GuildMasterpiece Theater

What can I say, it seems to TOTALLY be working!  We took a good step back, and we cleared even more BOSSES!  How fun is that?!?  Next week it will back to our regularly scheduled more Vashj!

Look at us! We just keep on keepin’ on with that step back! We downed yet another boss! How fun is that?

So, this morning I sign on and check out Digg like I always do, man you can get lost in that site for hours and there on the front page I see this article: Husband and Wife get Divorced over WoW and it makes me think about the game. As a GM I spend a LOT of my free time on this game, and I don’t ALWAYS have my priorities straight, but I would like to think that most of the time I do. I feel like this is one of the top five toughest parts of being a GM. Sometimes when you sign on your screen turns totally pink in whisper, or sometimes when you log onto vent people are begging to yank you into a super secret channel… these things happen all the time, and before you know it, a quick log in to check your auctions can turn into an hour and a half of dealing with why so and so really wants his mom’s best friend to join the guild to raid even though she is a rogue who turned 70 six hours ago. (I would totally let a mom in BTW, cause MoM WoWers are the coolest.) But still, you get the picture.

Over the course of being a GM, I have discovered a few ways to handle this. On occasion I will put up my <DND>sign, and people for the most part get that means I don’t want to be disturbed. But then, there are always the select few that don’t get it. One of my favorite things to do is to just go <AFK> and stay that way. Then I don’t feel obligated to answer any whispers, because I am obviously AFK.

Now, I am not saying that as a GM you should always do that… that would make you suck a lot. But, I am saying that as a GM I sometimes find that I need to finish my darn dailies… or else someone is going to have to cover my repair bill!

So… how do YOU guys deal with the taxing time it takes to be a GM?

Well, after talking it out with my officers and members… we did decide that we NEED to kill the Lovely Lady with the snakey hair, and we are willing to wipe our butts off to do it. That being said… I know my guild… and they needed a night of fun. We went into SSC on Tuesday night to take out the first three bosses to get all cleared and ready for an all Vashj weekend, and it was less than stellar. After wiping for (I kid you not) two and a half hours on HYDROSS (yeah, you read that right) we finally got an attempt in that was going to work and our main frost tank lost internet connection! (Damn Canadian snow…) It was bad bad bad… so we split off into ZA groups and finished the night downing some crazy trolls mon. We regrouped on Wednesday and cleared it out all the way to Leo pretty much catching ourselves up for the week. We took Thursday off because hey, nerds need love too, and then we headed in to SSC to get the place ready for Sunday night Vashj love. So she sits there taunting me ready to take her down, but we had some more casual players that still needed some gear from Mag, and a few of us are still in desperate need of our T5 Shoulders from VR, so we headed out to clear both places. It went quick and effortlessly, and with plenty of time to spare… and we figured hey it’s Friday, why not stay up and play some Warcraft… so I headed up to Hellfire, and a friend headed down to Shadowmoon and BOTH world bosses were up… how could we not give it a try?

Doomwalker first… took three attempts (would have only taken two, but a kid from another guild started screwing with the raid… tried to tag the boss first, made him evade by flying on top of him during an aggro wipe, etc.) and we killed him. We got to bring some of the less geared guildies, so we were able to get some fun loot for them that not a lot of people on the server have!

Well, we figured we might as well go for two in one night, right? Nothing like getting to write TWO posts on the guild progression post on the realm forums… so we headed up, two shotted Kazzak, and called in a night! It was an awesome boost for our guild, and just the kind of silly thing we needed. Now, I have full confidence that we will kill that crazy snake lady, oh yes… we will

I know someone wrote a post about this earlier, and now I am in a similar predicament…

We have a player that raided with us for a while, went a little loopy, /gquit and then came back as a casual, non-raider… he promptly /gquit again hours later, and we were like oh well… because he brought a lot of drama with him.  and, frankly we were glad to get rid of it.

Well, fast forward three months, and he wants back in.  He just wants to hang out and not actually raid.  (We have both casual and raiding players in our guild.)  Well, when the officers saw his app it was a unanimous no.  A couple of his real life friends are in the guild and they are pretty upset that he wasn’t let back in to the guild, but we just don’t want to deal with the “bad apple” that he used to be.

