Though we may go to different guilds, we're still friends…

Since the implosion of my old guild I was left in a bit of a daze. No surprise there. A lot of us were similarly confused, especially those who had been long time guildies since our Bloodlüst days in TBC. Though I didn't stop playing entirely, I found it difficult to log in and spent a lot of my time going back to my old console RPGs, my gaming genre of choice up until WoW interrupted my life.

Some people moved on to new raid guilds, some joined "placeholder" guilds while sorting out their personal feelings, others decided to fly solo. Since I had been given guild leadership of our old guild, I mostly sat in guild, feeling positively miserable while I logged in, especially whenever I saw yet another person had left, but I felt I had a certain responsibility to close up shop.

The other officers and I had mutually decided to dissolve the guild, and we divided up the assets in the guild bank among all the guildies according to their ranking on EPGP, so the people who had contributed the most, got the most of what we left. I stayed long enough to make sure everyone got their share, then handed GM leadership to an old twink alt of mine (so I could change the guild MOTD and leave instructions for those who may come back after a long hiatus and wonder where people went). And then I left myself.

Even without a common guild, many of us are still friends and keep in contact with each other, which was the nicest thing about Oporotheca. I met some really cool people there and we still swap whispers to see how we're doing, still wave at each other in Dalaran, and vouch for each other in pug VoAs. Some of us who didn't move on to 25-man guilds (and even a couple who have), decided that we'd like to keep doing 10-mans together, and the result was a 10-man ToC run that resulted in an Anub'arak one-shot the first week he was available.

We're now running 10-man ToC every Monday and hoping to do Ulduar hard modes. A little over half of that group has now rebanded under the new name of Be Your True Mind. (I like the Persona series, what the hell. It's what I spent all my away-time playing.) Our new guild is dedicated to 10-man raiding with the idea of seeing all the content with a small group of reliable people.

While it might not be as glamorous as 25-mans, when I look back and think about what I was most looking forward to with WotLK, it was that 10-man raiding of end game content would be possible, and I was looking forward to the idea of playing every week with a small group of people I enjoyed. I actually hadn't the foggiest idea when I joined Oporotheca that our guild leaders intended to ramp up to 25-mans. I thought it was just going to be a small group of friends from Borean Tundra to Icecrown.

25-mans are fun, don't get me wrong, but I know that personally I would not be able to run such a large guild, and I know from conversation with the other Oporotheca officers that they don't have any interest in running or helping run one either. The other 25-man guilds on my server either don't raid when I'm available or they aren't compatible with what I'm looking for. So for better or worse, 10-mans are what I'm looking at. I know some people at this point would just switch servers, but I'd rather not leave Skywall, and really it doesn't matter to me whether I'm facing down the Lich King with 9 or 24 other people, just as long as I am facing down the Lich King.

Content is king, isn't that what they say?

And honestly, I'm finding I really like the free time I'm finding myself with. When we're only raiding one or two nights a week I'm able to actually play other games outside of WoW and spend nights completely game-free. I'm an amateur writer of more than WoW fiction and I'd be lying if I said my work hadn't been impacted by my playing of WoW. It would be nice to get back in the habit of submitting my writing for publication again.