Having a guild is much like sitting on top of an active volcano; it's going to erupt, and you're just going to have to sweep up all the ash when it does.
What I'd like to be doing is manifold. I have a mountain of work to do, and I'm dipping my toes into Fiverr. A friend of a friend has commissioned a painting, and I'm still working on some art for myself. Likewise, there's another 16gb of RAM just waiting to go into my computer, but I haven't had a spare moment to turn it off! So of course there's a ton of guild stuff that I've had to do instead, or in addition to all that. Someone left one of our swtor teams so there's been some tracking work trying to find a replacement. We're still in WoW startup mode, so we're dealing with the repercussions of having fewer people, less stuff, and more need to delegate. Running a guild that spans MMOs is not as easy as taking the old SWTOR workload and dividing it in three sections, unfortunately. A lot of the 'reward' of being an established, large guild in SWTOR came from its solidarity. So we've plunged our SWTOR guild back a few tiers while trying to invest in other games. I'm trying to delegate as much as I can, and intelligently to boot, but I just feel like I'm doomed to fail at some level because there's so much work to be done. All the while, I'd much rather be debating the important matters: should my GW2 heavy armor be dyed silvery white or gold?
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We're an old guild, but new to GW2 and WoW, at least as a collective.
What does that mean for us? Basically, it means that our resources are zero, but our hearts are full, and our eyes are greedy. We'd like to have a developed guild yesterday to reflect that guild we were in SWTOR, but, at the same time, we aren't that guild anywhere else. In WoW last night, a group of somewhat-scrubs took my total scrub Death Knight through a raid last night. I'm such a noob that I don't even know what raid it was, which I'm telling you honestly here because it epitomizes our state as a guild. Sure, we're still in SWTOR, but most of our loyal membership has one foot, maybe both feet, out the door. Others walked out a long time ago but have come back or further into the guild now that we're not defining ourselves based on a game. From a GM standpoint, there's been a ton of little executive decisions that make a huge impact, such as:
Of course, I'm still also responsible for supporting the people who want to continue playing SWTOR. So I have a lot of work to do as we make the jump, but at least I have enough knowledge and resources built up in SWTOR that I can do enough in that regard. So, unlike other people, I have an entire agenda of things to do in videogames that are hard deadlines, because, without them, we can't continue building up Aisthesis. However, I'm not alone in this; I have a dedicated group of friends who want to help, whether it's shouldering some of the burden of knowledge and resource-building in one game, continuing to play and support in another, or just providing moral support as we figure out how to move forward. I'm grateful for those people all the time, because without them, there's no way I would be trying this in the first place. So, I'm having fun. I bought the game. I bought a whole bunch of quality of life stuff. PVPing the other day invoked memories of vintage Swtor PVP. The world looks fantastic; my characters look fantastic. I've drawn in by the story, even though the hokey cutscene 'stage' method of delivery is jarring. I've been streaming just doing things on Twitch. Last night, my guildies and I finally did some dungeons besides the nightmare-fuel Wintersday dungeon (also, Arenanet has some balls for putting out such a crazy holiday event). My reaction is, meh.
Levelling and exploring has been fun for me, which is different. I'll admit that I'm impatiently rushing Ajantis to 80, but I'm also taking the time to fully explore zones, thanks to level sync and the knowledge that you still gain experience after level 80. The dungeons we did--Ascalonian Catacombs, Caudecus's Manor--we did in story mode, so I know there's more to come. We also had level 80s in our party, so the syncing system did give us--especially me, since my character was the lowest level--some challenges. But in general, I can understand why people said that Guild Wars had PVE problems. It didn't feel like a face-stomp the way that swtor or wow dungeoning would feel if a high-level character was there, but it did feel incomplete, as though some essential element of PVE was absent, and therefore the challenges in the dungeon had to come from somewhere else. I know that that is precisely the case, and I'm not asking for the game to be something it's not. I just hope that Guild Wars 2 will have enough content I enjoy to keep me logging in even after the new shininess has worn off. Besides, you know, agonizing over dyeing my gear. |
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