Thursday, July 1, 2010

Switching gears

It was a very difficult weekend.  After a long talk with one of the officers and after talking to the GM on Monday I decided to leave my Paladin in the guild, but step back from raiding on him and instead focus on my Druid.  I had already made plans to refocus on my Druid and make him my main again in Cataclysm, but I've accelerated that plan now.  I've been looking at various guilds but decided to take my friend up on his offer from a few weeks ago.  After I joined my new guild I had a bit of a long talk with my friend about what took me so long.  He hadn't been in the previous guild all that often whereas I'd been in it for a year and a half, so he perhaps didn't have the personal connections to the guild and the people in it like I did.  But the conversation also focused on the difference in motivation.  A lot of people are singularly focused on raiding, and those folks are the ones I consider to be truly elitist.  In other words, motivations like friend ship and the pleasure of just doing things with folks you hang out with aren't the driving factors for them.  They want progression above everything else and when that is stymied they will typically hop to another guild that can provide it for them.  For them all other motivations are either non-existent or so far removed from the top of the priority list that they might as well be.

While I want progression as well, it isn't the sole motivating force for me.  I enjoy running through older content and completing achievements as much as I do killing a progression boss.  In fact I'm just as happy running through a series of 5-man dungeons with friends as I am raiding.  That's what kept me in my old guild so long and why it was a very hard decision for me to "move on".