Alone in the crowd, in Dalaran

I'm at another turning point in playing Warcraft. I've been playing the game on and off - mostly on - for almost exactly five years, and I've seen the game and the community change and I've gone through different phases while playing. I have this feeling right now like Vianne in Chocolat where the winds are blowing and I feel the need to pack up and move to a different server, a different environment and reinvent my experience in Azeroth. I do this periodically. Sometimes I feel forced, sometimes it's just angst or a desire for adventure. The season has changed, it is time to pack up my things and move someplace new.

My current guild is one that I never intended on joining, really. I was playing independently on Cho'Gall when I met a nice group of adults who were also playing on a daily basis, and we had the promise of doing some 5-mans together and maybe raiding eventually. Between then and now two things happened - the main couple decided that they were going to transfer off with the active portion of the guild to Illidan, and Blizzard released patch 3.3 that included the new looking for group interface.

The move to Illidan was both wonderful and terrible. It was a wonderful economy to reroll in, with stacks of copper ore selling for 6 gold each and mithril selling for 75. I had all the gold I would need for leveling and more and it was an easy and prosperous path to 80. The server itself is kind of terrible though. The people are loud and awful and there's tons of them. Dalaran is incredibly laggy. We win the battle in Lake Wintergrasp all the time, which is nice for farming epics, but it ruins the experience when it isn't competitive.

The group of people I transferred with joined a guild where they had friends, and the day we arrived it exploded. At least I didn't pay for a new transfer I guess. One person has stopped logging in altogether, and there's only a total of about 5 active people other than myself. There are no guild plans. I am the only person depositing anything in the guild bank, and I have no access to retrieve anything. Basically, I'm alone on an overpopulated server. The best times I have are with the LFG interface. I can queue up for a new group, get transported there, knock out the whole dungeon efficiently, and be back where I started with some quick gear and badges with no fuss. It pretty much eliminates the need to be in a guild.

And that's pretty ironic considering that Warcraft is finally paying some attention to guilds for the first time since guild banks were introduced in vanilla. In the upcoming expansion guilds will be able to earn experience by themselves through the actions of their members. The top 20 characters (players?) will contribute points to a total for the guild for different achievements that can be spent to grant the guild and members of the guild different benefits. It's all a bit hazy and undefined at the moment, but it's a package of incentives for people to be in guilds. It's a good thing they're doing it, because the new LFG tool is a way better experience than the typical guild experience right now.

In the old days guilds had goals and supported each other, these days they are usually drama-filled electronic penis-waving contests where people try to maneuver for favor and access to loot. The LFG tool is much more fair. It doesn't care who's sleeping with the GM or whether you have DKP saved up from old Molten Core runs you never spent, it rewards the here and now with a need-before-greed share of the spoils. It's fair to a fault, which makes it easy to negotiate around. It provides more structure and equity than most GMs, and it promises that no matter how bad a dungeon run goes, tomorrow is another day.

So I am in my red traveling coat, following the winds to a new shore, and I don't know where I will set up shop next. Probably someplace small, where the ability to provide pleasant conversation and occasional assistance is still valued.