The Guildskipper's Lament

I’ll admit it; I’m not the most active of MMO players. I’ll love blasting through content for about a month... Then drop out. This is one of the reasons I’ve stopped playing subscription games, and also one of the reasons I keep coming back to Guild Wars. It’s kind of refreshing to see all your stuff back where you left it. Kind of like booting up any old save of an RPG you long abandoned.

Obviously this kind of burst-driven activity makes me the first to be removed from a guild roster when the culling season begins. (I’m currently fortunate enough to belong to a guild without said culling tactics, an absolute blessing for me.)

Let me give you a short summary of my experience with guilds in GW.

Guild 1 member: Want to join?

Me: Sure.

Joins guild, plays for a month or so, leaves.

4 months later:

Me: Oh, cool, I’ve still got my cape!

Finds He’s now guild leader with a nigh empty hall and the guild roster is empty, bar one other person who hasn’t logged on for 11 months

Me: Well, crud.

Guild 2 leader: Want to join this guild I founded?

Me: Sure.

Joins, is active for a month, but suddenly, without a word, the leader leaves. PMs Leader.

Me: So why did you leave?

Guild 2 ex-leader: lol bored, in a better guild now. [I’m paraphrasing]

Eventually ends up as leader while people leave. Adds Message of the Day explaining what happened (Since our glorious leader hadn’t) and watches as the guild falls apart.

Guild 3 Leader: Interested in joining?

Me: Sure.

Plays for a month, completing the majority of Nightfall and making friends with most of the alliance during the Dragon Festival.

Logs in 1 month after, cape is gone.

Me: -_-

Fortunately, it’s at this point that I PM one of the guys I knew in the alliance. I hadn’t actually realised he was the leader of his guild; I just knew that he was a nice guy.  So, finally, I got set up in a great guild that supports my play style.

I follow every trickle of news regarding GW2 I can, hoping against hope that this will be the game that finally breaks me of my habit of constantly flitting about. So, when that droplet of news about the guild system fell out of the PAX pipeline, I just sat there for a few seconds. The ability to join several guilds on the same character is something I hadn’t even considered.

Assuming that the alliance I belong to transfers to GW2, they will give me a nice home base to return to whenever I decide I want to play. It also means that I get to socialise with groups that satisfy my various interests, be it a crafting-focussed guild, a guild that specialises in dungeon runs or even somewhere I can chat about game lore.

So, is this a good thing? Well, for me it most certainly is! I always find my interests spreading further apart and it would be very nice to be a part of a system that actually encourages my diversity and can keep up with it.

This has been Chronicler Redthorn, and I like multiple guilds!