Tales of Shiranai

Anyone who has been following my Twitter feed for the last couple weeks (all 20 of you) knows that we are playing World of Warcraft again. After getting tired of guild bank ninjas and other BS, we took a break for a second time soon after Ulduar came out and to play some console games (Star Ocean 4 and Sacred 2 were disappointments, if anyone is wondering!). I also finally got the chance to play Warhammer Online during this time, and while I thought it offered a far superior PvP game, the PvE wasn’t there.

We are now back, spending time in WoW playing with a RL friend. Sadly, we missed out on the Summer Festival so we aren’t able to get our Violet Proto-Drakes this year (but they look kinda funky anyway). Since we’ve been gone, Blizzard has released a whole new raid dungeon and made some other interesting changes to the game, but the game’s core problem remains: this community sucks overall.

Anyhow, we’re sort of stealthily looking around for a 25-man group. Having been gone for 4 months we are behind on the gear curve (though it didn’t stop us from destroying Onyxia, in a PUG no less), and titles/achievements that were awesome when we left aren’t so awesome any more. I guess it is easier to burn Sarth Down or get through Naxx without anyone dying when you have Tier 9. At either rate, I’m hoping for a more low key group, preferably one still bothering with Ulduar. Not looking to be uber server first at anything because it all won’t matter once Catacylsm comes out.

However, I am at the same time extremely hesitant to join another raid group/guild for multiple reasons. The first being that there is a possibility my available time to play may change, and I do not want to commit before I am certain when I can raid.

The second, more overreaching hesitation, however, is that I am fairly tired of the mentality that is construed by most WoW players and the BS that goes on in WoW guilds as a whole. And I specifically mean WoW, and not MMOs in general. We have been playing WoW on and off for five years and been members of several different raids in WoW, and have seen stupid behavior and drama, over and over again.

As a contrast, for those of you who wonder why I am saying WoW specifically, we played LOTRO for several months during our first break from WoW. During this time we were in a single kinship (the LOTRO equivalent to a guild), and during that entire duration there were no problems. All runs with the kinship ended up with reasonably fair loot distribution even though a formal loot system was not being used. All of the members were respectful, used proper grammar, and were generally decent people who seemed to actually want to help others out. Even though we left because the endgame of LOTRO was boring, it was on excellent terms with the kinship and the leader. When we came back for a “free play” week, they all remembered us and said hello, and the leader even offered our spots back should we decide to come back permanently.

That is in stark contrast to WoW, where in a three month span, two of the guilds we were in had the guild banks ninja’d by the leaders (who then transferred to another server) and in one it came to light that the guild leader was partaking in activites that would probably be considered to be a federal offense.

So I really need to be very careful about what raid I join this time around. Because the PvE gameplay at end game is pretty much the best there is, I am pretty much giving the game another chance. However, I might just choose to lay low, PUG what I can, knock out some achievements I didn’t get to and build up my gold for the next expansion.

On the other hand, if Turbine fixed up the problems with LOTRO’s end game, and maybe  tweaked the combat to be a bit more fast paced…