Looking for SWTOR Guild

I haven’t played very much WoW lately. I started avoiding WoW in the spring, and I never quite returned, although I did have a brief episode of Extinction Burst where I did a bunch of server transfers and leveled a new character and ran around exploring areas of the game I had previously ignored and joined a new guild, all in an attempt to recapture whatever it was that kept me logging in. Didn’t work. I’ve definitely lost that loving feeling as far as WoW is concerned.

I haven’t given up on games. I’m still constructing Sims 3 houses, and I’m enjoying the Pets expansion, which has removed a lot of the worst features from the pets expansions in the two previous Sims games. Plus it has horsies, and you can not only race them, you can paint them any color you want. I’ve also been playing Angry Birds and Plants v. Zombies and Guitar Hero on my new iPhone, which I got basically to replace my dead Kindle and my dead camera. It does those things plus play games and make phone calls, so I approve. The games so far are your basic twitch; not sure if there will ever be a huge complex strategy and/or sandbox game I can play on my phone, but they’re fine for a few minutes of instant distraction when I’m waiting for my PC games to load.

I’ve already signed up for SWTOR, which starts next month, and so DarthBunnywabbit will be turning into a SWTOR blog, assuming I still feel like writing it. Right now I’m looking for a SWTOR guild. They put in a feature where you can join a guild before joining the actual game, so I posted in the recruiting forum and am currently weeding my way through tons of websites for guilds that responded. Hardcore guilds, multi-national guilds, fanfic writing guilds, overachiever guilds, roleplay guilds, guilds that formed in Everquest and guilds that formed yesterday.

One thing I have learned from my past gaming history – relying on random chance means you lose more often. I like being in a guild with people who like to communicate by typing. I like having guildies that don’t feel the need to sling assorted varieties of hate around like dogs marking trees. The random method pretty much guarantees I’ll wander into an enclave of the other type, so I’m pre-screening. I’m not quite going to turn into one of those sheltered orchids who balks at interaction outside the circle of protection, or at least I hope not. I do know that I’ll probably be investing some time in this new game, and I don’t want to spend that time watching crackers with low IQs exchange misspelled insults. I want a congenial-pub kind of environment where I can exchange wisecracks with people I know on a superficial level, so I’m going to go find a promising group to start out with rather than relying on the Fickle Fairy of Random Chance to assign me to a server full of witty repartee where I will magically find a random guild with no d-bags in it.

Actually, I learned a few things from my misspent years as a WoW addict. Navigating guild applications is only one of them. And here, I’ll give you the standard anti-guild applying rant: “Why should I have to apply to a guild, this makes it too much like a job, how artificial and unnatural, blah blah blah.” To which my informed answer is something like, well, of course you apply to a job. You’re going to be spending some time there. It’s a good idea to make sure you’re not going to be spending that time assembling aircraft engines when your real expertise is brain surgery. Sure, you could always go apply for a job that nearly everyone can do, such as preparing french fries. It’s going to suck if you were looking forward to spending lunch discussing brain surgery with other brain surgeons, however.

People sometimes get all quasi-spiritual about randomness – it’s destiny, karma, part of the divine plan, natural. But those same people don’t take random jobs and friends and spouses without going through a selection process. That’s why I’m checking out all these guild websites and crossing off ones with too few members, or too many typos, or unsubstantiated boasting, or d-bags saying d-baggy things in public with nobody telling them to dial it back.

Prowess is another consideration. Some of these prospective guilds are run by people with good track records at winning games. Others are run by people who brag about how they’re going to clean up all the server firsts yet don’t cite any kind of experience doing that. From my experience, every guild will brag internally about its awesomeness, regardless of the amount of fail actually present. That’s a human nature thing. We humans like to sort ourselves into little groups so we can discuss our superiority to all the other groups amongst ourselves. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger Effect, we are all above average (or at least, we perceive ourselves to be above average). Since all guilds claim to be way above average, distinguishing a guild that is pretty good at gaming from one that is pretty good at boasting can be a challenge.

Just by virtue of being in a guild, I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of discussion with my new guildies about how awesome we all are for having the good taste to be there, all of us being above-average together. The dark side of all this hyper competency involves talking smack about everybody else. WoW has made me very conscious of this tendency. If a group is focused too much on staying ahead of the guy behind them, rather than looking forward toward the finish line, you wind up with a cultish sort of experience, with lots of activity policing and loyalty tests and other BS. There’s a very subtle difference between “our guild will excel in this game” and “our guild will pwn all the other guilds in this game.” The first guild is more likely to have achievers in it. The second is more likely to be full of bullies with confidence issues.

I’m getting dangerously close to portraying myself as some kind of paragon of correct behavior, so I thought I’d mention my mean sense of humor. I’m not going to list all my virtuous achievements to reassure you that I’m not really a mean person. I’m occasionally mistaken for one though, especially when I’m laughing at something foul and distasteful. Plus I like to play villainous characters. Which brings us to the Sliding Scale of Virtual Morality.

I’m really tempted to go into some anecdotal experience here, about the disconnect between people who spend their days saving lives and/or being nice to people and their nights saying outrageously mean things in raid chat. And the other disconnect, between people who are constantly eager to denounce others for saying mean things … then you talk to them for a while and learn they’re pretty much jerks in real life. To further complicate matters, sometimes people are stone cold d-bags in real life but are friendly and cooperative in game. Or maybe they are partisans on some issue the pundits regularly paint in shades of black and white – politics, religion, and so on – whether they rant about it at every possible opportunity or whether they keep their mouths shut until directly challenged. It might even involve the degree to which intra-group insulting is tolerated – whether it’s an abrasive kind of place or one where everybody needs to be on their best Care Bear behavior at all times.

There are no clear lines on the SSVM. It basically involves walking a tightrope between “will the group laugh or report me for this joke?” and “will my comment to Player X about her lack of DPS cause her to log out in tears or laugh and tell me to shove it?” As someone who is even more addicted to wisecracks than gaming, understanding whether my mean sense of humor can be openly displayed in public is an important consideration. And at the same time, there are certain kinds of wisecracks that set my teeth on edge, such as endless repetition of “that’s what she said.” I want to be in a wisecracking guild, but it has to be the right kind of wisecracks.

I’m actually leaning toward this one guild that has a frequently-posting member who actually has a picture of himself, naked, in his signature file. It’s a pretty unflattering picture, and nothing NSFW is on display, and I laughed out loud the first time I saw it. It’s pretty clear there wouldn’t be a lot of walking-on-eggs-so-as-not-to-disturb-the-easily-disturbed in that guild.

Another guild made mention in their code of conduct that they do not tolerate racism … unless it is in-universe racism. Go ahead, call people nerfherders and refuse to allow droids in your drinking establishment all you want. That’s something I tend to really enjoy in virtual realities; bigotry toward alien races. It preserves all the amusing parts of being a bigot, adds the enjoyment of improvised acting, and has absolutely no negative repercussions whatsoever. Nobody is getting denied any jobs or scholarships or apartments or anything of tangible value. No little kids will be tormented on any playgrounds for physical characteristics outside their control. No bodily injury will be inflicted. Instead, humor will be enjoyed, and people will laugh. They may even reflect on how stupid it sounds when people take bigotry seriously.

It's going to be tough choosing, and the fact that so many of these SWTOR guilds have websites full of text and posts by people who clearly enjoy typing and reading and talking warms my heart. I think maybe I'll find the SWTOR crowd far more to my liking than the WoW playerbase.