This biggest problem that Fortune Favors faces at the moment is (in my opinion, at least…) our inability to keep level 80 characters in the guild.

Players will level up to 80, do some heroics, and then want to start running raids on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, we’re a casual guild (and will remain so or else the GM will not meet the membership requirements).  That in itself doesn’t prevent us from running raids, but as 80s start looking for more than we can provide at the moment they move off to find a raiding guild.

I understand this, but at the same time I’m not the first person to mention that if all the players who hit 80 and left had not left, we’d have plenty of interested raiders.  Granted, that means they would have had to be patient for the people who weren’t 80 yet, so I’ll repeat myself again and say I understand.

But what if we had a raiding guild?  One where the atmosphere of it was similar to that of the guild they’d stuck in until level 79?

Look at it this way – Cub Scout Packs are usually affiliated with a Boy Scout Troop.  When the boys graduate out of Cub Scouts, they already know what Troop they’re going to.  Their friends from before will still be there, and in many cases the leadership stays the same as well.

That’s the kind of situation I’m thinking of.  Fortune Favors is not going to be able to keep 80s who want to raid because the 80s who want to raid all leave.  It’s a catch 22 that many casual guilds lament and cannot fix without turning themselves into raiding guilds or walking the very fine line between stepping up recruitment and ending up on everyone’s /ignore list because a recruitment message got spammed way too often.  It upsets me, but it would upset me less if I knew they were at least (for the most part) all heading into the same guild rather than scattering to the winds.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this.  For my convenience as well as yours, I’m listing them below.

1. DRAWBACK: Fortune Favors still won’t be holding on to 80s.  It won’t solve our problem, it will just let us know those who leave are welcome in a good guild when they choose to go.
2. BENEFIT: Players who hit 80 and want to raid would have, at the very least, a first guild to try out.  They would know other 80s in the guild and perhaps (again, this is in the hypothetical stage) even some of the officer corps in both guilds would be the same people.

   I have seen some 80s leave Fortune Favors and then guild hop because they didn’t feel they fit in with any of the raiding guilds they tried.  I’d like to think their time with us got them used to a certain standard, but whatever the cause guild hopping should be avoided if possible.

3. DRAWBACK: I can’t GM two guilds.  It may sound egotistical to list this as a drawback, but I do so only because that means there would be fundamental differences between Fortune Favors and it’s affiliated raiding guild.  My hope would be that with enough members in common the similarities would outweigh the differences, but anyone expecting a carbon copy guild would be wrong.

   Ideally the raiding guild would be GMed by one of our Officers (since they became officers because they showed leadership qualities), but this plan is still in the “Tell me what you think” stage.  We could very well just end up affiliated with an established raiding guild run by someone else instead.

4. BENEFIT: The raiding guild would have a guild from which they could always find new members.  They wouldn’t be limited to Fortune Favors for recruitment, of course, but it’s as nice for a guild to know where to go to find players willing to join as it is for players to find a guild willing to take them in.

I’m sure there’s more, which is why I’m throwing this out there to the guild.  What do you think?

So yeah, sorry about spilling a little bit of emo into the guild blog, there.  But things are better now.  Here’s why.

1. Guild bank is Restored.  Thanks to the efforts of a few players, it even has a larger net worth than it did before the incident.
2. The hacked account has been locked.  Row still hasn’t made a triumphant return to the game yet, but at least we don’t have to see his main farming in Storm Peaks any more.
3. Fences are being mended.  We seem to once again be on friendly terms with all but one of the officers who recently left.
   One of them only pulled an alt out because he was sick of the drama.  As I was sick of it too, I could totally see his point of view.
   As for the one player with whom there has been no reconciliation,  I’d be willing to talk things out 1 on 1 but I’ve personally had no contact with him since the night everything went south.  It is possible that my busier schedule and less time logged into the game (on weekdays I tend to log shortly after doing some dailies and maybe a Wintergrasp battle or single heroic) has had something to do with that.

   I’m dying to post more on this topic, but I don’t think this is the right forum to do so.

