What does your Guild mean to you?

I had an extremely similar exprience several months ago, only with the added bonus of not only missing friends, but also warming bench for 3 weeks before being casualed. Which I had explicitly and repeatedly questioned before transfering.

It is a form of culture shock.
It happened the worst for me when the guild I was in transfered servers and then joined up with another guild. Similar experience of younger players with leet talk and bagging everyone. Here I was expecting there to be give and take from both guild groups. This did not happen so I left.

I found this experience very different, as far a culture shock, from when I have joined another guild as an individual since then you know you the late comer and just fit in.

See, I've been in the same guild for three years - I can't imagine not being with them. Sometimes I get a little niggly idea to go raid with other people (much like how I assume married people feel) but then I remember that no one would probably put up with me.

It's hard to find a guild that so magically manages to meet your sense of humor, personality and raiding priorities.

I had been in the same guild since near release and we never were great at progression but the people made the guild worth it. By the summer of last year, so many of the old faces that made it worthwhile were gone and I was so frustrated with the one step forward, two steps back nature of our progression, that I had to do something. I decided that if I could find another guild that met my expectations for maturity while managing to take new content down in a reasonable manner that I was ready. It was a tall order and I figured I'd never find that... Not like you can search in the guild recruitment forum for 'cool people that don't suck but like to raid.' I too was a lot worried about being overwhelmed with leet speak and immaturity.

I got lucky. My current guild wasn't even recruiting at the time, but I was incredibly impressed with the guild expectations and applied anyway. My interview on vent reinforced the initial impression. They're not quite the social group that I had before, but I don't regret the move one bit. Besides, I left my other guild on good terms and play there once in a while to keep in touch.

I'd honestly suggest to anyone to take their time, be patient, and find a place where they're sure that they'll be happy. In the end, I didn't find my current guild by the guild recruitment forum. I simply was looking at guilds that were on a server where I had a couple of friends playing and looked through the top guild's sites.

My guild is one of those "Friends and Family" guilds. We do raid (and do decently well) but exist as a social arrangement first. I wouldn't dream of leaving my guild due to the connections I have with these people.

You assertion of "the guild is to allow raiding" is probably the majority of EJ users, but I'd say most guilds are probably created on a social basis. As a nut for mathematical models and spreadsheets, I have my fair share of frustrating raids, but that can be relieved by canceling the next night's raid and meeting up for beer and wings instead.

Also, I'd much rather say "Scott, you're healing..." instead of "Xdarxscarx, you're healing..."

Social ties are for casuals! Sorry, couldn't resist. My attitude toward my guild is pretty similar. I may get frustrated with them a lot, but I know many of them personally and they're real people to me, not just characters in a game.

It took me two changes of guild to actually find one that was right for me socially. I'm very happy where I am now and hopefully will be for a long, long time to come.

It may sound odd but my previous guild had a 'no alts' policy and this really killed my enjoyment of the game while I was there. During late TBC, long after KJ was down and when we were waiting for WotLK to hit, people barely logged on outside of raids. There was nothing to do and the social side of the guild was all but non-existent

Its something I’ve mused about a lot also. I think in most cases its actually quite hard to strike the perfect balance. I think a big reason for this is that WoW has attracted a lot of people from the 20 / 30 something age bracket. As a rule of thumb I’ve seen that the older the player the gets the more likely it is that they will be prepared to make raiding performance compromises in order that they have a better social experience in game. However, belonging to that age group in my mind also increase the chances that the player might actually be quite bad at computer games in general. While one 20 / 30 something WoW player might have had a long history with technology and computer games that has influenced their lives a great deal, some grew up in the same era and pretty much spurned technology entirely.
As the years have gone by the approach to technology and IT has changed drastically so its safe to assume now that the younger the person, the better their holistic understanding of computers / computer games / understanding an interface is going to be.

