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.
