It does feel a little like Hotel California here sometimes...
I've said this before in previous posts, at the same time each year!
At the end of WoD, we had an insurge of people, and the same has happened again. People are lining up to join the guild!
At the end of the expansion, people start playing again - perhaps they played early in the expansion then got bored, but by the end they are coming back to check out what they've missed out on. Or maybe, people come back to a guild that has collapsed due to the pressure of raiding and find they're the only ones there. Or, people get one of those free 10 days to play things that WoW gives you when you've been away for a while and they like it and decide to resub.
Whatever it is, the past week has been full of new members coming to the guild, and some of them are returning members.
I admit, I am excited when new people join the guild. Especially when they show the characteristics that I think are important to being a good fit for the guild.
The first one that came along was one of Triarchi's friends, Deciphel. Apparently they've known each other for ages, and ... stop me if you've heard this before... ex-mythic raider who now has a family and job and hasn't got the time to invest in mythic raiding, but would like to do normal and heroic raiding. However, this guy also likes to chase achievements, because as I was "interviewing" him, he was with Triarchi in the midst of doing the "Tomb Raider" achievement.
After a long chat, he decided to join, and literally in his first hour after joining I dragged him to do the Chosen on Sunday. He was reluctant, because he didn't want to stuff up, and also didn't want to take anybody's spot. But it was ok, we were short anyway, and though we didn't get it (well, one person DID get it), he had fun, and it was great to have another achievement hunter join the guild.
Of course, I did ask him beforehand how many achievement points he had, because it is a standing joke that you can't join the guild if you have more achieves than me. Fortunately for him, I was way ahead of him and still #1 on the guild list.
The next wave of rejoins came from Voe, Rag and Dan. Technically those guys still had toons in the guild, but they had stopped playing WoW for a while. I asked them about their time away, and they all said that they had a great time away, making new friends and meeting new people, but not uncommonly, when you get into the cycle of searching for a mythic guild, each one has it's own internal dramas and they either collapse or you move on to escape those dramas. It was like when Nok came back - that though it was good to get away and do new things, that he realised when things went a bit sour, that Frostwolves was his home, and he wanted to come back to it. Dan said something similar - he said that there was a series of dramas after leaving that sucked the life out of the game for him. I'll paraphrase the best bit, because that made me feel happy:
... beautiful thing of hindsight! ... in some ways glad I did (leave the guild) ... only to come to the realisation that things were perfectly fine in FW. Now looking forward to BFA a little more with some good quality people...
I admit I have been a bit anxious about them rejoining, afraid of them being a bit weird and elitist like last time, but I really don't have to worry about that. Everyone knows that I dislike disharmony, and that I will step in if I'm not happy. I think the boys are genuinely happy to be back, and I just want things to be how they were 6 months before they all left.
The next one, which is exciting to me, was Anghelz joining on his alt. I met Ang in Onineko, and at their guild meetups. I like Ang, he's fun. He makes hilarious dad jokes (well, I like them, even if nobody else does). I wouldn't want him to leave Onineko for Frostwolves because... well, I don't want people to think I poach! Anyway, he came over and brought some seahorses to sell so he suddenly became everyone's favourite person. He might have been bustedAng probably won't raid, but if I need more jokes to tell the kids, I can always rely on him for something.
The next person to join was a lucky stray! Furyfire, trying to be helpful, saw a poor person in trade chat looking for a nice, friendly non-cesspool guild. Helpfully, he whispered them and said he was in a nice guild and to talk to Navimie.
I'm having flashbacks to when one guildie said to me "Navi, why are we picking up strays?" And... it's because I can't help myself. That could be me out there, wandering around whose friends had all quit playing, looking for a home. Nobody gives me a chance because they don't know me and I want to play this social game but I can't be social if I have nobody to be social with. Is there anyone out there like me?
So, I get a whisper and I start the LONG interview process. Sometimes it's over quickly, but I chat to the guy for the better part of... an hour. If anyone can stick it out for an hour and still be polite, and I like what they say, then into the guild they go! So this guy, Stahli, manages to stick it out with me for an hour, answering all my questions. Why do you want to be in Frostwolves? What are you looking for in a guild? Why did you leave your other guild? What do you like to do in game? And after all the probing, I get a pretty good handle on the guy. Joined the game with friends, joined a guild, drama and guild fell apart. Absorbed by another guild, more drama, a bit of a "cesspool" place that wasn't a fun place to be in. He moved servers, and ended up in another guild here that wasn't really the right fit and ... that's when Furyfire found him. He did say some amusing things.
"Are you in HR?" he asked me, after a few of my probing questions. "This seems like some of the questions I get asked in my recent job interviews." LOL. The other funny thing he said was when I told him he could find Discord and Facebook details on the guild info page, and he jumped onto Discord to chat to me and Crooked. He talked about some of the guilds he had fallen into.
"I got a random guild invite, and you can sorta tell it's going to be a cesspool place because tehre were 400 members in the guild, and most of them were inactive," he said.
"Umm," said Crooked. I giggled. "Don't judge us, Stahli," I said, "But we have 900+ members in this guild, and we're not a cesspool guild."
Poor guy. Caught him a bit offguard there. He was very chatty, and he seemed like someone who was looking for the social aspect of the game that he missed from his first guild with his friends. Hopefully we can help him find it again!
