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A quick introduction before we jump in.  One day I was casually talking to a coworker about our favorite game experiences and I shared a few of my favorite raiding moments.  Jack got a paranoid look in his eye, gave a quick look around the room and started to tell me about his time as a GM.  I found the conversation, and his experiences in Vanilla WoW, very interesting so I decided to do an interview.  Hope you enjoy!

Plec: Before we get started, lets get a brief synopsis on your history in WoW. You spent a long time as a Guild Leader on the Llane server in Vanilla WoW? What type of guild did you start and what was being a guild leader like back in the time of 40 man raid content?

Jack: That’s right, a few friends and I founded the Irate Pirates on Llane the week the game opened. There was five or six of us to start and we had to bribe people on the bridge into Stormwind to sign our charter. I think we were paying something like 10 silver per signature because that is all we could afford. We didn’t really know what kind of guild we wanted to be, we didnt really have any clue what the end game would look like at that point. All we knew is that we wanted a guild that felt like a friendly place. We didnt put restrictions on levels or gear back then. The one rule we had was basically “don’t be a dick”.

Ultimately this lack of vision lead to problems later on. Were we a raiding guild or a casual guild? Did we require people to meet gear requirements or did we not? Did we use a point system for loot or were we just going to rely on people not to be greedy. In the end my desire to have a guild that didn’t have rules had to be thrown away. Without loot rules there are problems, without gear requirements there are problems, with our raid reservations there are problems. I think you could probably create a guild without rules today as long as you stuck to the 10 man content only. Beyond that size people start to become suspicious that the “leadership” is not listening to them or is sneaking behind their backs.

In the beginning we took everyone and anyone, half the guild at one point was all hunters. Competition to grow a guild back then was huge. Guilds were merging, expanding and exploding at a terrific pace back then. It was a point of pride with us to have our guild survive and be known on the server. Back then there was no cross-server raiding or pvp. You did everything with the community on your server. It was easy for people and guilds to become like minor celebrities back then. I remember when we picked up this gnome rogue named “Hatter” who was famed for his Horde killing ability on the fields of Hillsbrad. I felt like it was such a big deal for us, like our street cred went up.

Molten Core. Molten fucking Core. I still wake up screaming at night thinking I am trapped in that hell hole. Imagine trying to run a raid with 40 people with no Vent, no teamspeak, just chat windows. Trying to train people to shoot the same mob at the same time was a nightmare. Just trying to get 40 people to show up at the same time was impossible. It forced a lot of bloat into the guilds, you needed to pick up the assholes just to fill out your ranks. It was an almost impossible number of people to field. A lot of guilds died because they couldn’t get enough people together for a raid. For a very long time we couldn’t do it. We formed an “alliance” with two other guilds, Black Rook Hold and Tribal Moon Shiners so that our guilds could see the high end content. This system worked out for a few months but then ultimately exploded with accusations that our guild was using the system to our advantage. We were the largest of the three guilds and so the other guilds felt we were using our size to take unfair advantage of them. Sadly it became a self fulfilling prophecy, we took so much grief from them that when we did get big enough we left the alliance and went our own way. I’m not sure if those two guilds are still around but I do know that a lot of the leadership from both have since joined the Irate Pirates.

Plec: At what point did you throw your hands up in the air and say enough? Further, while you were running the guild and putting insane hours into organizing it, was there the sneaking thought in the back of your head that you couldn’t do this forever? I remember during my “Lost Year” when I was marginally employed and playing absurd amounts of WoW, I’d think, “There is absolutely no way I can play this much WoW for the foreseeable future.” I usually would drown that thought in a tidal wave of soda, chicken parm heroes and Karazan runs but the thought would always pop up again. Did you have any of these moments?

Jack: No, I was totally happy running my own little kingdom. I was putting in so many hours each day that I had little time for anything else and I was fine with that. I was so in love with the world and the challenges, I loved crafting the fate the of the guild and promoting it.

I did finally step down as leader after a year of this because I was going off to grad school and I knew there was no way I could put in the time that was needed to run the guild. Ultimately a guy named Klepto took over as the next guild leader (because a guy named Klepto is really who you want running things). I took more of a Godfather, leading from the shadows roll after that for the next two years. After grad school I quit the officer gig as well and now I am just a passive regular old guild member. The Pirates are on their third guild leader at this point, a guy named Loxon, who has done a wonderful job steering the ship the last few years.

I’m not sure if I would enjoy running a new guild at this point, so much of guild mechanics these days are run by conventional wisdom. I liked trying to just figure things out back then, trying to craft these crazy people into a working machine.

Plec: Is it a difficult role for you to go from living and breathing the game to taking a more casual backseat role? I know that when I took some time off at the end of TBC, I always had the sinking feeling that I was missing out on something. The same thing happened when I tried to raid causally in this expansion. I finally gave in to my anxieties and joined a much more hardcore raiding guild. I seem to approach WoW as an all or nothing affair.

Jack: I hung on for a very long time because I didn’t trust anyone else to run it as effectively as I had. Egotistical of me for sure, but I had invested so much energy into creating a successful guild that the thought of not having access to officer chat filled me with fear. What if the entire thing collapsed! All my work down the drain! I very much had a personal stake in the survival of the guild, it was a point of pride for me. There are very few guilds left from those early days, it still makes me happy to know that the house I built is still standing.

These day the guild seems to run pretty well, I can’t recall the last time there was any forum drama. Every now and again I will think about trying to make it back into the ranks of the leadership but the truth is they don’t need me. At this point I am the crazy old grandfather who talks about things in terms of “back in my day”.

I don’t worry too much about missing out on content. Our guild always manage to finish it all, we may not be the first to finish content but we get it done eventually.

There you have it.  Anyone else have any “fond” memories of being in a guild during Vanilla WoW?