New Beginnings on Auchindoun

A quite week in blog land doesn’t necessarily mean a quiet week in WOW. In fact this week has probably been one of the most eventful weeks in my guild’s history. You may or may not have read this in my blurb but I play on a server called Warsong. I had touched upon the history of Warsong in a previous post here which essentially summarized says that Warsong was a premier server during the release of WOW. It was the home to multiple cutting edge progression guilds however the server has struggled significantly with long queues and bad lag. This inevitably forced almost all guilds to transfer off and leave Warsong behind. Since then, Warsong’s population has become extremely unbalanced (15,000:5,000 Horde: Alliance) which doesn’t make it very pleasant. Worst of all, Warsong somehow managed to become the official server for Brazilians who play WOW. Over the years more and more Brazilians have come to Warsong to play and while I don’t have exact numbers on this, I would say at least 75% of the server now only speaks Portuguese. This essentially has limited our recruiting abilities (even though we are the #1 alliance guild) as the pool of recruits are only people who don’t speak english or people who really don’t have the commitment or will to raid to begin with.

As a result, as of yesterday, my guild Daybreak no longer resides on Warsong and we have made the transfer to a new server being Auchindoun. I for one have been strongly against server transfers as they are extremely dangerous (for a guild) and there are so many unknowns once you make it over. Some of the questions that had been running through my mind were:

• Will the whole guild transfer over?
• Free transfers are always to low pop servers, how will that affect us?
• Even if there are new folks looking for a new home, why did they leave their prior guild/server solo? Are they problematic players?
• I’m losing all my banks!!! (I happen to have 3 bank alts with 2 guild banks with 2 tabs each)
• Will a server transfer will address and fix the issues that exist regardless of what server we play on?

I was happy to see that by the time I logged on last night only 3 raid members were still left behind on Warsong and every other member had already transferred, a good start and a show of guild unity. We’ve also already had several new applicants (that speak english!) as it seems that we’re the most progressive alliance guild on the server now. While the recruitment pool is smaller, at least they all speak english which should allow us to fill our roster to the necessary means. In the end it seems like this is what I would call our last big push at staying progressive. Clearly there is a want to be but the server has been holding us back for some time now. With a busy summer and with people having IRL plans we’ve been forced to cancel raids with our limited 26 man raid roster.

Today we begin a new raid week on our new home, only time will tell if it was the right move but as it stands right now.

PS. The only downside to all this is some asshole level 64 blood elf mage has my name (Vallen) so I’ve had to rename myself. Lookout for Rarren on Auchindoun soon!