R U LF Guild?

Had an interesting post come up in Plusheal.com and thought I would copy my response over to here. To those who are still reading this I hope you find it informative.

I find it surprising how the word guild can mean many different things to different people. For some it is a source to build a group like the above, for others it is a place they can find people who have their sense of humor and for yet others it is a place of refuge for them from the idiocy that is out in /1, guess which one is me. :)

I personally have only been in 2 guilds, well 3 if you count the fact that I started a 2nd source of my 2nd guild on a dif server. The first one I was in was a group of people that I had started gaming with quite a few years ago and we had moved from game to game but the core people stayed the same. We ended up starting in WoW and things were going pretty good. Since I had been part of the core group and had shown leadership skills a long time before they had bumped me up to officer pretty much right away, yes the guild had started before I had started playing WoW myself. We had worked our way to 60 and they were interested in taking part in the end game content, since I didn't have the time to level as fast as they had due to RL issues I wasn't ready when they were and to be honest have never really been that interested in it in the first place. Anywho when the time came that I hit 60 and was starting to get geared they were making more demands on me to fill a role in the raids they were doing. I was unable and unwilling to sacrifice this and had fought them on trying to force others for it too. See when I had joined up the guild was a social place that people could use for getting groups and we were more interested in keeping it rather casual. When by this time the emphasis had moved from casual to semi-hardcore and they were losing alot of the people who had joined up in the first place for the casual. No matter how hard I tried to fight them on the matter they were more interested in getting the people in and getting them into end game than they were in keeping the guild true to itself in a sense. I ended up stepping down as officer with a heavy heart because these people were my friends and I felt I was letting them down. Then the attitude from the rest of the guild became so caustic that I finally logged on and typed in the fateful /gquit.

It wasn't an easy thing to do and it all matters on how you look at your guild as to how much you should way it out. If a guild is just a source for people to get to end game and the game for them is getting the latest greatest loot and achievements, then feel free to hop from guild to guild though I feel you are missing an integral part of the game by doing so. For the some other people out there if a guild is a source of friendship and comraderie (sp) then you need to weigh out what you want that guild to center on. If you look at Conquest they aren't just a group of people who are looking for end game, they are also looking to build a group of people who you can rely on and build a relationship with. The base for it is endgame yes but they don't want people that will just be there for the loot, if I understand correctly. With my new guild that I had joined after leaving my first and then starting on a second server, we are a much more casual place that people can come to and know that their kids have a safe spot to play with out the caustic environment that is out there.

So to sum it up I would say make sure you keep you eyes wide open when it comes to joining a guild. It is your $15 a month and you want to invest it wisely. And if you do find a group that you enjoy playing with then stick with them until their path no longer goes with yours. Yes it can be difficult to leave since you have invested so much time into that group, and yes it is awful when it feels like you are leaving people in a lurch. But don't stay in an group that you will hate to be in to the point that you would end up leaving the game over. There are plenty of people out there that you can find a group with and some of them might be like minded as you are.

And hey if you don't find a guild that is what you want you could always try starting a new guild and see if you can build it from there. :)

Good Luck and God Speed.