My guild? You're looking at it!
I'm just sharing my experiences with the community, and wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences.
So here I was, with my characters on a new server (in a manner of speaking) and merrily soloing and multiboxing. One problem-- constant guild invites anytime I stopped at a city, and sometimes even when I didn't. Funniest group invite moment? The time that someone /whispered my warlock to ask if she wanted to run Blood Furnace with a group. What was she doing at the time? You guessed it... running Blood Furnace with a group. Advice to people looking to form groups... check the location of anyone you are about to /whisper for an invite. Thanks. But, I digress...
The /whisper spam was becoming annoying. In part because it was often the same handful of players who would ask, day in and day out, for me to join their guild. I don't think it was a case of any of them being determined to recruit me, as much as it was that they simply spammed guild invites to anyone they saw without a guild tag. The character names would become a blur to them, so they'd wind up spamming people repeatedly. This was in addition to the guy who sent me a tell offering me his guild, because he was "tired of being a guild master." That one sounded so suspicious that even if I'd been interested, I'd have turned him down. Then there was the guy who wanted my level 80 hunter to join his guild. They had 20 people already, including several 70s, a 60 or two, and some 40s and 30s! Or the guy who followed my shaman halfway around the game world because he apparently wanted to draw out the request in a "20 questions" format, instead of just asking if I wanted to join his guild. For the record, the answer to the 20th question was "no."
(An aside: Does anyone really want to join a guild that recruits in this manner? It strikes me that most people who are unguilded fall into two categories-- they do not want to be in a guild, or they are constantly being kicked out for being a lousy guild member. Yeah, that's what I want to join, a guild made up of malcontents, loners, and troublemakers, run by someone with no standards. Am I being harsh? I tend to think that I am not. 'Spam recruiting' is the number one sign of a bad guild, IMO.)
Hrm, this is getting a bit long. Anyway, I decided to create a guild for the sole purpose of avoiding the constant guild invite spam. I figured it would also be useful for getting items to my auction alt character. Aside from that, I didn't really have any expectations or plans. I considered asking someone here to create five alt characters and help me form the guild, so as to avoid spamming others with guild invites and "help me make a guild" messages (yeah, I had a few of those as well, sigh). And then I figured, why not go whole hog? So I purchased five vanilla accounts and rolled up some alts annnd... tada! <Hugs> was born.
(Another aside: I had considered going for some cutesy theme name, and my first choice was <Pieces of Me>, which I thought was downright clever. But I imagined having to explain to people that no, I'm neither emo nor a big Ashley Simpson fan. I went through a few other choices, which I can't recall now. I also was considering a Lovecraft-inspired name, but figured that I'd be explaining THAT one as well. I finally went with the name of a friend's Everquest guild, which I thought would be a nice tribute of sorts. It is also a simple guild name that won't require any explanation. Still, a guild of female characters called <Dunsany's Doyennes> wouldn't have been too pretentious, would it? >.< )
To keep this from becoming too long, the end result is a guild bank with four tabs (which are already 85% full) and around 6,700 gold. It's been a pure godsend for organizing all of the stuff that was accumulating in the banks of the multiboxed characters, my other characters, and any bank and auction alts. There were one or two times when I was emptying a character's bank into the guild bank and realized that I had stacks upon stacks of an item I'd just bought at the AH in order to finish up a tradeskill level. Arrgh...
Since I've been leveling every tradeskill with my numerous characters, it's great to have one area to drop the materials that my gatherers collect so that the other characters can grab what they need. And my auction alt can now flip through the tabs and see if any of the items that would otherwise be collecting dust are a hot auction item lately. (The answer to that is YES, to the tune of about 1500 gold over the last four days!) This is very good, since there are four characters who will need at least a normal flying mount in just four levels, as well as the northrend flying skill seven levels after that. And if I want to get their fast flying mounts as well, I'm looking at around 27,600 gold. I am now just under 20,000 gold shy of that figure.
(Yet another aside: what's most surprising about that is the fact that when I figured out that I was still 21,000 gold short, my response was to shrug my shoulders and think "that's not so bad." WotLK has really rendered gold concerns moot. Around 3,500 of that 6,700 in the bank is the result of the hunter's post-80 questing and dailies, even though he has spent around 9,500 gold since level 70! And that's not counting the 2,500 gold I spent on my shaman when I got back to playing and installed the expac, or the 1,850 spent on guild bank tabs, or any other expenditures I've run up since I got back to playing. So after spending around 14,000-16,000 gold, I've got more than 6,700 gold and counting. Yeah, another 20,000 gold won't be a problem, especially when the group hits Northrend.)
Anyway, that's my excessively long post on forming a guild. Any thoughts, comments, or experience of your own?
