This was
still in the early days of World of Warcraft, and most guilds, even the top ones
on the server, had a core of friends that had been playing together since the
beginning. Thousand Souls and TDC were no exceptions. Being friends is not a
bad thing, but in a guild based on friendship, and not a common goal in the
game, people tend to have different goals. Some want to raid hardcore, some
want to play socially, and some in the latter category have been in the guild
since day one, and some may even be officers. This was a massive problem for
our guilds, even more so on a young realm such as Darkspear, that had a
comparatively low population of actual old timers that raided hardcore in
Vanilla. When Darkspear opened, the game had already been out for 18 months,
and groups of friends that started playing when the realm opened were still
playing the game together.
I never was
a member of Thousand Souls, but from what I understand this was the case even
more so in Thousand Souls than in TDC. The founding members of the guild,
Saally and Angreyna being the most important ones, were still formally in
charge of the guild. However, they were not interested in leading raids or even
participating in them unless they wanted some loot. Loot was distributed in a
very selfish manner that didn’t benefit the guild. On one occasion, Saally did
outbid the main tank on the Tier 4 leggings. This wouldn’t have been so bad, if
it wasn’t for the fact that she was on one of her alts and the main tank was
still having some quest blues. In practice, though, the guild was led by
Orzolek, who administered the guild and led the raids. During one raid,
Angreyna apparently had a different view on the tactics, and presented it in a
blunt way. Orzolek told him to leave the raid, which he promptly did. That was
the turning point and after the raid Orzolek held a speech where he spoke about
everything wrong about Thousand Souls. He left the guild and formed Salvation,
and invited the players that weren’t part of the problem.
This
changed the playing field completely. Salvation started racking up kills in
Serpentshrine Cavern like crazy. I believe they even threatened Random
Violence's position as the top guild on the realm before they collapsed (I have
no insight in what happened on the Alliance side, so excuse me if you know more
about what happened at the time). TDC was shamefully left behind, and the whole
atmosphere in the guild took a turn for the worse, at least it did from my
point of view.
For
timeline purposes, I believe Thousand Souls were working on Magtheridon, Void
Reaver (both of which TDC had killed, while they had killed The Lurker Below,
which we hadn’t) and possibly some other boss in Serpentshrine Cavern
(Karathress?). I could be wrong about the specific bosses, though.
