I was talking to a buddy the other day at work and I made a comment to him that still holds true as I am writing this:
You know when you get to that point in Tetris where the little pieces are coming down so fast that you just don’t have enough time to think of where you should put them, you just keep stacking them in ways that will prolong the game.
That’s how I feel right now! I feel like there is so much piled on me and the other officers in my guild that we are just pushing stuff to the side so we can keep going.
Let me elaborate:
My guild found out Monday that Blizzard had decided to transform our server (Drak’Thul) from a PVP server to a PVE one. Good ol’ D’thul is a low population server and Blizzard figured by changing it to PVE and then turning on the “New Players” flag that people would flock to the server. For those that didn’t want to stay on Drak’Thul, Blizz gave the option to swap to one of three other servers.
Let’s just hink about that one for a second, in order to bring players to the server Blizzard wanted to change it and then give people the option to move off…genius!
Whatever. The WoW gods at Blizzard know a little about what they are doing, and it’s not like we can change it now anyways. For those that wished to stay on a PVP server, Blizzard offered free transfers to select realms:
Akama-Medium population server with several alliance and a few horde guilds that were in various stages of heroic 25 man Icecrown Citadel.
Dalvegyr-Medium population server with several alliance and horde guilds that were in the early stages of normal 25 man Icecrown Citadel.
There was a third server listed but it was flagged as PVE. No point in considering that server so I will keep it off the list.
Now the kicker was this: We learned about this on Monday, Blizzard started to let people transfer off Tuesday.
One of our Officers posted in our super secret Officer forum that we needed to make a decision RIGHT NOW! We didn’t have time to wait; we needed to make a decision Monday night at the latest. All but one Officer chimed in and it was decided that we would move to Dalvegyr. We felt that being around guilds that were close to us in progression would give us a much better chance of recruiting players rather than fighting with a guild that is far more progressed for talented players.
Our raid members did not agree. They believed that if we moved to a server where the rest of the guilds were knocking down heroic bosses that we would have a flock of talent that wanted to join us. Most of our guild decided to not follow us over and instead went to Akama. When all was said and done I would say that my guild lost almost 75% of our players.
What I am truly amazed at are the specific people that we lost. My guild was originally an Everquest guild and once World of Warcraft came out they switched over. We had a player who had joined the original Everquest guild and had stayed with us until the server move. He had been with us for 10+ years. He never had an issue with the guild, was a great raider and was an integral part of our team. He left us Wednesday and went to Akama.
I could go on and on about the people that we lost. I could say how much it hurt when one of our mages and a good friend of mine jumped into Ventrilo with me on Tuesday and cried to me as she informed me that she was going to transfer to Akama. I could tell you about the sick feeling I get everytime I log onto our forums and see that another person, another guild mate and friend has decided that they would like to go to a different server but I think that anyone who reads this already understands how I feel.
So what does the future hold for my guild? I honestly cannot tell you. The only option we have right now is to put in some work on 10 mans until we can build up enough for a 25 man raid. Several of us are still trying to move characters over with little success and our guild leader had his account flagged and banned for trading a large quantity of gold to other players. I guess Blizzard missed the fact that all of the people he traded it to were guild members that were transferring over. When you have a guild bank with over 400k gold sitting in it, there isnt an easy option for moving it around. Just another kick while we are down though.
As I said before, I am not sure what the future holds for my guild. I think that we can pull through and come across stronger than ever but only time will tell.
Oh, and don’t even get me started about the raiding changes in Cataclysm.