It's at queue times like this ...

You ask yourself - "why didn't I start the login process before having my shower ?"

Lol

I'm currently waiting for 223 people ahead of me to get off the Silvermoon WoW server. It's actually moving fairly quickly. One thing about Silvermoon, it has shorter queues and they clear quicker than Draenor.

I'm active on 2 realms at the moment :

Draenor - is the new home of the Violence Reborn horde guild. These are the awesome people who gave me a new home after a lot of silliness kicked off in the guild I helped create, oh - 8 and a half years ago now. That showed what could happen when raiding and the politics around getting a bunch of people out every few nights to raid. The guild basically tore itself apart with the tensions between those who wanted progress and those who just wanted to enjoy the game.

I've gone from one end to the other. I wanted to see the content and be part of a team that kicked ass. Mind you, that was partly due to knowing who the raid leader was. Yep, she was pretty awesome and it's a genuine pleasure to have her as a friend.

Here's to you Overqueen ! It was never the same after you left for the BC beta.

The VR people are a bit more laidback, they don't mind too much that I got burned out completely from raiding and have no real interest in that end game stuff any more. I feel a bit guilty actually for spending more time on :

Silvermoon - is the home of the alliance guild I'm helping level. I've never really played much alliance. After a short dalliance with them in the early days, I was horde all the way. So there's a lot of levelling content that I've never seen.

That's where the game is for me, the journey up to maximum level. It's a different game after that, filled with repetition and lacking in interest. On the way there, you journey through 2 worlds and a bunch of continents with lots of stories along the way. I'm about to jump into adventures in the southern tip of Azeroth with my new mage. (Queue's almost done !)

But there are a few changes I'm displeased about in WoW.

They seem to be joining realms together on the quiet. I'm fairly ok with that when it comes to the auction houses. More players means there's more people to sell stuff. That means more competition, better availability and lower prices. That's great. But what isn't is the competition when you're out in the wild doing the adventures. There's far too much competition out there and I'm often seeing players from other realms getting to the baddies that I'm hunting down. They get in the way and make me take longer.

Guild invites. This is the new junkmail. On at least half the characters I've started, there have been unsolicited guild invites coming up even before the introductory cutscene.

This is silliness of the highest order.

It's like having 5 or 6 people knocking on your door every night inviting you to a rave. That's what guilds with no control on who joins them are like. They're noisy, filled with rabble and no place I want to be. If a guild wants to have people of the calibre of the average WoW player (it's very low, dregs of gaming society - trust me on that) without even a brief chat to see if they're polite (or even talk the language of the server), then I don't want to be a part of them.

That comes out as slightly ranty but I've seen what disruptive people can do to a guild. They'll troll the members just for fun. You can't trust anything they do or say. They'll clean out your guild bank. And all sorts of other nasty stuff. I don't know about Draenor but on The Maelstrom, there was a guild called something like "Cairne's Cows". If one of those turned up in a group, the rest of the members would leave. It was that bad. I used to arrange raid groups surreptitiously so that if we had to take one, there would be only one member of Chaos AD in the group. (That was a fella called Rana who was actually pretty good - the rest were disruptive liars).

WoW's got a bit more friendly to the solo player since then though. There's more facilities in there for getting into random groups but even then, you see the dregs of the player base causing problems for the rest. I've not used the facility too much (intentionally) but saw plenty of frustration in guild chat from those who did.

WoW's an awesome game in terms of content but the players really drag it down.

Mind you. There are some awesome players out there and I'll close out with a few :

The Legendary Sandra - who retired from the game a few years ago. She drew a comment of "I like this one, can we keep her ?" to Sarai the Overqueen during our first MC raid after a schism in the raid organisation.
Overqueen - I've mentioned her up top there. She had the hard task of keeping Guildlink on track, it was never the same after she got drawn into the BC beta.
The original Mercs - the ones from work I mean, not the people who came in afterwards, some of who were responsible for tearing the guild apart (and then buggering off to a raiding guild).
All of the VR people

And I'm looking forward to helping the new guild through its adventures.