Breakfast Topic: Have you ever been abandoned by your game friends?
by Mike W. McVey 
Jul 4th 2011 at 8:00AM
I created a draenei hunter. All of my friends had been telling me how great the World of Warcraft was and how we could rule our realm! Well, I logged in, and no one was on. I learned all about the beauty of the Isles of Azuremyst and Bloodmyst. Having made it to level 15, I found that my friends had still never logged in.
I called my friends. They claimed that real life had invaded; a WoW killer was taking up their free time. They were tired with all the changes in the game. Before you knew it, I was level 40. Someone was kind and bought me my first mount. My friends had barely logged in for over two months. Honestly, they never really logged on again on my server. That was four years ago.
With all my friends leaving, I left WoW, too. About a month later, I logged back on and found a guild that was willing to teach people like me to raid. Because of the guild, I was able to make several new real-life friends. Though the guild eventually disbanded, I am still friends with several of my former guildies.
Over the past few months, much has been said about Rift, real life, and the changes in the game. Several people have abandoned their friends and guildies with little to no information on what happened. No one likes to be abandoned, least of all by their friends.
Have you ever been abandoned by your friends in WoW? How did you respond?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
exogenesis. Jul 4th 2011 8:08AM
Not really abandoned, but my "WoW group" was split apart by a particularly invasive and manipulative girl who managed to turn the blokes against each other due to their "desire" for her, and turned the girls against the blokes cos the girls could see what she was doing.
I still talk to most of the group, but we've never been together since.
scree Jul 4th 2011 10:43AM
Sounds simialr to something that happened in my guild. We kicked the girl from the guild and a lot of people left with her. After 6 months they woke up to what a manipulative bovine she was and are coming back now.
KrisseyB Jul 4th 2011 6:20PM
These girls make me angry. Very very angry. As an attractive female, who plays wow and raids and does arena, I've made it a point to be appreciated for my SKILL as a player and NOT because I have a nice rack. I work very hard to be respected, and bimbo's like this ruin it for all the women.
Allithus Jul 4th 2011 8:08AM
Well there was that one time when my friend who was also out gm abandoned the guild and quit the game
Tim Jul 4th 2011 8:14AM
Made me sad. But they came back. They seem to do so every few months
Les Jul 4th 2011 8:21AM
All of my friends but one are gone.
I had around 10 IRL friends who played, but real life and/or other games have taken them all away.
I started playing because I liked the stories, and I will keep playing until that changes, but i do miss them.
Zerq Jul 4th 2011 8:31AM
I was apart of a guild that within a span of 2yrs, broke up about 4-5 times. After every break up there was always the same 6 of us that stayed. We all became good friends during that time. Unfortunatly after the last break up RL came into play for 1of us, and we didn't get to here or see much if him after that. The gm and his close friend made altar on a different server and joined a raiding guild. When I herd about this, I realized all I ever wanted or needed from a guild was one that would stay together, and has been together. I applied and was excepted into a guild that I'be been part of for over a year now, and I couldn't be happier. LLTS!!
Canadin Jul 4th 2011 10:09AM
when in undergrad I had a bunch of buddies ask me to come play WoW. We spent all sorts of time talking about best places to grind for gold to get the epic mount back when it cost an arm and a leg to get. So 2 of my buddies were lvl 60 before the rest of us started playing so we got to have a tonne of fun lvl'ing having a rogue and arms warrior as personal body guards through the ravages of Hillsbrad. Once we got scholomance back when it was a 10 man the 2 guys got bored of helping us and totally disappeared from playing. I had class with these guys and eventually it came out they had us all on block and weren't intersted in doing "noob" things like UBRS and scholo. Needless to say we felt a little jilted. They stopped talking to me and my roomie all together and were totally rude in person. A few months later we were in a guild that was heavily involved in opening AQ and were in a fairly successful 40-man raiding guild then came the sweetest part. The 2 elitists' guild came apart at the seams and were apping to our lowly "noob" guild for a spot... long story short we laugh about it now but they never got their spots :P
Elwoods Jul 4th 2011 9:22AM
Totally off topic:
WTS Return key.
MikeLive Jul 4th 2011 8:36AM
Just as we started getting a few bosses down after Cataclysm release, the guild and friends that I actually changed server and faction for (on three characters no less) all dropped ship for Rift. Admittedly they could've taken me, but I played Rift and it felt a heck of a lot like WoW, but not nearly as fun, so I figured why not play WoW?
It also made it difficult because I don't own a Windows computer (I need Unix-based for my workflow, so Mac is my choice), I can't dual boot as my computer always has code running in the background that I can't interrupt, and so I played in a virtual machine. Even though I put a full 4 GB of RAM, two of my four processors, and it abstracted up to DirectX 9c (so it was actual hardware video, not software emulated), I still had to run Rift on the lowest settings and once I was outside the instanced starting zones, performance went unplayable (less than 1 FPS).
Point of this rant is not to whine that I'm a Mac user was left behind - but that Trion Worlds made a huge mistake by doing so. The MMO market is huge, the Mac market is growing, and both have a large focus on casual consumers. The *only* MMO on Mac right now is WoW, so they literally have no competition on the platform. I've been waiting for some time for another dev to step up and provide actual competition, and thought that Trion could actually do it (based on the Rift previews), but alas, no dice.
