This weekend an event happened that I thought I would talk about, however first I feel like I need to give some background. During the heyday of World of Warcraft I was a die-hard Alliance player. They were of course the faction that had Dwarves, which went an awfully long way for me. However because of the human faction hacks, the fear break, and weapon skill hacks I ultimately re-rolled at some point as a Human Warrior that became Belghast, the character that I ultimately became most known for. Argent Dawn during Vanilla was a magical place, that much like cheers was a server where everybody knew your name. This was in part due to the fact that it had a very active server forum, allowing different guilds and both factions to mingle freely.
As I moved my way into leading raids, I got indoctrinated into a bit of a club of other raid leaders who were in pretty regular communication. I’ve talked about this before but we had an incident where someone took BOE loot as need, left the raid and posted it on the auction house. I mentioned it to one other raid leader, and within fifteen minutes this player was on the do not invite list of all of the major raids in the game and on non-raiding probation for the guild based raid that he just joined. Twenty minutes he was in chat begging me to reverse all of it, when in truth the cat was out of the bag. No one wanted someone like that in their raid and all I did was mention it to one other leader in passing and it set the wheels in motion that really couldn’t be undone.
Argent Dawn was a server that was greatly impacted by a number of events over the years, most specifically the Alliance faction. Firstly the transition between 40 player raids to 25 player raids was extremely fraught, and similarly was the shift down to the existence of 10 player raids. Probably more than that however was the shift away from non-guild based raiding that came with Cataclysm. Blizzard started attaching things at the guild level, and Argent Dawn was a server with a still thriving ecosystem of raid groups that weren’t actually really associated with a specific guild. For years we were an overpopulated server being one of the first two Roleplaying flagged servers, and each time new servers opened up Argent Dawn was often times in the list of eligible targets for transferring characters off. On the Alliance side of the house this claimed entire guilds as they decided to make the jump to greener pastures.
For me personally, I checked out of World of Warcraft during Cataclysm, and it began a cycle. I would go through this pattern of returning at the end of one expansion, playing the pre-expansion content and then ultimately leaving again one or two patches into the new expansion. This is not exactly what you want in a guildmaster, and this ultimately lead me to hand off the reigns a few times… firstly to Elnore who was a serious raider and shifted the focus of the guild to raiding. Then to Rylacus who was more or less the Steward of Gondor, not really leading the guild but more keeping tabs on it while I was away. Finally the guild transitioned to Kylana, who like Elnore once again shifted the guild and the infrastructure to serve the purpose of raiding. There was a time where I was unfairly bitter about the changes in the guild as a whole, since I fought hard to keep Stalwart not just another raid guild. However I can see that they made the changes that were needed by the people who were still around and still playing the game while I was constantly gone.
The bigger problem however, is that I was never just active in House Stalwart. I was active in the community at large and while I was gone it changed in even more sweeping ways. Not only did my effective “home” feel a little foreign each time I returned to the game, but the server community as a whole felt like strangers. There was a time when I had the limit of server channels configured on my characters, and coming back they were all ghost towns. Gone was the council of guild and raid leaders, gone were the social channels of friend raid groups, gone were the few roleplaying groups that I was still friendly with, and replaced was a bunch of asshattery in raid chat by a completely new crop of people. I tried to make connections, but ultimately it didn’t feel like home.
For years I had been a semi-active member of the Bloodmoon Chosen guild on the horde side, which was made up of a bunch of people that I knew from the Argent Dawn server forums and the eventual Argent Dawn IRC channel. These were folks that I had communicated with daily for years, so it absolutely made sense that I park my little horde alts in their guild. It was during Warlords of Draenor I believe that some drama happened on that side of the fence, and while I am still not exactly sure what went down, all of my friends from BMC broke out and founded their own guild. Facepull felt like home because it was made up of so many people that I had known since Vanilla days, and I started leveling a Paladin that served as my horde main for a few expansions.
The funny thing about Argent Dawn Horde side is that it seemed not to be changed so severely by the rigors of time. While roaming around in both the Hubs and the over-world zones I was constantly bumping into familiar faces and having random conversations with folks that I actually knew form the onset of the server. This weekend one of these events happened, and it was ultimately what inspired me to write about my shift in allegiance. I was landing at the Great Seal just as a familiar name was about to take off, which caused me to send a message to her. Tenebres is someone I have known from the forums for decades, and I remember when she posted baby photos of her now 15 year old daughter in what I think was the IRC Server at the time? So what followed was us talking for a good 45 minutes catching up on how and what we have been doing.
The thing is… this isn’t a one time event because I am constantly bumping into people that I have known for years while roaming the world, because it seems like the Horde never had the great server splits that the Alliance side did. The Horde just feels like home right now. There has been massive turn over in the Alliance guild, and I dearly love some of the folks that still tie back to the era in which I was actively playing. However playing Horde reminds me of the social fabric that I loved about the server because while it is somewhat diminished, it still exists and there are still large groups of people that communicate on a regular basis. It is ultimately those social connections that root me to a game and to its server, and without them the entire process just feels hollow. Ultimately this is why I am spending my time of late playing catch up and leveling an army of alts, because that is the one thing that I miss the most from Alliance side, being self sufficient in all of the tradeskills.