Because of this, its always been quite easy for me to accept the following;
Its very easy for guilds that comprise largely of younger people to be very good at pve content. When you abandon any kind of social criteria for selecting and keeping your members and only focus entirely on raid performance (including when that person can raid) you beat the game.
Sadly by going to this extreme it normally means you end up with a a group of people who have little altruistic appreciation for keeping a team together over a longer time frame. When anything happens to a member of your guild IRL they wont care, and will kick them out to get the next epix hungry leet kiddy in to keep progress up. So when there is nothing to do for any sustained length of time the same guild will break up or have problems.

It is possible to create high performance guilds that do keep going over longer time periods but it requires a much higher level of social screening of applicants than guilds normally use. This is why all this "olololol this game is easy stuff" really makes me lol.
As far as games go this one IS actually very easy. The first computer games I played, Space invaders and Donkey Kong - That shit is Hard. Imagine 25 player Donkey Kong one TCP / IP style - that would be a hard game.
When I was in my teens I was playing Doom, Duke3D, Quake (that then became quake world) in probably pretty much the same capacity as a lot of teenage players are playing WoW. Knowing how I played those games and how little real life distractions I had at the time its no surprise to me that the CS kids can finish the game quite fast =)
The hard part to this game is and always will be the social logistical elements. Guilds that stay together for long periods of time, beat all the content in a relatively small time frame, and have the atmosphere that you want take a lot more work behind the scenes than ones that are made with “PROGRESSSSSS11111” as their main tenant.

I strongly disagree here... early adopting people have far more experience with true computer stuff than the "new kids". Most of the 15 year olds won't even know what a command line is, have less experience with menu structure and want everything to be done for them. They basically don't want/need to understand what's going on, as long as they can do what they want via the interface.

Also, it's quite confusing that you say a younger person will have more understanding of computer games, when their experience starts at playing CS2 or Wii's mario galaxy. They have been pampered in a way "we" never were when we were playing stuff like doom and quake. I remember having to connect to Quake servers using ~ and a server IP+port I had to remember myself... No information on amount of players, the map, anything in advance to joining the game.

The real reason 20-30 year olds compromise on progress is their IRL activities versus gaming time.

Fair enough, and being an IT professional having seen all of these develop from there conception gives me extra insight into a lot of things. But aside from takeing pleasure in some more obscure technical elements of the game i cant see how any of those skills that you list that i have also aquired are necessarily required to be a good endgame raider. Im sure that those skills can also be picked up and honed from a much shorter total game experience time frame.

Of course you don't need a long gaming experience to learn how to not stand in the fire. I just don't see the connection between being younger and better understanding of the game/interface you were making.

Age doesn't relate much to in-game skills in WoW to be honest. In my experience younger people tend to focus more on personal performance than group performance, which leads to the question: isn't an older player better?
You don't need that 10ms faster react time a 16 year old has over your average 25 year old raider. What you need is willingless to "work" as a team, while not sucking individually.

The earlier (or younger) you are exposed to technology the easier it is for you to assimilate an interface and exploit it quickly. This is something i have observed in development consultation fairly frequently. And perhaps your also underestimating the effect not being exposed to these things at an early age may have on a person, when their brain is developing at its fastest rate.

I can agree with that, but that is not the same as "that the younger the person, the better their holistic understanding of computers / computer games / understanding an interface is going to be."

Perhaps you just forgot a few words there ^^

Does your raid seemingly materialize moments before raid invites, and moments after the raid is over? Do such "raid loggers" have an unnoticeable presence? Are such people the majority of your raid?

Your guild might suck!

Bink, you really hit the nail on the head with this one. I'm going through a similar process right now myself.

I'm just raiding with friends and doing 10 mans at a snail's crawl. I am enjoying the experience thus far.

Even though I had to wake up at 3am to do it after moving, I really really really miss my old "carebear" guild and the people/atmosphere there too, more so than the more raid-oriented guild I'm in now.

I see you changed back to Deus Ex, good call.

Well, since I am a guildleader and that guild is somewhere in between progression on one side and casual gaming on the other, while starting age is 23. We really have players from different generations. It is really a big difference. The oldest raider is 51 and due to having a mentor/relationship joiner (e.g. Family) the youngest is 18. That's a hell of a big span. it is a Generation.

@Embar ; @Phil - There's always room for more Oceanics in DeC

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