Bye Bye Bloodsky

Bloodsky, the most progressed raiding guild on Altar of Storms has shut down. Longtime readers will no doubt recall my brief 1 week stay as a member of Bloodsky.

There was a post made on our Realm Forum and much drama has ensued. It appears to have been a combination of events that led to the leadership of Bloodsky deciding to call it quits.

Summer had taken its toll on Bloodsky and several of their key members were decreasing their playtime either due to a growing lack of interest in the game or real life matters coming to the forefront.

Bloodsky also mentioned the difficulty of recruiting on our server. Altar of Storms is listed as a medium population server. Despite a large number of Kara guilds, we have very few raid guilds. Bloodsky was the only Sunwell guild, Alliance side, on our server. Dominion, my guild, was the only Tier 6 guild, along with Manus Domini. Manus Domini, and Mal Katai (my former guild) is making the transition from Tier 5 to Tier 6. Bloodsky was going to need transfers, or they would have had to start poaching players from those guilds. Para Bellum was a new guild, but I’m not sure where and what they are raiding. Bloodsky officer’s simply got tired of the near constant process of recruiting, gearing people up, and teaching them the fights.

While this does put Dominion as the most progressed guild, Alliance side, on our server, there was no celebrating last night. It is always sad to see another guild pull the plug on their raiding operations. Whatever you might have thought about Bloodsky, ultimately, they were just players, passionate about the same game we are.

We had a guild meeting to discuss Bloodsky’s end and how it was going to affect Dominion. Some of Bloodsky’s players are looking to transfer off, while others will invariably come knocking on the door of Dominion, Mal Katai, and Manus Domini.

There is a natural concern that these more progressed and better geared players will displace some of our current raiders. Let’s face facts, they were in Bloodsky because they enjoyed raiding and because they were at the Sunwell level, they outgear most of us.

Our Raid Leader tried her best to quell the concerns that people had. In truth, we are all dealing in the hypothetical because no one from Bloodsky has joined Dominion.

My biggest concern was that there might be a move to change our raid times. The biggest reason I left Bloodsky was that I couldn’t get on early enough to make their raids. I addressed the concern to the officers of Dominion and there is no plan to change our raid schedule. Whew!

How I feel, and what I said during our guild meeting is that it comes down to trusting our officers. Whatever disagreements I may have had with Vlad during my initial time in Dominion, I am convinced she will make the decisions based on what is best for the raid. She has brought us this far, and done an excellent job, giving of her time to help us get organized and keep us on track.

We simply have to trust her to try to do what is best for the raid. We have to trust that she will do the right thing. She likes every person in the raid and truly wants to do what is best for them. Some nights, she will have more raiders than slots, but other nights, like Monday, she might have more slots than Raiders. It’s a tough gig she’s got.

My biggest concern as I voiced my opinion was that people would think I was just trying to curry favor (suck up, kiss butt) from Vlad and the officers. That wasn’t the case. What I said was truly how I felt. Either we trust Vlad to make decisions that are best for all of us, or we don’t.

After the meeting we formed up our raid for Mount Hyjal. We were starting late so a full clear wasn’t going to be possible, but we did manage to one shot the first four bosses. We finally, after I don’t know how many weeks and weeks of kills got an Unbreakable Will to drop. I was really happy for Kee, our Main Tank Warrior.

The mood in the raid was fairly light and everyone seemed to be having a good time.