a rising guild called Allerian and being hopeful of a spot I applied only to be shot down. The hunter class leader didn't like me from something way back in Chaos where he'd been in my squad and wiping lots of raids. I'd kicked him and he resented me. Once a few more of my friends got in the app got reopened and I was left in no doubt that it was only because I'd had so many vouches that they'd had to accept. I at both stages loved and hated this guild. When the right people were in the raids it was great fun and we cleared most of TK and SSC. When BT and MH came out the old GM came back and it just went downhill.
We got accused of being cliquey which was true in retrospect but it was mainly a shared banter and a hatred of carrying people who contributed nothing and yelled the loudest for rewards. The Hunter CL was still being a massive arse and I swapped between BM and surv regularly because even though accepting me as Surv he decided he wanted to be the token surv hunter and demanded I respec. Then when he didn't show up for raids I'd end up respeccing back anyway.
After about 2 months in the guild I noticed the Gm and his best friend were siphoning off gold (people could buy DKP each month) and craftable mats for their alts which were needed for progression. The trouble came when the GM class swapped twice, used his massive DKP advantage ( he refused to reset the system from kara days because he'd earnt so much) to take loot then class swapped again. He then applied for another guild whilst remaining GM and said he'd still look after us.

My 10man group plus the assorted other friends we played with left in one almighty clusterfuck of drama because of this. All the bitterness came flooding out of a lot of people and I rather unwisely got into a slanging match on the official forums (I'd say I won but it wasn't pretty). It was just before the nerf patch at the end of TBC and somehow we ended up hanging out with a load of the ex members from the formerly most progressed guild on the server. They'd run into Sunwell and eventually disbanded and gone to another server only to hate the guild they merged with and move back. Our guild Rainbow Renegades (with memorable ranks such as "littal rainbow") merged with them and became the guild I'm in now.

I try not to talk too much about my guild. I know some of them read this and if I got into a really big rant I know I'd either cause drama or more likely look like a massive tool. Basically we're Server No2 and from our initial outlook have grown from a casual guild into a lot more of a hardcore presence. I've made a lot of good friends that I hopefully will be meeting up with soon, more so than any guild I've been in.

Our server is small. A lot of the people I've met along this journey to 80 and WotLK I still speak to occasionally or recognise in dalaran. Hell, among the more progressed guilds there's even a kind of unofficial bond, mainly because the /w s for pug raids etc tend to bounce around the same people. It's got to the point that I've tried other servers and because I don't have the shared history or a reputation it almost feels lacking.

So, if you're still reading after this massive wall of text, what's your history? Do you have a chequered past?

Answers on a postcard please (or in the comments)

/echo out