Nostalgia: World of Warcraft Pt. 3

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This story takes place in Cataclysm, World of Warcraft’s third expansion. At this point, I had been a nomad of sorts ever since my former guilds had disbanded.
My story was not too uncommon either. Many players found that Cataclysm had it’s share of problems and found the game to no longer be enjoyable. Whether it came out too soon, made the game far too easy with Looking for Raid where players no longer had to work hard to get into a raid, rather they simply joined a queue and was thrown into the raid with various other players. This and various other changes had altered the game in a way that made it undesirable for those of us who knew how WoW used to be.

Nevertheless, I played on. With my original character who was a Holy Paladin I leveled to max and desperately searched for a new guild, filled with active players who’d fill the community void I had for so long. In my search I actually came across an old high school buddy of mine who also played by the name of Paperwaster. At the time he was going through a rough break up and through the bond that is gaming, we grew closer.

In playing with him, he introduced me to two of his friends who also played World of Warcraft. For the sake of privacy, I’ll call them Mario and Peach. Mario and Peach were a couple who played WoW heavily. After chatting a few times in game, on skype and then finally having a lan party we became close friends.

Eventually, Paperwaster and I decided to throw money at our screens and transferred over to play with them even more. We quickly found that Mario and Peach were avid lovers of Player versus Player. This is an aspect of the game where you use your various abilities to defeat enemy players. It was a part of the game that I wasn’t to fond of, but was willing to give it a try.

After a few months, Paperwaster and I were neck deep in Pvp events such as Battle Grounds where players team up to accomplish objectives while also having to compete against opposing players and Arena Matches where 5 players go in with another 5 players and the team left standing is the winner. Mario and Peach taught us quite a bit, I then expressed my love for PvE events such as Raiding. They both seemed rather interested and wanted to be apart of it.

At the time I thought I had lucked out, for both Mario and Peach were very smart, dedicated and ambitious. Hoping they would put as much passion into raiding as they did Arenas, we would make quite a bit of progress. Unfortunately, despite numerous conversations, I could not talk them into moving the guild to another server. The one we played on, Kalecgos, was a low population server. The problem with low population servers is that it makes searching for other players to join the guild, let alone raid, was much harder. The economy of the server was also terrible.

So Paperwaster and I worked through it. All of us in agreement that we’d all raid in the near future, I hunted for new members, worked on getting gear for my character, spent quite a bit of time creating materials our raiders might use. It is an understatement to say that I was invested in the success of the guild.

Both Mario and Peach were the leaders of the guild and I assumed they would also be raid leading as well.

Never had I been so wrong.

Over the weeks that followed, I was ready and geared to heal for our raid group only to find that Mario and Peach had not a lick of PvE gear whatsoever. When I confronted them about it, they responded by attempting to defend their choice in using all PvP gear in place of PvE gear. They believed that the high stats from gear they earned doing arenas would help them more than gathering PvE gear. For those who do not play World of Warcraft can even still more than likely understand that there is a reason that they separated PvE gear from PvP. Unfortunately, they did not and would not budge when Paperwaster and I attempted to sway them into using proper gear.

I looked past it however and hoped that it would actually help them. My next request was to have the group study the raid bosses and their mechanics. This way, when we entered the raid we would know exactly what to expect. Sure enough, when the night came I asked the group if they had studied the video and sure enough, Mario and Peach had not. Most others had which made our guild look even more silly with our leaders not caring enough to research the fights.

Still okay. I believed that because they were very smart and intelligent human beings they would be able to listen to commands and fulfill them. So we get ready to go annnnd I get informed that Mario, who previously volunteered to be a ‘tank'(Player who taunts monsters, drawing their fire to keep the others safe) had decided last minute that he no longer wanted to tank. This happened 30 minutes prior to the raid start time. Leaving me high and dry I had no choice but to search high and low for a replacement on this very low population server. Raiders I gathered grew frustrated at the wait and some of them had even left. After an hour of searching I did find players to fill the missing spots and they turned out to be more competent than our core group, thankfully.

When taking on one of our first boss, players in the group had died from not knowing the fight, including Mario and Peach. When an outside player who knew these raids very well stepped up to lead, he was shut down by an insulted Mario when the outside player attempted to explain what we had been doing wrong. The player grew frustrated, left and soon the rest of the raid group fell apart. Mario believed himself justified in his defense and choice of words.

Needless to say I had quite enough. I tried once more to ask my dear friends to try raiding in the proper way and when they refused I simply gave up on world of warcraft by quitting. After recruiting so many players, working overtime to get gear for others, setting up raid events and explaining fights just for all of it to bounce off players who just did not respect me or the game we played.

Moral of the Story: If you have to force something, it more than likely will not work.