Apparently he has gotten his life back together and his friends assure me the drama is over, but I just don’t know if it is a risk I am willing to take with my awesomesauce guild!  On one hand, I feel like everyone deserves a second chance, but on the other… I kinda feel like he already got his… alas.

Okay, so I was giving my RL a bunch of funk for his crazy macro, and he swears to me that it makes WAY more sense if you don’t change up your UI to be as girly as mine, but I did get a cute little screen shot out of it, and I thought I should share! Here is my little guild working away in SSC!

Okay, a little history about my guild…

I became friends with most of the start up players in my guild when I was in a casual guild that couldn’t get past curator.  There was nothing wrong with my old casual guild, I was just bored of never getting to see any new content, and I had made friends with this other guild that was a little more hard core, but was looking to fill out a second kara group and some 25 mans… well, the day before I decided to finally quit my casual guild and join the raiding guild they had decided that they were going to merge with a hard core guild, and my husband and I ended up being a part of the package deal.  This had the potential to be really cool, but they promised us a part of the raiding team although they pretty much already had their top raiding spots filled out.  Our main tank became a ‘catcher,’ the hunters all ended up on wait list behind their hutners, etc.  So, we kind of just stuck by what we were doing, kept running our little kara group, and basically felt like very little fish in a big pond.

Well, they instituted a MT need list.  In doing so, they said that our Kara MT friend basically wasn’t getting any gear from the 25 mans… well, this sucked for our friend, but we were willing to just deal with it… until the day we showed up to a raid only to be informed it wouldn’t be happening because they MT had decided to retire his MAIN warrior and instead he would be playing his ALT dps warrior… yeah, that REALLY happened.  We weren’t able to raid that night because we didn’t have a MT.  Apparently he had cleared all this with the officers of the guild, but they didn’t bother to bring it up to the guild… well… needless to say, after he took gear over the other tanks that planned to remain tanks, then switched over to his other character…. that was the day we /gquit to start our own.

And we have been hot on the heels of that other guild ever since… They had a big advantage over us because they had enough guilldies ready to start 25 mans and we barely had enough to fill out a kara (although it was awesome to clear kara on our first night as a guild, that really brought us toghether as a team.)  But, we quickly got our numbers and are now plowing through the 25 mans…

Now, that being said.  Vashj is kicking our butt, as a guild, and as a raiding team.  Three hours of wiping only to get her to 1 percent was one of the biggest blows in my entire guild’s history.  So, I am wanting to take a step back, get a few boss kills in the Tempest Keep.  We need those kills!  Ours is a guild that loves the progression, and I know that the wiping will get us there eventually… but it just isn’t happening right now!  I mean we have only downed one boss in The Eye, so I think this is the right move… right?

Ahhh we are so happy to finally have an off night!  We have been pushing so hard for progression, and we keep playing through our scheduled guild off nights, but we decided this weekend to just screw around on alts, farm up all that stuff we need, and just have a great guild time.  It really was nice, and I got to hang out with people in guild that I don’t really get to spend time with.  Off nights are really important to guilds because they rejuvinate.  So, even if you are SO close to that big boss kill… take a break!  Mara is pretty this time of year. 

Another night of Vashj… let’s just hope it doesn’t end in a wipe fest! All we need to do is kill her once lol! This is our second night of fun on her, and this when the crunch time happens for guilds… they have to come together in a raid like this where we are going to die a ton and spend a lot in repair bills. You have to keep it light and fun, but at the same time keep it serious… and how? Poker rolls in between wipes? Perhaps a joke or two? The key is the balance between fun and serious… it is rough to find it, but it CAN be done

So, after much deliberation, consideration, and perhaps a little inebriation we think we are going to use the Suicide Kings loot system. We feel like it is probably the closest to our guild philosophy of trying to remain fair and true to the members, but still having a good time and not being as hard core as we necessarily could be. There are definitely some concerns, but I will be writing more about the system and rather or not it is a good one as we get it into place. I just hope that it ends up working out to solve some of our loot problems. (And maybe eventually I will get my T5 Set Bonus… swoon.)