Belonging to a guild

I pretty much soloed levels 1-60. Yea, I found the occasional pick-up-group (pug) and even tried a couple of guilds. The guilds always disintegrated within a day or two, so I had convinced myself that I would live out my time in WoW as a solo player.

Part of being a non-guilded player is the constant barrage of blind invites into guilds and the occasional whisper asking to join. One day in September 2006, I was coming out of the bank in Stormwind (one of the major Alliance cities) when someone named ItchyCoyote whispered me asking why I wasn't in a guild. I humored him and told him that my experiences with guilds was less than impressive and that I was probably going to stay a solo player.

After chatting for a few minutes, he invited me onto their ventrilo server (a way to do voice communication while in-game) to talk. I was hesitant, but decided to jump in to see what the deal was. We talked for a few minutes and he said (in a nutshell): give us a try. If you don't like how things are going after a couple weeks, you can leave. After mulling it over for a few minutes, I decided to join the guild named Baptized by Fire.

Over the course of a couple months, I realized what I had been missing out on during my solo play. I was finally getting into higher end instances / dungeons and completing some quests that required more than 1 person. My gear slowly went from all green to all blue to now some a mix of purple and blue (note: the color indicates "quality" - grey = worst, white = blah, green = better, blue = even better, purple = best).

After my probation period (during the first 5 weeks, they can kick you out with no reason given), I was offered an officer position within the guild. I enjoy being an officer, but sometimes people forget that it's just a game and get pissy about stuff. I'll blog about the "drama" more in future posts.

While we have about 90 in the guild, there are probably 5-6 of us that get on vent every night and play together. It's a lot of fun to get to know people that share my interest in WoW and I have definitely made some friends.