You are the community you build

While sipping the morning coffee and checking over what nonsense fills the general forums today I ran across a post from an ex-guildmate who was bemoaning how expensive it is to transfer multiple characters from one realm to another.

It's true, at $25 per character if you have a full stable of valuable toons it can cost you up to $250 to move them all from one realm to another. It's a ridiculous cost for someone to pay for changing the play conditions of a video game, really. But many people will pay - and have paid - the fee for transferring characters to another realm to play with their friends or to escape a realm with playing conditions they found unpleasant.

But this one caught my eye, because the complaint was made by someone who I remember very well. Back in February of 2009 he and his group of friends decided that they needed more sovereignty and dropped the drama bomb on our guild, quitting right after we had downed Sarth +3 drakes.

If you're not familiar with the Sartharion fight it is an epic battle with a dragon inside the Obsidian Sanctum. Sartharion has three drakes assisting him, Tenebron, Shadron, and Vesperon. The "easy" way to beat him is to run around the outer ring and encounter each of the drakes and kill them one at a time and then fight Sartharion. The harder modes are leaving one or more of the drakes alive when you encounter Sartharion, and then they come and join the fight at different intervals. The hardest mode is Sarth +3 - killing Sartharion with all three drakes still alive.

It's the hardest boss encounter I've ever been a part of, and it was a wicked achievement. Whenever I'm playing on my druid and someone says something about my gear or questions whether I know what I'm doing I flash my Twilight Vanquisher title and they shut up. Even with the gear improvements it's still a hard encounter, and people have pretty much stopped trying it because the rewards aren't that great anymore. So if you've got it, you've got it, and I've had mine since February.

So the goal of our guild was to get three drakes, the hardest possible 25-man boss kill at the time. We were all motivated in spite of our differences by this achievement, and it held us together. When we were finally able to pull off a victory (far ahead of most other guilds) there was great jubilation. For about 15 minutes. Then immediately thereafter, this ex-guildmate started whining about gear drops and guild priorities and expressed his displeasure about everything. Basically, he wanted to loot three sets of gear instead of just one, and the guild wanted to shard the gear for enchants.

I got tired of the nonsense and stopped logging in. It didn't take long before he summoned the courage to grab as many friends as he could, and quit the guild. It basically cut the guild in half.

We didn't have any other goals, our guild dwindled. They had a goal however, in forming their new guild "Core," and that was to be the ruthless best. They succeeded. They were at the very peak of progression, top of the realm. At this point, all options were open to them, and with the influence they had as a guild that can clear any content for anyone they could set an example for others to follow.

So nine months later when they say the server is terrible and they can't stand playing there, it tells me quite clearly how much they've changed over time - not at all. The server has become a reflection of their attitude; rude, selfish, and insincere. And I am very happy that it is prohibitively expensive for them to leave the hell they built for themselves.