You can't go back again

World of Warcraft started its commercial servers in November of 2004. I picked it up and started a guild. Over the next 14 months we became the premier guild on our server. For all intents and purposes I was royalty. Multiple people every day asked to join our ranks and would literally do just about anything to do so. Eventually we conquered what was available and future updates looked dim. I decided to focus more on real life endeavors. Yes thats right, Counterstrike.

If you play counterstrike enough you'll start to become pretty good. The better you get the more the game bothers you. Even on 100 tic servers there are so many lost bullets it just becomes annoying. On bigger servers I often found myself having to kill people 3 or 4 times before they actually died. On smaller servers the problems are still evident, but less frequent. If you have a bad connection to a specific server sometimes youre better off spraying at the knees even if you usually get headshots.

Near the end of my most recent counterstrike career I had the pleasure of playing with a handful of some of the best players I've met over the years on a 100 tic extremely low ping server. I was getting over 75% headshots, and many of them were doing the same. Later that night the server was at full capacity. Many of the same players were on. We were down to 30% headshots. I really don't think our accuracy was any lower though. The registry just needs some work, and the more people you have the more work it needs.

Frustrated with counterstrike and missing some of my warcraft friends it was time to move back. The camaraderie you establish within a guild is similar to that of being on a sports team or any other goal oriented multi-person project. Being on one of the best team only strengthens that bond. I knew an expansion was coming in January so I went back in December to get the lay of the land. The expansion raid limit had been reduced from 40 to 25 people so I figured I could pull something together in the foreseeable chaos.

My people were largely spread to the wind. My best people were in the new powerhouse guild and content to stay there. I decided I'd go for a more casual raid schedule and try to recruit people interested in such. Initially things went well. Leveling up in the expansion was fun. New quests had partially moved beyond cookie cutter kill x amount of y mob, or go take this package over there to hopping on a gryphon and doing a bombing run over demon fortifications ala rogue squadron meets pokemon snap. New dungeons, one of the major appeals to these games, were plentiful and entertaining.

After about 3 weeks we hit the new level cap. I'd filled about 10 spots with some of my old people: solid, skilled, reliable players. I pulled in another group of roomates from back east we'd met. I filled the rest with new people interested in the casual schedule.

At first we hit the single group (5 man) end game dungeons. This helped us acquire sufficient gear to begin the 10 man starter raid (a raid is dungeon that requires multiple groups). We began to progress through the dungeon rather quickly.
Eventually more people hit the maximum level and we had a line of people waiting to get in to the 10 man raid so I was subbing people in and out after 30-45 min stints.

We still didn't have quite enough people to hit the 25 man raids though, but things looked very optimistic. We had a good mix of all the necessary roles. Then I started losing healers one by one due to real life reasons out of my control. The group of roomates that had joined us showed their true colors. Now that they'd had the best non-raiding gear available they stopped logging in on non-raid nights which in turn increased the difficulty of others to find groups to obtain the gear they needed.

Some of the people I hadn't really met yet finally hit the level cap and the new nature of this game reared it's ugly head. Before the expansion the raids consisted of 40 people. If 10 of them were bad you could carry them if the rest of the guild was good. In the current state of the game you can't carry a bad player, and some of our players weren't able to react fast enough to do what was necessary in the 10 man raids. A side effect of trying to form a more casual guild I suppose.

Some members left the guild after being ostracized due to lack of skill. Others left due to the selfishness of some of the other new recruits. This in turn has led to a less enjoyable raid environment, and ultimately a smaller turnout for raids.

I disbanded the guild. My old people were amazing, they were selfless, they were the army any general would want. If I'd had enough of them I imagine our guild would have lasted beyond this game and into another. The new people were the polar opposite and ultimately the major cause of our destruction.

Over the course of 11 months while I was away the face of the server had changed so much that my royal status had all but been forgotten. I thought recruitment would be easy, but it became a struggle. Many of the people I'd met before had also moved on, and few of them came back.

Over the past 10 years I've led two of the finest organizations in their respective games. I've now led one that will likely be forgotten in a shorter time than it actually existed. It will likely be my last such endeavor. You can't go back again.

-Vicious

P.S. You can always go back to counterstrike though!