Doomed to diku?

I've been alternating between fighting off an urge to play WoW "seriously" and following Warhammer Online with avid fanaticism.

I'm keenly interested in finding out if WAR can promote the formation of social relationships and guilds by designing towards interaction with other players. Because I'm starting to miss the social aspect of MMOs. Of accomplishing stuff as a group.

Yet I find myself in a Catch-22 situation. I'm uncertain if I have the desire and energy to invest heavily into a guild to build the sort of camaraderie and relationship that I miss from the days of yore in the MUD.

There's also the problem on being on the other side of the ocean as 90% of the guilds out there - in this workaday world, there's only so often I can get up in the morning to even show my face and been seen, let alone participate enough to build any kind of relationship.

And there's the selfish-player, low accountability mindset of a large MMO as opposed to a small MUD. In a MUD of 300 players, everybody knows your name. More or less. In a large MMO, if you feel like it, you can just decide to heave-ho and give a guild a miss, and chances are, no one will miss you or if they have some reason to miss you (say perhaps you made off with a boatload of their shtuff), you can pretty much drop off the face of existence and never be seen again. Not easily, perhaps, but easier than a small-person MUD, for sure.

Not everyone is a no account thief, of course, even if the risk is there. But there's certainly the old "let's look out for me" mindset at play in a lot of people. We see it on CoX, even. "Fill for me." "Do stuff for me." "When you need help, I'm not there. But if I need help, I expect you to be there for me. You're a guild, right, that's what guildmates are for!"

It's so hard to find the sort of guild that takes special care to look out for everyone, but still gets stuff done. A needle in a haystack in a large MMO. Is it even worth the effort and RL money? (After all, you're paying a subscription every month...)

In the case of WoW, I'm dancing between a fine line of attraction and hate. I'm really starting to dig the graphics. I'm kinda thrilled by the prospect of a big world with different graphic styles, and the 'depth' of class talent trees and systems (where 'depth' means the complexity and time involvement to grok each system). I'm somewhat tempted by the thought of participating in a 25 or 40 man raid to beat on a big (meaning HUGE, GIGANTIC) monster, each doing their part properly, to bring it down.

Then the sudden burst of sanity kicks in and refutes: I love the big world, but I'm not super-keen on running for hours through it, seeing mobs pasted at random diku intervals ad nauseam. Neither am I keen on leveling by repeatedly killing these interspersed mobs and shuttling back and forth between NPCs who can't quite decide which type of goblin to kill (oh! and I forgot to tell you, there's a goblin chief you have to take down too!) and wondering why out of 40 goblins, they only have 5 stomachs between them.

I'm uncertain if I want to 'grok' a deep, time-involved talent tree, if there's going to be only the ONE TRUE WAY to spec right (or face derision, taunting and elite scorn). And while killing a big giant monster seems pretty darned cool, being forced to get up at odd hours and to spend four of them getting to the giant monster in the first place, and doing it -repeatedly- for a minute chance at a really-cool-prize-which-you'd-probably-never-get-unless-you-were-desperate-enough-to-put-on-a-husky-voice-for-the-guild-leader-over-ventrilo...is damnably UNCOOL.

I miss the camaraderie. I don't miss the drama. But guilds come with both.

I don't know if CoX can yield a guild (or supergroup) that will feed this. In the first place, I'm not very chatty. And it's rare that one really needs a guild for anything in CoX - which leads to this awful attrition rate - no accountability, y'see.

Guild Wars? I don't know that I want to play Guild Wars in a hardcore fashion. I'm not -that- much for PvP, though I guess I'm open to learning if there was a nice friendly guild who didn't mind teaching clueless n00bs. I've a tendency to drop out of sight for months at a time on GW anyway, so that's making me hesitant to join anything. Same reasoning/rationale for LOTRO.

I doubt I'm going to be hardcore into AoC. I just want to mess around with it for a couple months, enjoy the story and get my money's worth of a new system and so on.

Hrmph.