Wandering Alliance Down????

It is not official yet, but it looks like Wandering Alliance may fall apart. I will be the first to admit that things have not been perfect at WA but I am a little disgusted by the way things are going down.

About 3 months ago a resto druid (we will call him Mem) applied to the guild with very little gear, but he was a friend of one of our Class Assists and posted one of the best applications I have ever seen. This is not all that surprising since I found out later that the druid is or was not his main. He also had a rogue on another server that had cleared Black Temple. He was a great pick up for the guild and preformed well from the start even with sub par gear. Also due to his experience he quickly took an unofficial leadership roll explaining raid strats and organizing some 10 man raids. After about a month we started to see new apps from Mem's friends. Like him most of them didn't have the best gear but they were classes we needed and submitted pretty good apps.

I also started to hear a few rumblings about Mem's "clique." Some people were worried that they would leave to go to a new guild, and others worried that they might try and start their own guild taking a few or our members with them. I dismissed most of this as paranoia for a couple of reasons. First, if you look back to one of my first posts you will see that we had a group of friends leave to join another guild. I thought past experience was just making some of the members nervous. Second, WA was doing pretty well. We had our ups and downs but we were downing bosses.

Then patch 2.3 came out. A few more of Mem's friends were joining the guild, and he started organizing ZA runs without making announcement in Guild chat. He also started organizing Kara runs without making an announcement in guild chat and included his non guildie friends in the runs. To make matters worse. Most of these runs were right after our regular raid time. I often asked after the raids if anyone was interested in ZA or Kara, and generally wouldn't get a response, but then 10 to 20 minutes later I would start to see guildies in Deadwind Pass or in ZA. So, it wasn't just that they ogranized it without telling people, they flat out ignored people.

At this point the rumblings started to get louder, now with an added rumor that some of Mem's friends from his BT guild were transferring to Eitrigg with T6 gear to join a new guild Mem was forming. While I did admit that it was a possibility now, I just couldn't see how it would happen. Even if Mem took all his friends in WA, a few WA members and had some off server friends I didn't see how he could get more then 20 people. Also, Eitrigg is probably one of the worst servers for raiding. Of the hundreds of guilds that have cleared BT, not one of them is on my server, and a lot of people that want to be hardcore raiders on Eitrigg transfer to other servers. In fact, the top guild on our server regularly goes through purges where several top members transfer. As a result, I didn't think there is anyone that would want to transfer here, and I didn't think there were enough quality players willing to leave their current guilds to join a new guild.

This leads us up to about a month ago. We were downing the first 4 bosses in SSC in one night and getting Leo the next night. We also started to talk about working on TK a little more to get the other two bosses in their down. However, we were having a hard time even getting attempts on Vashj. WA has a Core of about 15 to 20 hardcore members that show up to at least75% of the raids. Then we have a layer of casual players that fill in the gaps. This does slow down progression some because you don't have a real consistent group but it was nice to know that you didn't have to show up all the time. So, on nights that we were clearing to Vashj we would have 35 people online. On nights we wanted to do Vashj we would have 20-25, and rarely got the right make up for the raid usually having to many healers and tanks and not enough DPS. Basically Hardcore members showed up, and the casuals did not. However, to be fair, I should say that a lot of this started to happen around the holidays and when a lot of players had their Finals.

The rumblings continued for the past month. Also there were some issues with how loot was being distributed in ZA runs that Mem or one of is friends were leading. Some people said that they were showing favoritism as to their own friends by not letting some people roll. I tried to ignore it all, by saying that if they leave they leave and WA will survive. It is one of the oldest guilds on the server with a lot of really good people. We have been through worse and can do it again.

Unfortunately, I found out over the weekend that the cancer has spread farther than I had thought. Apparently Mem and his friends have been approaching quite a few of the hardcore WA members over the past month that to join their new guild including the top three leaders of our guild. I never thought thought they would be open to it but apparently they are strongly considering it, and by this simple fact I think WA is probably dead.

I understand the frustration of the hard core members that want to progress faster. I consider myself to be one of those hardcore members and have been frustrated as well. I want to see Hijal, BT and Sunwell before the expansion. So I can understand why Mem wants to form a guild that is more focused and progresses faster. As to the guild leadership, I can understand why they are tempted to go. Our GM formed this guild over 2 years ago, and has rebuilt it many times. I understand the frustration and desire for a break from running a guild, but the way it is all happening is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

As you can probably tell form the tone of this post, I am not one of the people who has been asked to join the new guild. So, I will freely admit that part of my disappointment is jealousy and some sour grapes. One of the officers of the new guild is a WoW friend of mine going back to FoC (We will call him Gnome). When I had found out that many of my other friends in the guild had been asked to join the new guild, I asked Gnome, why I had not been asked. Apparently they don't see Moonkin as all that raid viable. This isn 't all that surprising since this is a common attitude in WoW, but this was from my friend who had previously always wanted to have "his boomkin." It just hurts. In my opinion they should have opened up the new guild to all WA members but make the new guild rules known. This way people know they are expected to play 75% to 100% of the time and that raid performance will evaluated and criticized if needed. Cherry picking WA members of desired classes just seems wrong.

Anyway, I don't know what is going to happen but I think that WA is done. The GM told me over the weekend that they will talk to the members about it tonight. If the leaders stay then we will go on but it will probably take a month to get us back on track if not longer. As I look at the roster of the new guild I see 14 (old) WA members now there. One other WA member has gone to a different guild and a couple of others I know have applied.

What this all means for me, I don't know. I have several options but none of them seem all that good right now. I will talk more about that later after I see what happens tonight.

Toon Update:
Graylo - I did some kara and ZA with him but only got badges.
Graypal - I got him to about halfway through 64 and made him Scryers. Going Scryers as a Drianie is not fun. I don't recommend it unless you really want to.
Grayfel - Still building rested XP.