A Requiem for Boom and Other Tales

Hello, and welcome to my Blog.

I feel cliche starting out like this, but hey..how else do you start a blog?

This is going to be my outlet for my World of Warcraft endeavors.

Allow me a quick introduction.
My name is Andrew, and I am a WoW player. I have played for almost a year now. I have a level 70 elemental shaman named Snostrebla. I rock restoration on occasion as well. Both specs I am geared completely through T5, and have little upgrades available up through T5..at least nothign significant. I have a level 32 Prot pally named Tigraine, and a couple others I haven't played enough to be worth mentioning. I am in the guild BOOM, and second-in-command to the Guild Leader only.

A quick description of the title of this particular blog and hopefully the general theme of this blog: BOOM is a guild that we have been rocking on Crushridge. The guild was started back on August 23, 2007. It was started as a guild to escape the clutches of a guild going hardcore, and having the ability to raid in a super casual setting with your closest buddies. I leveled from roughly level 50 and up, here in BOOM. We started rocking Karazhan back in Oct/Nov and we simply tore through it, thanks to a couple of super-experienced raid leaders, and we had a ton of fun and geared ourselves up really quickly since we were fully clearing it in three weeks.

Time passed, and we grew, inviting friends and family into the guild, and rocking Kara with all these folks as well, and then we reached a point where we didn't really have anything we could really do. We found ourselves in a position of not being able to really really hit anything hard after that. Zul'aman was a little too hard to bring just anyone in, and we have such a casual approach that we couldn't tell someone in all greens that they weren't good enough to run with us, and we didn't have enough for 25 mans and didn't want to recruit just anyone. We still had a good thing going, though. We had a group of around 20 really active players that were very considerate of others, and wanted to help everyone out, and then everything changed.

I blame myself a little, I blame the nature of the guild a little, and I blame the guild itself a little. The itch for 25-mans came upon us in force. All-of-the-sudden everyone wanted to do 25-mans. Well we were faced with a problem, because of our unique free-for-all guild structure, but at the same time all the players runing with integrity and mass amounts of skill, we wanted to avoid bringing in the loot whores. You have all probably played with one at one time or another. The person that talks in guild, or party constantly about X piece of gear, and usually works it into a conversation about as often as one would a newly ex-girlfiend or ex-boyfriend. We've all grouped with these people, and sometimes we tolerate them because they are our friends, but lets get real..we didn't want to deal with that anymore than we already did. Also we don't even want to delve into the realm of possible ninjas.

So we were faced largely with a recruiting issue, and it was particularly hard too because we have such a good reputation for tearing through stuff, and having really rock-solid players (gear aside). So we wanted more people, and had many clamoring to join up, but when you slip a little on your standards, and have to bring people in to fill spots on a 25-man raid, you are bound to start seeing some drama. "So and so died too early" "So and So drives me crazy, why don't we kick him?" "if so and so had done x, we would've killed y" All of these things may or may not be true, but what it ended up boiling down to was an overall lack of consideration for fellow raiders. To speed the 25-man jump we started rockin with another guild, and it worked well for a while, and then the scrubs started showing up. These are the guys that won't outdamage a tank, but get upset when healers aren't able to heal because they ran out of mana in a fight that was supposed to be half as long as it should be.

Long story short, things began to get ugly and many started to remember the success of the 10 mans and the old days. Many wanted to still raid, but we were in a cyclical loop. As a GM of a super casual guild, I cannot tell anyone to do anything really, and counting on others to be considerate at that point begins to just epic fail.

Things are at a standstill now for us. We can barely put a 10-man together. We've had people leave for bigger better things, and it looks like the GM's are just sitting on our hands and not doing anything. Partially its true, because we built and environment that was not conducive to fixing the problems we were having, and partially was due to lack of playing time, and many other things. Long and short of it is this: the glory days are going to be short, and a new era must dawn. Whatever the result is, I intend to keep playing.. no dramatic quit, no dramatic explosion. If things get worked out (as I am fully expecting they will as we plan and plan) great. If things fail, I can simply step down and continue my WoWing in some other capacity. As for now, I am done with listening to the whining and not being able to fix it.

The dawn of a new day, and a requiem for BOOM. I will be including my other adventures as well. Hope this is well enjoyed!

P.S. I realize that this sounds ultimately negative, but I really really really do love BOOM. It has seroiusly been the pinnacle of gaming enjoyment in a kid raised on nintendo and beyond. I have made super duper friends in there, and hope that I will be able to keep them, and keep playing with everyone! I am just sad to see its values and greatness passing.

If any from BOOM actually read this, hang tight. The horizon holds great great things, and its very very close.

Godspeed

-Andrew