The Fall of Salvation

While the rest of our initial team was in Salvation, Dingus was left out of all of this. Persistently playing on, he made a reputation for himself as a reliable Rogue, even among the Salvation members. When he finally applied once again, a vast amount of Salvation members vouched for him, and Orzolek had to budge. For the first time, all of my original friends were in the same raiding guild. This didn't last long, though.

Excerpts from the ex-TDC channel (Beauty is Marlen's alt).

One day when I logged on, Leffe told me that something fishy was going on. The guild leader and the officers were emptying the guild bank. Leffe was the only one among us that was part of the in-group in Salvation. He had been a core raider for a long time in Thousand Souls and soon got asked if he wanted to transfer to another server along with some of the founding members of Salvation (and the contents of the guild bank). Having all his friends on Darkspear led him to decline, and he told us all about it in confidence. I think their intention was to transfer to a more populated realm, with a larger roster of experienced players. Since the chosen realm was Magtheridon, rumors soon spread that the guild they joined there was just a stepping stone in order to join Nihilum (for those that don’t know, Nihilum was the highest ranked guild in the world at the time).

The situation leading up to this was rather complex. The guild leader wanted the guild to be as progressed as possible, sometimes bordering stupidity according to some. If you raided in Salvation at the time, you could get the impression that we would rush a raid together and wipe all night on a boss, just so we could say we were working on that boss. We could wipe countless times with an undermanned raid, instead of just calling it a day.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there were people that were not core raiders, that didn’t have the DKP to get any tier 6 gear for a very long time. They didn’t get any gear from Serpentshrine Cavern or Tempest Keep either, since we had stopped doing them. Back then, there were no gear resets every content patch. When a new raid tier was released, you still had to gear up, starting in Karazhan. Very few of those intent on progression raids were interested in going to farm raids they had already done countless times to gear up people they didn’t know or care about. This may have been interpreted as elitists stubbornly refusing to do the old raids. We were a Black Temple guild now, and were simply too good for the lesser raids. But I am not sure everyone wanted to wipe for three hours in Black Temple with a 17-man raid either.

The workings behind the scenes of what happened next is still to this day not entirely clear. During the days leading up to the officers transferring, a lot of posts from disgruntled members were posted on the guild forum. This led to a lot of speeches and discussions, and the guild was reformed. We would stop with the pointless raids, and schedule at least one organized farm raid every reset. This wasn’t what everyone had been looking for, and it didn’t settle the issue, but at least it seemed to halt the escalation. Everything seemed to calm down. The next few raids went well, and we didn’t have to do the pointless wipes in Black Temple. Then, a few days later, a post was made on the forum that a member was trying to take over the guild. The person would be kicked from the guild, a lot of people would be upset, and many would leave the guild. The person turned out to be Galinda, our Priest class leader. And sure enough, a lot of core members did leave, among them Nubble, our Paladin class leader, and Memory. If these accusations were just a smoke screen ahead of the already planned transfer is anyone’s guess. From the information I managed to gather at the time, it seems to me that Orzolek recognized that the clique around Galinda had grown too powerful, especially in regards to loot distribution since it included several class leaders. There may have been some truth to that, but the reason why the whole conspiracy theory about the hostile takeover was concocted doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I don’t think anyone believed it, so it only served to spread confusion among the members. And Galinda making sure loot went to his friends isn’t worse than how many of the other officers handled loot. The final result of it all was that we were missing a lot of healers for progression raids, since the people that left were the best healers on the server.

In order to be able to raid at all, Spasi, Johnnydrama, and I changed roles to healers, and Alexvoid started raiding as a Holy Paladin. Still, we couldn’t possibly hope to progress in Black Temple, so we were back to farming. After a few days of failing to get a decent raid together, the events described above occurred. As soon as we got word of the guild leader and officers leaving the guild, we quickly got a group together to get ready for what would happen next. As soon as the news broke, everyone in the guild was distraught that the leaders had betrayed the guild. Spasi, Memory, and I quickly formed a new guild with Memory as guild master. We soon made Leffe and Dingus officers as well, and invited pretty much all Salvation members to our new guild, Play Out. Funny how Thousand Souls finally ended up in the hands of a splinter group from TDC.