Friends and the Game

There is a major problem that I have experienced many times during mystint as a WoW player (since Nov 06). I began playing with an even more casual attitude than I have now. I didn't have a single max-level character until about two weeks after patch 2.4 came out. I know right? What the hell is wrong with me? Since then, though, I have had some problems. The thing about a game, MMOs specifically is that they are people based. It doesn't matter if you say that the primary reason you play a game (any game) for the single player game; games are created under the assumption that, at some point, more than just one person will go into the doings of the game. Okay, that's probably incredibly too broad, but it's generally the truth. Sorry, back to WoW, the reason you're here.

I became a member of this guild, still my favorite guild I've ever been in, called Show us Your Crits. I know, classy, right? Well the purpose of the guild wasn't pvp or raiding or anything specifically. It was just a bunch of people that have been playing since the game's inception who wanted to play with friends. These people quickly became some of my best friends and I just couldn't stay away from the game, not to play necessarily, but to be able to talk to friends. I became frustrated though, I could tell that I had some modicum of talent in my class of choice and wanted to try a little something harder, so I ended up pugging many Kara runs. These runs were largely successful, and I soon had so many invites from various raiding guilds that my head was spinning. I didn't want to leave my some of my best friends, though, and here is my problem.

Should I stay with the people that have helped me enjoy my time on WoW?

OR

Should I seek greener pastures and ultimately more bad-ass lootz?

I suppose it looks like I'm probably priveleging one over the other, but I'm really not. This is a question that truly bothered me for months, because while I love my guild and I love the people and I love the things they were doing, it was filled with too many lazy people to actually progress anywhere (e.g. 5 hour Kara stints wiping on trash countless times). So I've thought to myself that this is probably a problem that keeps most casual players from starting to do the things that will actually help them enjoy the game.

The thing about being a casual player is that your allegiance ultimately goes to your life. Your children, your job, your spouse, or your real-life friends are all, in a major way, more important to you than the progression of a game. So you think that you don't have the time or the ability to commit to a regular progression/farming schedule. Therefore, you, the average casual player, tend to stick to a guild because you have friends in the guild. You see that leaving them would be likened to treason.

My answer to this question is: TAKE BOTH. Okay, I suppose you people haven't figured out how to clone your characters yet, but I'll come down to your level and pretend that I *can't*. Your character is not you. You are the person talking to those people not your character. I love the people I met in Crits (in fact, I have the guild leader's cellphone number and she is quickly becoming one of my best and closest friends), but I can just as easily keep in contact on other characters. Other characters which I am attempting to level so that I can start actually doing things with these guys again (I just despise levels 40-45 and 50-55). My main, though, transfered to a new server where I was gladly accepted, and have been raiding ever since. Kara, ZA, Gruul, Mag all down. And I'm fine with the fact that all I do is 10-mans and the easy 25-mans. It can become more than I can handle with just those.

Coming Soon: Things that excite me about WotLK!