My WoW guild has collapsed, and I'm not sure what to do about it

[echoreply]

The guild I've been playing with since I started, WoW, around when the Sunwell patch in Burning Crusade came out, has pretty much completely collapsed. Not due to drama, but just people getting busy, moving to other games, getting burned out, etc. I login now, and usually nobody is on. Ironically? As a last hurrah? We hit guild level 25 last week.

Our raid leader through BC and the first part of Wrath was a fine player, but not a very good raid leader. Once our new one took over pretty early into Wrath, things really took off for us. We would pretty reliably raid twice a week, and during the week we would help people get geared. There were always fights we had trouble with, but we mostly made steady progress through the content, and we did down the Lich King before Cataclysm came out.

Cataclysm has just not gone well for us. At the beginning I think the problem was that people had a hard time getting back into raiding after a few months break since "finishing" Wrath. We had trouble ever fielding 10 players, or even 8. We've not actually completed a single Cata raid. Not even since they've made them easier.

I miss raiding, and a big part of that was the social interaction with the other people in the guild. And without the raiding, there isn't much else for me to do in the game. I mean, I can only do the same thing over and over again until I'm pretty thoroughly bored of it.

So this is the thing, my wife and I want to keep playing, but it doesn't really have to be WoW. We don't want to server transfer into another guild, because we have an ecosystem of characters, and it would get expensive to transfer them all. On the other side, leveling a new character on a new server throws away the years of achievements and time we've put in on our mains. I keep thinking of it as a sunk cost economics problem.

We've also been thinking of Rift, or the not yet out Star Wars. Those are similar, in that we don't have a guild of friends we'll be playing with, but at least the leveling content will be new.

[Chronos]

Couldn't you find a new guild to join on the same server?

[echoreply]

Originally Posted by Chronos

Couldn't you find a new guild to join on the same server?

That would really be what I would prefer most, but all of the people who weren't in our guild that we sometimes raided with have also left. So, that leaves us with shopping ourselves to strangers. What I'd want to do would be to raid with some other guilds, and then if things worked out, and our guild stayed dead, to move over.

The problem is, my main is a melee dps, so not exactly in high demand. I'm a competent player, but at this point I'm undergeared for groups pushing Firelands stuff. That could easily be fixed by a few runs through the older raids, or the new 4.3 dungeons will probably fix it. My wife's main is at least a healer.

I guess I should start watching the forums (which I hadn't thought of until just now).

[GreenHell]

Play EVE online.

[Evil Captor]

I hear Lord of the Rings Online is pretty good and it's free.

[smiling bandit]

One big problem with WoW is that it attracts such a wide array of players. Hardcore, casual, young, old, and everything in between. They just can't keep up, content-wise.