As always, in World of Warcraft, the time before an expansion usually sees many guilds folding, or some guild even go dormant. It's also a time where you see many new guilds get created. On Eitrigg, this time period had shown the return of a guild that was strong in Burning Crusade and around the beginning of Wrath only to disappear as people transferred off server. The top guilds on any server rarely completely disappear. The guild is still usually in existence when these types of things happen. Usually alts are kept in the guild to preserve the guild tag. In this case, the tag became active again. A few people transferred back in, and the previous members on server, who had left to join the remaining top end game raiding guilds, returned "home". The reformed guild started recruiting again. It completely crippled the top raiding guild on server, and threw server rankings out of synch at two guild ranking sites – since they allow cumulative kills to count. The reformed guild became server 2nd – in a quick swoop just by the members it added on most ranking sites, without actually clearing the content as a group.
Most of this is just what happens these days with guilds, and maybe that will change with the guild changes in Cataclysm. What really just bothers me is seeing posts like this:
This is a post on the Eitrigg forums - selling drakes and titles. Yes, this is virtual currency. Yes, it is up to them if they want to do this. But has this become what this server and the gaming community here is about? The guild below is currently ranked number one, yet due to the mass departure of several of it's members, you can see below that they are asking for people to come and fill their raids with an enticement of the top performers getting gold. (Guess that means they have their own discipline priests and tanks.)
The point is.. back to why do you raid? Is it the prestige? If so, what prestige is to be had from buying the title so you can show it off, or the drake? There's other ways to make money for your guild. What's even worse is that most of the guild doing the selling of these virtual items hasn't cleared most of this content as a group on 25. 10 mans, yes, and rightfully earned that but as a guild, the 25 man achievements/hard modes were basically grandfathered in.
For me, a raid is about the guild. It's about the thrill of the kill. I've occasionally ran a friend through Stockades, or something similar to help them level, but I've never sold my services as in the post above. It makes the achievement or kill that much sweeter to earn it, than to be carried - to complete it with friends, with your raid group, and know that you did this on your own.
The expansion has obviously shaken up a few guilds on the server, but definitely not this one. As a guild that still farms drakes, we generally have people their titles in the first week of being in guild. It just is a bit shocking to see a guild selling these services when they still have folks that don't have it within their guild.
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