End off topic rant.
mibu.work1 Jul 4th 2011 8:40AM
I have personally left a guild leader I'd been gaming and raiding with for years, partially because his leadership had waned, partially because we started to get on each other's nerves, and partially because I found out he was a neo-nazi.
Kook Jul 4th 2011 9:09AM
Wait... PARTIALLY because he was a neo-nazi?!
Some things are friendship enders by default. That's one of them.
Elyonis Jul 4th 2011 11:14AM
Hmmm so which one of those was the deal-breaker?
Draven Jul 4th 2011 8:41AM
I quit WoW a month after Cata launched as i was disgusted with the direction the game had taken...I have recently re-subbed after reading up on the 4.2 changes and it seems Cata has decimated my friends list built up since just before BC launch.
90% of them are gone - they were all there a month into Cata launch when i quit but it seem's left subsequently and don't seem to be coming back despite the 4.2 changes.
The guild i was in is dead in the water - only 3-4 logg on and that too very infrequently.
I intend to spend some time on WoW to see how far 4.2 suit's my play style and whether i can derive any enjoyment outta the game - if not I'll leave again.
But i do miss my friends....especially a Feral druid with whom my Warrior would Arena for the lulz..(everybody thought we were the standard Warr/Resto Druid combo until he would start clawing on their faces) lol... fun times.
blazenor Jul 4th 2011 9:10AM
"I quit WoW a month after Cata launched as i was disgusted with the direction the game had taken..."
What is this wrong direction people are talking about with Cata?
SamLowry Jul 4th 2011 9:57AM
You want specifics? How about a new guild system designed to crap all over small guilds. I'm the last one left since everyone else quit.
And no, they didn't quit to play some other flavor of the month. Cata changed the game so much that they quit playing online games entirely.
Noyou Jul 4th 2011 11:49AM
@SamLowry
Wait, wait, wait, wait. When Cata came out I had maybe 35-38 accounts in my guild and about 120-130 toons (tons of alts). Not too far into Cata we advanced to lvl 10. Currently we are approaching lvl 16 and have over 70 accounts and almost 200 toons. I would say the guild leveling system and the new Looking for Guild feature has helped define our guild as a leveling guild and given a home to many players. From that aspect Cata has been the best thing to happen to my little guild.
DarkWalker Jul 4th 2011 11:59AM
Seems like I'm mostly in the same situation. Left the game soon after Cataclysm; the GL asked if I could share my email in case the guild started raiding again and they needed their old tank back, and I complied.
I've never heard from them again, and looks like the guild's forum has been sitting idle since January or so. Also, apparently, the guild couldn't get any of the previous 2 10-man raiding group going, since their Armory page doesn't list any Cataclysm guild raiding achievement (though a few members are getting boss kills; seems like they are either pugging, or are filling vacant spots in other guild's runs).
As for why I've left:
- Heroic runs that could easily take a few hours (and a VERY LARGE chunk of patience) if pugged. Given that my schedule never allowed me to participate in guild Heroic runs, this made me unwilling to ever tank Heroic PUGs again until I'm sure Heroic PUGs are back to taking a more reasonable, MUCH lower time; the ICC heroics, for me, were WoW's pinnacle in fun to run Heroics.
- Absolutely linear questing. I simply couldn't stand to level another character, which completely killed my drive to level alts. While doing the new and remade quests once was actually fun, I sincerely think even the old, pre-cataclysm 1-60 quests had better replay value than Cataclysm's ones.
- Removal of the portals in Dalaran and Shattrath. Not because of the portals themselves, but because it signaled that the devs were willing to increase travel time in order to make the world feel larger (and to channel players away from old content and into the new content). I simply don't agree with any change that increases travel time.
- Archeology. Mix of travel time with random rewards. I hate both travel time and random rewards. To put it in context, I would rather re-level Fishing than level Archeology on my toons.
- Guild leveling. While at first I was too fixed on the perks, after a while I started to notice how much guild levels favored old and big guilds, exactly the kind of guild that is naturally more powerful by their very nature.
- Too harsh forum moderation. When I started monitoring the WoW forums at 15-minutes intervals, at the height of the Portals debacle (after the single, gigantic thread complaining about their removal was locked), I started noticing dozens of threads vanishing each day. The same repeated itself early on in Cataclysm with the complaints about Heroic difficulty. Smacked of censorship to me.
anuillae Jul 4th 2011 12:00PM
I'm not quite clear as to how Cataclysm changed *other* games?
SamLowry Jul 4th 2011 12:39PM
DarkWalker, you nailed all the reasons so many of us quit.
The removal of the portals seemed encapsulate Blizzard's new "Screw you" attitude. "We want everyone to enjoy the cities we redesigned", yeah, so they turned the two faction capitals you must bind in if you want to get anything done into lagtastic disasters. (We're an Alliance guild but my brother, the guild leader, created some Horde alts since he could send them heirlooms but he gave up on those alts first since Org was impossible to get around--1 fps on a good day.)
The decision to allow 5000 alts into a guild also was ridiculous. 500 was plenty, but no, let's force everyone to join megaguilds too big for anyone to actually know each other just for the awesome perks.
Raid pugs have disappeared as a result, and are now only going on within guilds.
And if you're wondering, our friends-n-family guild had 7 members in our glory days and we did just fine. None of us wanted to join hardcore raiding guilds since we actually had lives, but if we wanted to join a raid there were always plenty of pugs going on. Not anymore, thanks to Cata.