4. Our guild still seems to be active, with 5-7 members logged in every night.  That doesn’t compete with most raiding guilds, I know, but we’re small and casual.  Our relatively large roster is partially due to an overwhelming number of alts, so logging in to see 6 people online is kind of awesome for us.  I can remember plenty of times this summer where we had more like 1-3 members on, with two of them consisting of bank alts that were AFK while scanning the AH.  So really, we are for all intents and purposes more active than before.
5. We have another officer, and it’s totally my fault for not mentioning this before the … incident.  Madiana was promoted because our officer corps brought it to my attention that they all thought he would make a good addition to their ranks, and I wholeheartedly agreed.  Really, I should have made the promotion a while ago.  Luckily I don’t have to run the guild myself – I have officers to help point out things, events, and in this case people overdue for promotions that I may have missed.
6. On a more personal note, Mel’s arm is looking a lot better.  She has an appointment on Thursday to have the last of the staples removed, and in a couple weeks they should be able to start using the graft.  Once that happens it’ll mean another operation to tie off the fistula, but this one should be less invasive and it should also decrease the chance of very bad things happening.  This will lead to less stress, which in turn will lead to a more level headed GM.

And then shuffling everything like a deck of cards, since we’re reorganizing the bank.  When we’re done it won’t be divided up by item level so much as category (metal, cloth, enchanting, etc.) but the whole setup was not something I was able to accomplish before I crashed last night.

In any case, I’m done with my little round of emo self-loathing.  There’s some healing going on (and not just regarding the Guild Bank), which is good.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

1. Guild Bank is ninjaed again.  Barn door is not as open any more but too late now.
2. We’ve recently lost 7 level 80s (including alts), several of which were Officers.
3. 2 of the 80s belong to a former officer who will probably not let us use his Vent server anymore because the Guild Bank is empty, even though he didn’t play in our guild any more anyway.
4. Since most (all?) of the 80s we lost are in the same guild and some are family, they may all hate me at this point.  I don’t know, I was too tired (emotionally and physically) to ask last night.  This morning my wife told me at least one of them has removed another of his alts, so it seems likely.
5. I am a horrible, unskilled, and now paranoid Guild Master who’s waiting for <Fortune Favors> to collapse in shambles around me.  Evidence to the contrary is scarce.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

It’s bad.

Why? In part because I stink as a Guild Master.  This is in fact the thesis of my essay – remember it, I’ll be bringing it up again.

Exodous

It started with some of our 80s leaving to join more hardcore raiding guilds.  Not all at once, mind you, but over a period of several months.  This happens with casual guilds, and <Fortune Favors> remains a casual guild because myself and several of our officers are casual players.  We don’t have attendance or raiding requirements and I can count on one hand the number of characters I’ve /gkicked from the guild for any reason.

I don’t hate anyone for leaving.

It might make some people feel better if I did, but I don’t.  This ties in with my whole “If the game isn’t fun change something” philosophy – they wanted raiding experiences we couldn’t provide even with our guild alliances.  They found guilds that could provide those experiences and made the switch.  In their shoes I would have probably done the same thing.

A couple members approached me before they left to see if I was OK with it, promising to leave their alts in the guild and all that.  I appreciated that, especially since it wasn’t required.  One of those members was the guy who owned the Vent server we’d been using up until last night, but he was cool with letting us continue using it so long as we didn’t abuse the privilege.

This past Thursday we lost two more officers.

I took their departure harder than usual for several reasons, but mostly because for most of that day my wife whom I love more than life itself was getting one of these replaced by one of these.  It’s a pretty serious downgrade but the techs at her dialysis clinic were afraid that her fistula had been used so much that any time the needle goes in it could burst.  In their words, “If that happened with a doctor right here we’d still have no way to save her.”  I mention this only to put my emotional state into perspective.

As you can imagine I was under a lot of stress, which led to an outward display of my thesis:

I posted about it.

It wasn’t meant to be rage against them so much as it was against the situation of 80s rarely staying in the guild, but I don’t know how they took it.  Other opinions were expressed by other people, who will not be named here (because I’m keeping this post name-free), but I will say that 3AM posts to the forum while under the influence of doctor prescribed post-surgery painkillers should be taken with a grain of salt.

The official guild stance (and my own stance) is that we wish them the best.  It looks like several ex-guildies have found their way into the same raiding guild so they’re getting the same camaraderie they had with <Fortune Favors>, which is good for them even if it stinks for us.

