Monday, January 23, 2012

Guild Level 25 - Finally!

1-23-12

Wraith Flight on Demon Soul finally hit level 25 yesterday, with a big sigh of relief from me. I don't have to pay people anymore!! It's not about the gold, but I felt obligated to log in to see if I owed people money, as I didn't want people to have to wait forever to get paid, like the copycat guild Guild Bonus made them do.

Exactly how much gold did I pay out? Given that I leveled it to level 2 myself, that's 16.58 million gxp subtracted from the grand total of 845.67 million gxp, leaving 829.09 million gxp needed to get from level 2 to level 25. Grand total of contributions from all my toons = 150,107,791 subtracted from 845,670,000 = 695,562,209 guild xp that my guildies were paid for. At 1 gold per 1k guild xp, and allowing for people who didn't hit a payment mark, I probably paid out 695 THOUSAND gold over the past year.

In retrospect, I probably should have just paid someone for their high level guild, like E at the Altchronicles did, who I discovered from a comment on a BigBearButt post.

The difference between owning the guild, as opposed to just being a regular member and contributing, is that I can never ever be /gkicked. I am free to set policies, and I have faith that the Cash Flow perk, as well as the gold rewards for guild challenges, will eventually pay me back for the gold I've spent. I'd definitely have to /kick everyone if I decided to go on a long break, as you can be dethroned by members petitioning GM's if you've been offline for more than a month.

I don't know what it is, I'm just highly self-reliant (loner), probably from the influence of Diablo II, where I would buy items I wanted from players using my carefully hoarded gems (P Rubies ftw!), instead of doing countless Baal runs hoping that the items I wanted would drop. In WoW, I pay people to help the guild, instead of just hoping that they would, or having to run dungeons/BG's ad nauseum to benefit them, even when I didn't want to, so they'd stay in the guild.

Being a GM of a guild has drawbacks, you always have to be offering something, be it gold, dungeon runs, PvP, or raiding. If you offer nothing, people will leave.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

20 Days of...WoW Blogging Challenge - Day Two

Why did I start this blog?

I started this blog back in November of '08.....well, not really. Actually, I had a bunch of posts that I had written on my laptop beforehand, and started throwing them up there when I finally got around to making my blog. That's why there's about 50 posts within the first 3 days. The introduction was actually written a year before that. :)

Why do bloggers write? It's usually for a multitude of reasons, not just one. I had been reading BigRedKitty for a while beforehand, and BRK's sheer joie de vivre in playing his hunter was infectious. I've always enjoyed writing, and really like teaching/sharing my knowledge with others. The best way to learn is to teach, as by going over a subject from the ground up, you often learn surprising new things. I had noticed that nobody really talked about the Engineering profession, treating it like a bastard crafting profession, and that annoyed me. Ever since my 4th toon picked up the Engineering profession, I was hooked. I dropped max level herbalism on Bloodshrike to take it up, and haven't looked back. As of right now, 26 of my 30 toons are engineers, with only my priests and my mage Banesidhe not having the engineering skill (Priests have Levitate/Resurrection, Bane had too many hard to find enchanting/tailoring recipes to give up).

So, I started a blog with the intent of perhaps swaying people's opinions towards engineering, through the enthusiasm I showed for it in my posts. That's the reason for the blog title, as well as the picture.

The blog is also my release for stress, such as when my guild bank on Darrowmere got items ninja'd from it. As a Spider Robinson quote says, "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy." Just typing out my feelings and thoughts is a release in itself, and if people comment, that's a bonus.