When the Going Gets Tough, the Guild Gets Going

My guild has been through a lot in the past few months. It's easy to say that the people who are still there are some of the most loyal and determined people I've ever raided with. Some of them had been given offers to join better guilds, and a good chunk of them easily could have left to better guilds if they had wanted to - but they didn't.

Of the ones who left, I've heard here and there that a number of them have quit raiding or quit the game altogether, and the guild that formed from the departure of several long time members is currently lost in a trail of dust in progression.

I even recently found that a good chunk of the members in the guild from our failed merger stopped trying and chose to be absorbed by a much more progressed guild - something we've refused to do. All of this bedlam going on within and around us, and we're still here and raiding.

I've written a decent amount about my guild and raiding guilds in general - in fact my very first post (other than the "oh hey this is my new blog lol!" post) was about my guild and how much it meant to me. A majority of my Warcraft experience is within raiding guilds. I experience the same nostalgia that everyone else does about previous expansions, but I'm aware enough to realize that those experiences and the feelings I had aren't something that could be reproduced - they are all but dominated by the remembrance of the people I raided with and the guilds I had been in, and that can never be replicated

That said, I'm also painfully aware of the nature of raiding guilds. We're all in a raiding guild because we want to raid - unfortunately, if that doesn't happen, sometimes the guild ceases to be. Sometimes it doesn't matter if you've been raiding together for years, and even the most tight knit guild could find its end in a sudden catastrophic implosion. It's a strange place, the WoW raiding guild. You make friends, spend time together every week to fight monsters, experience trials and successes together, and then sometimes, suddenly, it's gone.

poof!
no seriously this character's name is poof
it's from the fairly odd parents
I like cartoons

With the experiences I've had and the situations I've been in, I mean it when I say that I'm surprised - I'm shocked, really - that my guild is still together. We are some resilient freakin' people.

I don't know what's keeping the people in our guild together. I don't mean that negatively - I just honestly don't know. Several members were pugging while we were falling behind, many visibly and outspokenly frustrated by our progression and performance. A good chunk of them haven't even been in the guild for a very long time - personally, I've only been in it for a few months short of two years, and there is currently no one who is an active raider who joined before I did. Almost half of our active raiders joined at the start of Warlords. Considering our troubles started at Warlords release, what the heck kept those people around?

I have no freakin' idea, but hey, don't question success, right?