Fitting In

I've been feeling the pull of Classic more strongly recently, and it's largely due to my new guild. Before then, I was kind of hitting that "endgame funk" on my hunter again, with solo content opportunities drying up and me not being sure how badly I really wanted to try running places like Stratholme or Scholomance with pugs just to get my quests in there done. Somehow, the thought of going anywhere with a bunch of friendly faces changes everything.

After only a few weeks, I already feel more at home in <Order of the Holy Fork> than I ever did in <Group Therapy> on Pyrewood Village. This isn't meant to diss the latter in any way; they were always perfectly friendly in their interactions with me, but I just never really made any real connections. On the few occasions when I joined GT members for dungeon runs, they were often talking about raid-related stuff that just confused me. (I guess it also helps that I have a somewhat better understanding of how Classic endgame works than I had a year ago.) And even if I found some players there quite likeable, this never seemed to be reciprocated. I don't remember people greeting me when I came online, asking me to join their group, taking an interest in who I was beyond "a tauren hunter", or engaging in any playful banter with me. Yet all of these things have already happened in the Forks.

Again, to be fair, the whole situation is different. In GT I was just somebody else's hanger-on who took ages to level compared to everyone else and was forever behind the curve. It's a bit different when you're a raid-ready level 60 and were actively recruited. I actually found myself wondering why one of the officers seemed to be paying so much attention to me, until I realised that he's also the hunter class leader and the guild is actively recruiting for two more raiding hunters right now. He's probably still holding out hope that I might want to make the jump to raider at some point. However, a lot of the regular members have also simply been nice to me without any apparent ulterior motives and we've shared quite a few laughs.

Another thing that's different though is that I've also made more of an effort from my end. Wriggling your way into the social structure of a guild is more "work" than you'd think, which is why I'm not surprised whenever I see people complain about feeling left out of their guild's activities when groups and friendly interactions don't just emerge effortlessly the moment they adopt a new guild tag.

You've got to learn the names and quirks of the officers, the raiders, and those who might be neither but are still online a lot and therefore somewhat influential. You've got to learn to connect alts with their respective mains - guild notes can help with memorising who's who, but god help you if any characters aren't tagged correctly. (If anyone involved ever reads this, whoever set the guild note for Reso's rogue to "Tony the Tigah!" caused me so much confusion at first...)

You learn to identify people's voices on voice chat - and oh, voice chat is a whole other kettle of fish. My impression so far is that similar to the way it works in my SWTOR guild, you could technically be a member of the Forks without ever coming on voice, but people like to hang out there to be social and as a result it's a good place to get first dibs on dungeon runs. Initially I was very quiet, not because I'm shy but because I think it's polite to listen first, to get a feel for the general tone and people's personalities, but as time's gone by I've become a bit more confident when it comes to speaking up, not least because I liked what I heard and people made me laugh.

I don't really know where this will be going in the long term - how many more names and personalities can my little brain realistically memorise when I already have so many cats to herd in SWTOR? - but for now I'm enjoying that giddy feeling of actively looking forward to being online again, not necessarily to achieve a specific piece of character progression that night, but just to play with some friendly people in a way that I know will be fun.