That New Guild Smell

I've given in to the dark side. I've gone ahead and joined a guild in AoC. An aussie-based guild at that, so that I can conceivably interact with people at non-3am time slots.

It's been too quiet soloing in AoC. And not being able to experience the end-game (harvesting/crafting, raids, siege PvP, etc.) bothered me a lot. Without that promise of innovation, AoC becomes another quest-for-xp pointless grind.

So it was either try and join a guild now, in the blossoming potential of a new game launch, or quit and abandon AoC.

And I find I'm excited by the unexplored land. The unknown.

WoW is ridiculously linear and overtrodden. Everyone knows the "best" specs, the appropriate talent trees by now. There are a million and one UI and map mods, and if you don't have them, you're a hopeless noob. There are recipes for raiding. "Turn left? But but...we've always gone right. It works that way!" And even if I dared to join a guild to raid for nights on end, everything is so...established. Mundane. Chore-like. And did I mention that the general WoW population seems unable to converse in proper English on their version of the broadcast channel - whatever it's called? General? And oh yeah, the level cap is rising again...in the next expansion. Progression is measured in levels and tiers of equipment. How does the guild rise to the top? Get everyone to the next raid boss progression, I guess.

Too little options for contribution, personally. WoW crafting looks to be a soloist grind too.

That's why I'm banking a LOT of hope on WAR, that they have considered the social aspects of joining/creating a guild, crafting and generally going RvR versus another faction.

But in the meantime, AoC shows some tide-over promise.

There's going to be end-game raids - at which I instinctively wince - but well, a couple points in its favor. Collision detection plays a part in AoC, apparently. So formations are going to be somewhat important, and no, you can't have 10 healers piling inside a big tank, healing autoselected single targets.

Healing is cone / aoe-based too, apparently, so positioning might become quite important. Different weapons have different reaches to them. The whole active attacking combat system might also spice things up, instead of autoattacking and spamming certain skill buttons.

And more importantly, from a selfish point of view, the exploration is going to start now. The exploratory raids. The raid recipes aren't established. Even in RoD, I've always been more excited going to see and learn a new mob than actually killing the goddamn things ad nauseam for a chance at a shiny. I love jumping onto Test server to try out the new TFs. Not so keen doing them every week and every day on Live. Unless I'm bored and have nothing better to do.

You can't get that sort of critical mass in a game that's been going on for some time. Someone's bound to just look up a recipe and say, let's do it this way, it's been done like this...

And building up guild villages/cities and siege PvP on keeps sounds really interesting to try.

(Hmm, wasn't there a rather familiar article about organizations coming together to construct things and shared org resources titled "Kingdoms" some years back? *hem* *cough*)

Who knows. Maybe it'll get boring in a few months (or one.) Maybe bugs will remain unfixed, and people will give up and quit and things will lose critical mass. Maybe some people drama will cause a massive guild implosion.

There's always quitting and waiting for WAR. (Aka the next big thing.)

But for now, the new shine and expanded options of a large guild is really quite fun.