Eleventh

It's 4.35 AM just now, and I am wide awake. Again. This kind of thing is happening more and more frequently recently, but we've got a lot on our minds just now, so I'm assuming that's a factor. I'll talk about it another time though, that's not what I want to write about just now; I just wanted to set the scene.

DISCLAIMER - This posting may contain abbreviations and references to World of Warcraft content. I'll try to keep it to a minimum, and explain where I can, but some of it will be unavoidable - please accept my apologies in advance. Also, this post has turned out to be much, much longer than I intended. I'd like for you to read it all the way through, but I thought I'd warn you just in case you can't be bothered.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I was kicked out of my WoW guild recently. This hurt my feelings. I've been playing WoW for nearly a year, and I'd class myself as a casual gamer. I know some people don't like the hardcore/casual labels, but it'll suffice for these purposes. It took me 6 or 7 months to hit level 60, and I soloed it the entire way apart from a literal handful of groups that I fell into out of convenience's sake. I wasn't active in any WoW community; not the official forums, as I'm not 12, and not any other community, so I was essentially ignorant of many rules that some might take for granted.

If I remember correctly, I joined the guild before I hit 60, but I pretty much just lurked in Guild chat - it wasn't really that active anyway, and few of the regular 60s made time for someone they weren't raiding with on a regular basis. I didn't mind, until I had hit 60, I didn't really think of myself as a 'full' member anyway; I had joined so that I wouldn't have to spend time at 60 looking around for a guild.
Eventually I made levelled up, but I still played solo for a couple of months. I'm a Tauren Druid you see, and I had played Feral from day one. That was where my heart lay (and still does) and I wasn't willing to change just yet. I knew I would have to - as Feral Druids are a hybrid class, they're a jack of all trades, and there are much better damage dealing classes out there. Druids are preferred to be Restoration specced - healers. They are good at this, better than some Priests in certain ways.

As a Feral Druid your endgame possibilities are limited, even in the usual five-man instances. Warriors are dedicated tanks, so your Bear Form is a poor second. Rogues are a dedicated damage dealer, so your Cat Form is a poor second, and Mages are a dedicated magic damage dealer, so your own offensive magic is a poor second. The time came when I could resist the change no longer - my guild were keen to get more Restoration Druids into the endgame raids, so I made it known I was willing to change over, but I'd need help getting the right equipment.
For those of you not up to speed on WoW, the main endgame raid dungeon is a place called The Molten Core which takes 40 people to complete, it's a massive cavern chock full of fire-based monsters and elementals, you need LOTS of equipment that increases your Fire Resistance attribute. I'd built up a few pieces of gear for this purpose, but nothing near what I understood was the norm. Nevertheless, the Guild Leader personally invited me into the Molten Core runs, assuring me I'd be fine and not to worry about it.

So I joined in the next Molten Core run, and it was good. The guild took down Ragnaros, the end boss, and I even managed to get the first part of my Tier 1 epic set. It felt great, I had finally contributed something useful to the guild, I had played my part in keeping my guildmates alive and helped us score a major victory. I joined in next week's run through MC, but it didn't go as well this time round. I won the bid for an epic shoulder piece, but we wiped hard on Ragnaros and had to come away empty handed in the end. I wasn't too bothered, you win some, you lose some; Ragnaros would be there the next week.
That was a Sunday. On the Tuesday or Wednesday, I logged on after dinner and was wandering around checking on some stuff I was auctioning off when one of the 'hardcore' guildies PM'ed me and asked if I wanted to join in a run through AQ-20 (That's an instance called Ahn-Qiraj, which is split into two parts, this part for a 20-man raid). I checked with my gf to see if I had time, which I did, and I agreed - I'd never been to AQ before, so it would be cool to check it out.
We wiped a couple of times at the end boss, as the fight can be quite tough, but we took him down eventually. During the course of the run a book dropped as loot, a book for Druids which taught a high-level healing spell. I bid for it and won it.

As you may or may not know, raids can get quite hectic. Multiple characters are taking damage all at the same time, and it's the healers' responsibility to not only keep them alive, but to make sure they spend their mana wisely so that they can continue to heal as long as possible - mana efficiency is the term usually applied. In the three raids (including the AQ one) that I had been in during my WoW career, I had not used above level 7 of my main healing spell - this manual was level 11. Increased amount of healing, yes, but massively increased mana cost, which is a serious issue for Druids, as we tend to not have the massive mana pool that Mages or Priests do.

I'll be honest, my initial reaction was to sell the manual. I did not see me using this spell with any degree of regularity, and according to one of my add-ons, I could easily get 200 Gold for it. Like many players, I am trying to save for my Epic Mount. This costs 1000 Gold - a huge amount of money. I held on to the book for a day or so, but eventually put it in the Auction House for sale. That would probably have been the Thursday evening.

I logged on Friday evening, checked my in-game mail and found a message from an actual friend I'd made in the guild, telling me that one of the guild officers had kicked me out overnight because they found out I'd put the book in the Auction House.

Pause for dramatic effect.

No message from the Guild Leader. No message from a Guild Officer. No official message of any kind from the guild telling me I had been kicked out and why. I was shattered. I thought that I had found a group of people I could learn from and grow with. Over the past couple of weeks, I'd considered maybe trying to take a more active role in the guild once I had built up a significant amount of experience with them. Obviously not now.

I immediately logged on to the Guild web site and read the rules posts again. Nowhere in there could I find a rule saying what I had done was not allowed. In the run up to me taking part in the raids, I'd asked some (I thought) good questions about how things worked; how the groups were structured; who healed who; how the DKP system worked (DKP being a points system rewarded for Raid attendance, which you use to bid on items); strategies for the various bosses. While I did receive some answers to these questions, in the main the response was, "Go look for yourself" so I did, and I found some information. Enough to get by with, but apparently not enough to know that what I had done would be grounds for being summarily kicked from the guild.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not pulling a Timmy, having a tantrum and screaming that life isn't fair, because I'm not. What I had done was against the rules, and I understand that now. But for the guild leadership to kick me out overnight while I was offline, giving me no chance to explain, defend or rectify my actions seems completely out of line. Had I been contacted then I would have been happy to take the book from the auction house and had it over to the Guild, and to accept a warning or a 'strike'. But no, instead they decided just to throw me out without a second chance, or a second thought it seems.

There were a lot of questions that I asked in my guild which I felt were not answered sufficiently, if at all. For someone who had been a solo player for months, to then jump into a Raid dynamic is a massive leap. It's a situation where people seem to think that everyone knows everything and no-one seems to understand that some information the more experienced players take for granted can be huge stumbling blocks for players new to that style of play.

So; that's my story. I have purposely left the name of the guild out of this post, as I don't wish to be accused of slander, mudslinging, flaming or being called a 'whining b1tch'. Should you wish to know who they are/were, you can read my 'farewell' post to the guld here.