Officer Account Compromised, Part 2

Yesterday I came home from work to find our guild roster was down by 3 more toons – those of a real life friend who I’d lived with for years and who’d even been the Best Man at my wedding.  My train of thought went something like this:

1. Oh crap why did he leave without telling us did he at least send an in-game mail?
2. Wait, his account’s been inactive for months and even if it wasn’t he hasn’t had time for WoW because he’s directing a play.
3. I’m just going to take a peek to see how the guild bank is doing andohlookhetookeverything.

A quick phone call determined that he had in fact not reinstated his account, let alone removed three of his characters, and I helped get the information he needed to get a ticket open with Blizzard.  The only good thing about this happening before was that the steps were familiar.

We’re not sure how his account was compromised.  My best guess is a keylogger got his password for another site or service (he uses semi-public computers at a local gaming store) and they got lucky when they checked to see if the same username and password worked for WoW.

He had two characters that the hacker had not pulled out of the guild yet, and I demoted them to Probation in an attempt to close the barn door now that the horses and a decent amount of mats/gold had gotten out.

Meanwhile, his main was spending it’s good old time in Storm Peaks – I assume to farm Relics of Ulduar.  Someone in Gen Chat told me they’d seen him at the Library killing Mechagnomes.

Enter supporting argument for my thesis #2.

In a move that was unprecedented for me, I reduced the powers my Officers had over the guild bank.  Before now they’d been whatever astronomical amount of withdrawals that Blizz would let you put as the cap.  It’s now 200g per day and 10 items per tab per day for officers – still more than most people use, and I can always alter it if the need arises.

To complete my round of barn-door-closing, I went through the guild roster and demoted all inactive officers to Well Prepared just in case this scenario reared it’s ugly head again.  We’d still get hit hard, but not as hard as the first two times.   I also figured that should those players return to the game (it’s happened before) I could always bump them back up o Officer.

In my haste I also demoted a couple of our Vent owner’s bank toons, but left his 70 Rogue an Officer.

Obviously my fault

After a miserable Wintergrasp and a not so successful attempt at heroic HOS (3/5ths of us were new 80s and needed gear upgrades, which was in fact why we were there in the first place) I decided the day couldn’t get any worse and went to bed.  Not an hour later my wife woke me up, totally livid.  The aforementioned Vent owner was on his rogue, calling myself, my wife, and my hacked friend out for ninjaing the bank on purpose and trying to cover it up.  I was half awake, but I’m pretty sure he called my wife stupid, too.  Not the worst of insults, but still far from polite.

Insert the rage /gquit here, followed by my wife getting kicked off of Vent.  When I logged into vent to see what was up I was punted off myself before I could finish asking what was up.

<rant>

What adds insult to injury is that he actually thought I would be tempted by the guild bank.  Hello?  We’re not a raiding guild, it’s not like it’s full of Frozen Orbs and Abyss Crystals, or whatever expensive mats you get in Ulduar/ToC/Whatever.

For all his talk of getting the funds together to make chopper mounts, I actually did it by saving up and building one – without borrowing funds from the Guild Bank, thank you very much, which is something I’ve never done and something my accuser couldn’t say for himself.

(Note at the time he asked first and I didn’t have a problem with it.  I’ve let officers borrow from the bank before, I just never saw the need to do so myself because it’s really not hard to get gold in game if you’re patient and work at it.)

As for my wife, she has a bank guild we helped her make that has the tabs so full of herbs & mats she’s gathered herself that if she took the stuff in the guild bank she wouldn’t have anywhere to keep it – she’s already mailing things back and forth between her characters because items in the mail don’t take up bag slots.  For crying out loud the fact that we need to wait before each run so she can empty her bags is almost a running gag now!

And my friend the hacked Officer?  He doesn’t even play anymore.  We lament this fact, but it’s true.  Even if he had the funds he doesn’t have the time, and WoW requires both.

</rant>

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

So there you have it.  Unless things turn around soon I expect ….

Know what?  I don’t know what to expect.  Every time I expect something good I’m disappointed, and I really don’t want to focus on bad news any more.

Most of the people I look to for emotional support in-game are now most likely blaming me for said bad news.

This isn’t fun anymore.

I have to get ready for work.

• It took a while to get started.
• We had a couple wipes where we really shouldn’t have had any wipes.
• One guildie said over vent that he closed his eyes when he went to repair because he didn’t want to see how bad it was.

