Stick a Fork in It

My Classic guild <Order of the Holy Fork> is more or less dead at this point. It hasn't literally been disbanded, but the last 25-man raid was over a week ago and nobody has expressed a desire to have any more of them. Most raiders have either stepped away from the game entirely or moved on to greener pastures. The last raid that was officially ours was another half-pug to Black Temple, in which we weren't even able to get a single boss down for some reason - after five wipes on Naj'entus we gave up. It was the very definition of going out with a whimper. There've been a couple of guild Zul'Aman runs since then, which I've dutifully avoided after how my first visit to the place in Classic made me feel, but I don't really expect those to last either.

I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of me wanted to just move on and not spend any more time thinking about it at all. I reminded myself that it's just a game and that I've got plenty of other things going on, but my brain and heart insisted that they cared and couldn't just let go on command, so I guess writing this is one part of me processing the situation.

Above all, I am sad. My relationship with both the game and the guild has been somewhat fraught since the launch of Burning Crusade, but I still cared a lot, and just before everything started to crumble very suddenly, things had actually been going exceptionally well from my point of view. I know guilds don't last forever, but I have always been pretty invested in the ones I've been a part of, and watching things fall apart while feeling powerless to stop it is always heart-breaking. I find myself thinking back to the time I logged into my night elf priest back in the day and found that the leader of our fun little social guild had decided to disband it overnight in a sudden moment of rage about something or other and nobody even really knew what was going on.

As much as I hate to say anything bad about anyone here, I'm also feeling a little resentment in regards to how the officers handled the situation. I know it wasn't an easy situation to deal with, and I'm not saying I expected them to perform any miracles, but the complete and utter apathy on display towards the guild was frustrating to watch at times. I can't tell what was going on in the privacy of their heads, and maybe they were having passionate debates about the future of the guild in channels I couldn't see, but if that was the case, none of it leaked into the discourse visible to regular members.

If we asked about why events weren't being put up in time, we were told that people with ranks other than officers had the capability to do so if they wanted (OK? But as officers you're the ones in charge of organising the core raids, why would we spontaneously expect someone else to start doing it?), discussions about the future of the guild mostly consisted of the same small handful of regular members talking in circles without any officers weighing in, and when an officer finally did comment last week on the question of whether we should try to merge with another guild, his response was that it wasn't his place to make that decision. Like, what's the point of being an officer if you don't want to organise things and don't want to be responsible for anything? Isn't that kind of the point of taking on that role? I get that officers have their ups and downs with the game too, but when all of them slip into "eh, I don't really care anymore" mode simultaneously, it kind of leaves everyone else out to dry by default.

On the other hand, there is a small part of me that's actually somewhat relieved that it's all over now. Wanting to be a good guildie until the end, I signed for and attended every 25-man raid that I could make, and it was disappointing how often they had to be cancelled or ended up filled with lots of strangers just to make up the numbers, even if these strangers seemed nice enough. (And I will give credit to the officer who led those raids until the end.) That constant uncertainty and the way our performance actually became worse and worse week after week were not particularly fun things to be a part of.

Even on a larger scale though - when I quit WoW in favour of SWTOR back in 2012, I did mention in my post about it that it was tough to constantly be pulled in two different directions, and that's certainly something I've felt throughout my time in the Forks as well. Heck, it's why I didn't want to get involved with a guild in Classic in the first place! But then it just kind of happened and I really liked it, so I made it work and I don't regret putting the effort in... however, I won't deny that at times it was also a lot.

I like raiding, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily want to raid every single night of the week, but between raiding in Classic and running ops in SWTOR that was exactly what was happening sometimes. And even as I did that, I always felt a little bad and like I wasn't giving either guild enough of myself. With that in mind, a part of me is relieved that there's no longer an expectation for me to raid with the Forks, as it makes my weekly schedule less busy and leaves me with a bit more time for other things.

As you might be able to deduce from that last sentence, I'm not planning to find another guild to raid with. It's clearly been a priority for many guildies who left, but at this point I really have no interest in raiding in Classic just for the sake of raiding - I was only really doing it because of the Forks. Right at this moment I'm not even that interested in socialising at all to be honest. It's an urge that will come back to me I'm sure, but first I feel like I need some time to myself to get over this breakup so to speak, or whatever you want to call the slow dispersal of a guild.

The odds of me being interested in Wrath Classic don't look good now - I was considering giving it a try for the sake of the guild, but with that gone there's no real draw for me beyond perhaps a little bit of curiosity about how the launch will go. It will be interesting to see how the BC Classic era servers will pan out - I've actually found myself wanting to playing on Classic era sometimes, but the truth is that without the social ties, I struggle to think of things to do with my max-level characters there. BC would be a bit different in that regard as there are plenty of solo grinds left to do that I haven't tackled and that I could see myself investing some time in once the bulk of the server has moved on to WOTLK. Plus being away from the current content crowd where all the achievers are racing each other to who can be done with the game first might actually increase my chances of finding more like-minded people to hang out with. Time will tell.