Big Changes

This morning was the fourth morning in a row that I slept fine without any middle of the night panic attacks… so I feel like the whole walk before bed thing has been vested at this point.  Additionally it gets in a bit of exercise which is always good.  The only real negative is that now I have to start watching the clock and about 10-10:30 I need to be detached from whatever I am doing and get ready for the walk.  This is shortening total available time to play… but the actually getting sleep thing is not too shabby.

Big Changes

Over the last few weeks I have posted off and on about the dilemma my friends and I had with the guild we were in over on Deepwood.  Stalwart has a really strong guild identity and culture, and it has spanned multiple games without really diluting.  Over the years since I left WoW, we have tried to reside as part of another guild.  But each time we end up as a guild within a guild, and this always leads to a bit of discontent.  Essentially after nearly a decade of House Stalwart, we have all come to expect a specific set of guild norms… and when the guild we are in deviates from that…  folks feel uncomfortable.

Since leaving WoW I have pretty much harbor with various friends of mine that have guilds.  Then as the Stalwarts decide they want to join me in that game… I have tried to broker there way into that guild.  The problem is when a critical mass of players arrives there… we stop blending in.  As a result whether or not I intend to.. I fall back into the old “Guild Leader Bel” norms that they expect of me.  Regardless of if I am actually wearing the tin star or not…  I am treated as such by the Stalwarts.

The Outcast Misfits were extremely nice, but for none of the Stalwarts was that guild really home.  Part of this spawned from the fact that we were over on Deepwood… a non-rp server without the roleplaying culture we were used to.  When you are used to this more “evolved” culture you can only see “labiator” so many times before it breaks you… even worse when it was a member of your guild.  So after listening to grumblings for a bit, and the same thoughts going through my head… I decided to send out a question to the Stalwarts.

The Options

Yesterday I created a mailing list and BCC’d everyone that had been a member of House Stalwart that either was actively playing or showed interest in playing Rift.  In the email I explained the situation we were in and laid out three different options.  Essentially I did not want to force my friends down a path they did not want to go down.  Guild Leadership is not a democracy…  but I value the opinions of my friends and for a big change like this I wanted their full buy in if it was ever going to succeed.  I phrased the different paths as numbered options and asked for them to vote either by reply to the email or getting ahold of me some other way.  I used a Google spreadsheet to tabulate the results.

Option 1 – Stay With the Misfits

To be a fair question… we had to include essentially the control… the NO change option.  I didn’t really think anyone would want to go down this path, but essentially this option involved ignoring the things that bugged us and staying with the Misfits as is.  There were a lot of positives about this honestly.  They are an extremely active guild, and have regular raiding opportunities.  However the problem is that while they have a PG guild chat policy… they have no such thing for character names… and in their ranks there were more than a few offensive ones.

One of the Stalwarts plays with his son and daughter fairly regularly.  Another one is likely to let her daughter play now that the game is free to play.  None of them need to see names like “Vulvanatria”…  not that they would necessarily understand it.  Additionally it sticks in my craw a bit that the guild has a built in have and have-not’s setup.  There are raider ranks and non-raider ranks…  and while they never really treated the non-raiders as second class citizens it just bugs me that there is a division at all.  While they are extremely active… you pretty much have to be level 60 to join in any of the “reindeer games”.  The vast majority of the Stalwarts are far younger than that.

Option 2 – Move to Faeblight, Join Silent Strike

Faeblight is the defacto roleplaying server, so simply by hopping over to it we are changing to a lot of the social norms our guild expects.  Additionally it is likely the highest population server, and all the cross server channels reside there.  During Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, House Stalwart was closely allied with the guild Silent Strike.  It was rare that we were running a raid or a dungeon without a decent mix of Strike folks in it.  In the course of my nomadic behavior over on Deepwood… I found out they had a pretty large and active contingency on Faeblight.

Elowynn/Saleny the leader of Silent Strike graciously offered us harbor in their guild, and quite honestly it would be a good home.  I have missed hanging out with the Silent Strike folks greatly over the years.  The guilds drifted apart when Stalwart became far more serious about raiding, but I have always tried to maintain a connection to Strike.  The only problem is that again… we would end up forming a guild within a guild like we always do.  Additionally merging as many people as we would be doing so… would put undue stress on their guild culture.  This was a good option but definitely had its issues as well.

Option 3 – Move to Faeblight, Form official House Stalwart

Moving to Faeblight gave us a lot of the cultural norms we were lacking over on Deepwood and the ability to actually report those heinous names.  Additionally most of the people that I know who are actively playing Rift… are doing so over on Faeblight.  So we have a built in community of shirt tail kin to draw from when we need to fill a group.  Elowynn was willing to introduce us to the HammerStrike folks and that would at least give us a foot in the door if members of Stalwart ended up wanting to raid eventually.  Finally we would actually have a home of our own after all these years of searching for one. 

I had been super reluctant to take this step after leaving World of Warcraft.  However recently I have come to the realization that it was never guild leadership that bothered me.  That is the part I am good at and enjoy, and did for almost a decade without issue.  It was the raid leadership part that killed me, caused me to burn out and almost quit the game.  I hate the herding cats aspect of raid leadership, and I simply never want to do that again.  Guild leadership… that is all the fun stuff, and mostly is just making sure people are feeling heard and help them when they have issues.

The Decision

This all honestly happened far sooner than I had ever intended.  I expected to throw out the email and have no real consensus until later this weekend.  However after a few hours a major pattern emerged, one that was essentially undeniable.  I got a total of 19 votes either through email or through some other means.  18 of the votes were for Option 3… one of them was for Option 2.  So with that clear a mandate, last night I went through the motions to prepare for creating a guild charter over Faeblight.  Once the Stalwart server channel had enough people, we went ahead and set things up.

As of last night House Stalwart on Faeblight is born again.. and I bankrupted myself buying the Stone Tavern Inn guild hall and our first vault page.  By the end of the night we had several people in guild, and hopefully over the weekend we can grab the rest of them.  It will be a long road to level the guild up to the point at which we get a lot of the same perks we had previously…  but it will be our home finally and not just a timeshare with someone else.

I could not deny the statement I kept hearing over and over from people. “I think everyone will feel more at home in an actual HS guild.”  And it is true honestly… I already feel more at home.  Communication is cross server and easy.. and I can still keep in touch with the people I joined Outcast Misfits with.  But it feels good to actually set down some roots in a game again.  The last two years have been good for me… but also very spastic.  I feel like I am jumping games on a weekly basis, never really developing the same kind of network I had with House Stalwart.

After my “MMO Must Haves” series of posts… I realized that the only game that actually has all of those things is Rift.  So I knew all along I guess which game I should be playing as my primary.  Now that House Stalwart exists in that game.. it feels all the more like home.  Hopefully over the coming weeks we can get things set up proper.  Rae has already started adding things to the guild Dimension.. she donated her awesome Greenscale balloon that can be seen in the picture above.  Thalen also donated a number of nifty things, and spent a good chunk of last night whittling down the current kill 500 planar mobs guild quest.  I will take awhile to get all the goodies… but it is ours.

Wrapping Up

Well I have an early meeting this morning so I need to get out of the house and on to work.  Hopefully you all have a great Friday, and a great weekend as well.  So far each day this week there has been a new crisis, and yesterday was no different.  My hope is that I can make it through today without anything breaking, or any customer screaming too loud about something.