Hi all, time for another of my blog entries.
In my last blog post I covered my concerns about the potential effects of Blizzard’s rather bizarre decision to compete with itself.
Having now had Classic out for over a month we’ve all seen the effect it has had on the retail game, numbers of players online and attrition to the classic version. Probably the most insidious of these has been the way it has spread players onto many different realms and guilds rather them keep them playing together as people reconnected with old friends and guild-mates in new versions of the long dead guilds of the past. This factor certainly made our attempt to provide a classic home for WW players doomed to a rather short life and provided a lot of disappointment for Rag who was keen to see the experiment succeed only to watch it quickly die as people went each their own way.
The effect hasn’t just been felt in WW and with the arrival of ‘patch’ 8.2.5 which provided 2 hours of new content and little else, guild masters like me and this guy have been wondering where it leaves us with attrition biting this hard and the next tier still weeks away as we try to progress in the Eternal Palace raid.
The inevitable loss of players to divided loyalties between classic and retail coupled with nothing new in BfA has caused us all to have to choose between the two. Those that chose classic have generally not progressed in retail and so have fallen behind those that chose retail and this has led to further attrition as they move from regular, reliable raiders to those that can cover in absence, if they are available and if they feel like it and if we can accept they don’t even have a third essence yet after all this time as the rest of the team closes in on the cap and decide to ignore the raiding rules for a select few just to keep these players in raid whilst hoping nobody else notices the double standards.
Let me be clear, I’m not blaming anyone that plays classic as it’s a game and their choice to make, but it doesn’t help the team in any way as they require replacing if we’re to confront increasingly harder boss encounters and replacements are really hard to find.
No doubt as time moves on guilds will fail and more people will be looking for a home, but it’s hard to predict when this will happen, who will decide not to quit and which of those will apply to and fit with a guild like ours. It is likely also that Classic will lose its appeal when people get to 60 and find that the end game is an even bigger grind than BfA, but again, they’ll be in no condition to step back into raiding in retail.
So in the meantime we’re more reliant than ever on those raiders that are still playing retail, still prepared to grind the current game in all it’s ugliness and these in turn face an increased reliance and need to be there week in and week out and this causes frustration and increased burnout when you can’t even go to a friend’s BBQ as you need to be raiding to not “let the team down”.
So, I can only say thanks to those who like me and Rag do this, week in, week out as your stubbornness when combined with ours keeps us going until such time as things get easier or they don’t and instead worsen until we’re no longer viable numerically.
To all I say, if you love Weekend Warriors and want it to be your final home in WoW then remember that it’s also your responsibility to help it stay healthy. To do your bit to help us stay viable or despite the legendary stubbornness of your Orc leaders we’ll be powerless to fight the numerical raid size boss and Mythic raiding will be done here, probably for good with undoubted knock on effects on the guild beyond that.
I know this may be a blunt way for me to put it, but remember the old saying, “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it”.
This goes for this guild as much as anything else and when you suddenly feel like playing the game again after you’ve done whatever you wanted to do instead, we sadly may not be around to help.
Thanks for reading.
