Anexxia posted her Mid-Year SWTOR Assessment and it got me thinking about what’s happened with me, the guild, and the game in the last 6 months.

It’s been 6 months, more or less, and the biggest thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people stranded – and I don’t mean stranded on a low population server.  I mean stranded by their guild.

As is natural with a new game, people get psyched to play it and find out it’s just NOT for them.  Hell, I lasted maybe a week in EQ2 before I was like I HATE THIS I CANNOT DO IT ANYMORE!  But a few of the people I started playing with loved it, stayed, and played hard-core end game for YEARS.

We started out with a piddly little guild of 8-10 people (because I am too lazy to go back and count), and we didn’t really know what to expect.  We had all raided together in WoW but we didn’t know if people would go back to WoW or what.  And before we had a viable raid team (people were still leveling) it was a bit of a struggle to keep people interested.

But as soon as we started raiding, it clicked.  We know how to do this!  We know how to not-stand-in-bad.  We know how to analyze an encounter and figure it out – even without meters (I know, the shock.)  Maybe what’s even more shocking is that we were having so much fun, nobody went back to WoW.

Sure, we had people who were unhappy with this or that, but we worked through it as a team.  One guildie decided he didn’t like the class he had chosen, and was just miserable.  Well, don’t go back to WoW!  Just reroll!  Instead of QQing about any possible holes in our roster, we adapted, because this isn’t a JOB, this is a game, and if you’re not having FUN, that sucks.  We pulled together and helped him level and gear his new main and hot damn, he’s happy, he’s good at his new role, we’re happy.

As for recruitment, it’s really hard to integrate people into an established group and have them really feel like one of the team and not like a junior member.  Here, I think we actually did it.  Well, Alex did it.  She’s in charge of that stuff.  I’m pretty derp when it comes to recruitment.

Here we are 6 months in.  We can most of the time fill the roster unless a bunch of people go on vacation at once, and usually we don’t have more than one person sitting out on a given night.  We’ve had people’s schedules and mains change and managed to adapt the roster to make it work.

I hear about these guilds falling apart and I wish I had a magic bit of advice how to keep your guild strong and together, but I honestly have no fucking clue how we did it.  We just kinda did.

There’s a domino effect when a few people leave, and more tend to leave.  There’s also a domino effect when you manage to stay together.  Suddenly, we have (unsolicited!) applications to our piddly little guild, which we didn’t expect, and we have to adapt and figure out, as a guild, if we should limit growth… and honestly, that’s a conversation I never thought we’d have.  I am as shocked as you guys.