But…

• It was (to my knowledge) the first raid Nia ever organized, and it was organized very well.
• It was another opportunity to run with some friends over in <Heros of the Lance>.
• We learned from our mistakes fast.
• The mood of the raid stayed positive and personable.
• The PUG raiders we brought in were valuable assets to the team.
• It was incredibly fun!

Special thanks to Officer Nianeve for having the initiative for organizing the raid, Thebunnie for being our meat shield main tank, Odiwonkenobi for topping our damage meter and providing some good advice (even if we didn’t always take it), and Whimsycal for (get this…) passing on her teir gloves, even though she won the roll, because it was more of an upgrade for Magressa than for her!

You guys are awesome.

We end up using Prince Malchezaar as a trampoline.  Again.

Grats to all who got something out of the run, whether it was XP, gear, a learning experience to prepare you for fights that are more than “tank ‘n’ spank,” or simply a good evening spent with friends.

For me, it was the last one.

-Inch

Not everyone got all the flames (roster changed a bit through the night), but some of us did and everyone made progress and had some fun at the same time.  Horde was there to greet us, of course, but that’s to be expected.  There were plenty of deaths on both sides.  Good show.

<rant mode>Oh, except for the one Horde DK who thought the only way he could flex his PvP prowess was to gank Alli with rez sickness while they were forming a portal to go home.  Good for you, buddy.  Did you even get credit for an honor kill from that?</rant mode>

But seriously, we need to do another run like this before the festival’s over to hit the cities that some guildies missed for whatever reason.  We can discuss the details in-game.

As a side note you may notice that Inch has left <Fortune Favors> to begin raiding in a manner more serious than our casual guild allows. Nymper’s done the same, though in the above pic he’s on his mage.  Other than some good-natured ribbing over vent we wish them all the best.  They both still have several alts in the guild and hang out with us when not raiding with their new friends, so it’s all good.

What started as a guild run with 5 people evolved and devolved into something more and less than that.  Be that as it may we had enough 80s who knew the fight to make it a walk-through.

Inch even tamed himself a new core hound, once the warlock and several tanks stopped pulling them off of him.  (Seriously, I think it was close to 10 attempts before everyone in the raid realized what he was trying to do.  People, they didn’t put /rw in there just to annoy people, you know!)

I tried to get a pic of the achievement too, but someone got loot-happy and the item windows covered up the achievement almost instantly.

All things concidered the run was a lot of fun and we really need to do it again, only this time with more guildies.  PUGs can be fun too, but I much prefer the guild runs we do, even if they’re harder or take longer.

We started off with Zul’Aman, followed by a jaunt over to Kalimdor to punch Onyxia in the face … again.  On our way back Inch and Nymper discovered a drawback of their quest for getting new headgear – no one in Mudsprocket would talk to them!

It wasn’t until we took a quick trip to Blackrock Mountain that I remembered I should really be taking pictures.  Oh well.  Behold, the only reason people go to Upper Blackrock Spire (UBRS): The Jenkins title.

I’m told a graphics bug also made Cuddles render at his original ginormous size for everyone else, but since I could only see it by looking over at my wife’s computer I have no screenshots … yet.

From there we headed off to everyone’s favorite level 70 stomp-fest, Karazhan!  It, uh … should be noted that when you’re one of the people who decides to bring a level 68 into what was once a Burning Crusade endgame instance it’s almost impossible for you to be geared up and ready, so most things will one-shot you early and often.  I thought I’d gotten the hang of it in ZA, which is technically harder, but I was wrong.

Being dead gives me more time to think up responses.

Illhoof dies in a fire.  Wheee!

Pew pew lazors!

Moar pew pew!

Ohnoesidied.  Though to be honest we’re pretty good if the healer gets disconnected and only one 68-who-shouldn’t-be-there buys the farm.  Though Farnight (Daynear) was close…

Hold me closer, shiny dancer.  XD

Aaaaand, we win.  Yes I died again, but to my credit that did not happen until Malchezaar was almost down.  Whew!

Grats to all those who got gear, enchanting recipes, & achievements!  Trips like this will hopefully become a weekly event.

(PS: Had some other screencaps that didn’t take place durring the raids.  Posted them here.)