Coming Home

“I think it’s time for you to come home,” she said.

On Friday it was hard to imagine that this would happen. I had done everything I could to distance myself from Red Royal Trading, to cut off ties, and just generally make it so I could not go back.

On Sunday night I rejoined Red Royal Trading. I rejoined as a Roleplayer, not as an Officer. I’m not sure if they would have let me be an officer but the point was moot because I didn’t want the job anymore.

The officers voted on whether to let me back in. I’m told that the vote was unanimously in favor. I’m not sure how many arms the guild leader had to twist to get that to happen; as a close friend for two and a half years I believe she would have invoked her guild leader prerogative to pull me back in regardless. I am told she had to twist no arms, and the welcome I received certainly suggested it. If nothing else the welcome back made me feel wanted, which is one of the things I felt like I needed in the first place.

Nature read me the riot act for a while, which I probably deserved. In the end we ended up back on good terms, mostly, which is a good thing. She has rapidly developed into an important friend in my game, and one of the best types of friends: someone who isn’t afraid to metaphorically slap you across the face if you’re acting like an idiot.

Dari and Syn welcomed me back with open arms. For Ani, I don’t think I was ever gone.

Monday night came guild RP, a time I used to dread. This time, however, Saxsy took charge of her relationship with Ani and took initiative to insert herself within the company. The gist of the matter is trade involving the formula for an improved arcane powder, known only to the mages in Eldre’thalas. RRT will start by purchasing the formula and selling it within Stormwind. More ambitiously, RRT will start a small processing plant within Feralas to create the stuff itself, hoping for a larger supply. Eventually, if all goes well, there will be larger facilities on the Eastern Kingdoms (I’m thinking Dun Morogh) to create massive quantities of the stuff with the intent of cornering the market on arcane powder.  Saxsy is in charge of this, and she dreams big. There will be hiccups along the way and I think they will be fun to RP. More importantly, it gives her a role other than “assistant to an unwanted villain” that had distanced her and made the RP not fun.

After guild RP, there was a continuation of A team’s run in Dragon Soul. The idea for it was that my raid team had gotten within 10% of downing Madness of Deathwing and they wanted to give it another shot. Anivile had been the mage for those attempts and she was no longer available. So, despite my actions, I was called in (allowed in?) and we were off.

There are some things as a raid group we don’t do as well as the more serious groups I have been in (most notably, Storm). For instance, RRT does not, in my mind, recover from wipes as quickly as my previous guilds, resulting in fewer possible attempts on a progression fight. Nor do I think RRT is especially good at identifying specific flaws in techniques; we are pretty much on our own when it comes to improving DPS and the like. But we have strengths, too, one I don’t think I fully appreciated until we went up against Madness. On Madness, I don’t think we tried the same exact strategy twice. We had tanks altering their cooldown usage each time. We had changes in time warp use. Every single wipe we discussed what went wrong and what might be done to make it better. Never did we just go again for the sake of going again. And ultimately we hit on a strategy that seemed like it would work. The very first time we tried the strategy, it did work. We won the fight, and we now have shiny titles.

I have at least two blog posts in my head about Madness of Deathwing, but I will save them for later. The takeaway is that I saw something there, and learned something there. RRT is not a conventional serious raiding guild. That does not mean that we don’t have pretty clever people running it.  We’re able to get surprisingly good results in a short matter of time. I’m proud to be a part of that, my idiotic statements in the past few weeks notwithstanding.

No loot dropped for Saxsy, but at this point I didn’t really care.

I was home. I was wanted. What I wanted, I had again.