Lonely...I'm So Lonely...

So here I am. Almost a week has passed since I've started playing WoW again – So what have I been doing? Well, I ran my dailies one day, and am surprised I remember the rotation. Um. I bought an egg from those pesky little hoppers. Uh....Oh! I also played with my UI a bit. And that's it.

I'm back on a day shift at work, which means I once again have time to play. I waited two months for this, and now that it's finally here, It made me realize why I didn't too much mind taking a break in the first place. Upon logging on for the first time in over a month, it dawned on me that Nimala was left exactly where I left her.

That is, unguilded with no friends.

When I first started WoW, it was to play with a real-life friend of mine. We never made it much past UBRS, and the guild was showing little in the way of improvement. I continued playing with my friend when I could, but I also helped found a guild on another server with some friends I had found on a webcomic. It was never a very serious guild, but I had a lot of fun playing with my friends and advertising the webcomic by the means of our little Angel Gnomes. Unfortunately, we didn't last much past the first expansion, but during our Bibblical journey, we came across another player who would turn out to become a good friend.

The guild he had was small, but close-knit. Everybody knew everybody; we were all friends. We expanded to the point where we had more than enough to run Karazhan, yet almost every member we recruited simply added to my list of people I considered friends. When our guild leader had to leave WoW for the military, the guild fell apart, and shortly thereafter I stopped playing for about a year.

Queue my new job! It was better than no job. And my co-workers were nerds. They'd talk about WoW all the time, and I was intrigued by the things they said about Wrath. Intrigue quickly grew into excitement, and I re-enabled my account, started fresh on a new server with an ickle little Draenei Shaman, and pounded my way to level 80 so I could play with my new friends.

It was around this time that I realized that one of my friends did little in the game BUT raid (and I wasn't nearly geared enough to join his guild) and the other was, as they say, “FOR THE HORDE!!!!1!!1!!1ONE!!!TWO?!!” and does not do well leveling in a party. I wasn't about to force another grind to 80, so I decided to gear up to raid with my Alliance buddy. It surprised me, however, when he mentioned at work one day that he was getting bored of raiding. He played less and less, and I knew my potential slot in his guild was getting farther and farther from attainable.

I found another guild for a short while that was progressing through ToC10, but sometime after my laptop broke and before my desktop arrived, the guild fell apart as well. This left me, for the first time since I started WoW, guildless.

For my tl;dnr audience, what I'm trying to say is that I'm very much a social gamer. I have the most fun in the game when I'm doing something with friends. I've played a good deal while unguilded, mostly grinding through dailies or working toward one achievement or another. It wasn't fun, when I look back on it, and I don't want to fall into that same pattern.

Now, here's the part where I QQ'd for a paragraph or two about how I no longer have real-life friends to play with, how I'll never find a guild as fun as my old guilds, which probably drove my standards too high for any potential new guilds, and how my healing is sub-par and "serious guilds aren't looking for sub-par".

Then I realized how much I hate whining. So I nixed the sobfest and sat back for a minute to inflect upon my predicament. If I no longer have friends I can play with, would it not make sense to simply make more friends that I CAN play with? If I really liked my old guilds, could I not simply look back on them with fond nostalgia, yet press onward, looking for a guild that still suits my desires? I know there are plenty. I just need to find them.

This is nothing more than an unexplored area of the game. Maybe I'll get some experience for discovering it.