Rebuild Complete

The Dambusters has transformed in a year. Almost the entire roster has been refreshed and so many new friendships have been formed that the guild just feels like it did at the start of Legion. It’s a testament to the way we operate that even tho 99% of the roster is of different players from the start of Legion, the actual community feels no different.

My rebuild is complete and I can look back on the summer reformation with great pride. We have a highly engaged memberbase who generally enjoy the game and I’m sure that’s in large part because of the guild they are with. There’s a saying in WoW I use a lot, “you play the game for it’s content but you stay for the friends” and that is so true.

The guild lost a great many people just over a year ago and went into hibernation as a sleeping giant. Since we reawakened, we have managed to build that community of friends that people stay in the game for. We all look forward to new content together and relish our time together in current content. Everything may not be perfect but we work hard as a guild and we care which is rare these days. I always say I can work with people who care too much, are passionate etc. but I cannot work with apathy. We foster caring behaviour which sometimes spills over but it’s far more interesting than having lots of people who aren’t particularly bothered.

The recent, rousing Dambusters Draw was brilliant and gave people a taste of what a fun thing that can be. The raiding has been fun and successful considering the company we now keep on the server rankings, especially given our relatively newly assembled status as a team. Come the next tier, I think we will shock some guilds with our good performance which looks to spring on from the raiding structure we have assembled.

Stonewrought raid team looks to be getting it’s long deserved separation so that it may be allowed to go it’s own way and hopefully flourish with Pixy volunteering to take interim charge while we search for a long term solution to it’s leadership situation. Ironwall will be able to release it’s usual Wednesday handbrake and burst through content without having to merge with Stonewrought. Although that has been fun, I think we all agree that in order for both teams to fulfil their potential, they have to have their own identity.

The ultimate testament to a good guild is to have people get to know us and then move from their main server to join us. We have had that recently and there are more following. While it’s particularly helpful right now for Ironwall raid team, this trend of people carrying out paid transfers to actually join The Dambusters has happened throughout the years at various levels. There are people here who paid to transfer from Xavius to Ragnaros and then also took the FCM from there to Grim Batol. That first move from Xavius came at a personal, real life financial cost to guild members in order to follow us from such a dead server onto the bigger Ragnaros where we really thrived before that server became unplayable for the Alliance.
Grim Batol is one of those servers that floats between high pop at expansion launch to medium and even touching into low at the worst times, but it always bounces back to high each new expansion. I like it because it’s peaceful enough to get stuff done during normal expansion time lines, exciting and busy during new content and yet always offers opportunities to smash horde players, or of course be beaten up by them. While that gets tiresome at times, I simply could not play on a PvE server because that exhilarating experience is lost and for me personally, it ruins the experience.

 Something I learned from our time at Ragnaros, avoiding log in queues is another real priority for me. The last thing I want as the leader of a relatively casual community guild is to give people that horrible moment of ‘oh damn, here I was just gonna log in and do a few things, I guess I won’t bother’ when faced with a 20 minute queue. That may be acceptable for high end raid guilds but it’s not really viable for us so we have to stick to the relatively reasonably sized servers where playtime is never curtailed during those peak times on a Wednesday and Thursday.

I am looking forward to the test of this guild as we enter the next tier of raid content later this month. With both teams sure to gain enthusiasm on the run up to Antorus, it will be really interesting to see the synergy of the guild continue and our competitiveness become heightened slightly. With 2 teams running simultaneously, I believe that will be our pinnacle as a guild and it can help us continue to breathe life into the community as more good players join us. I’ve always said that recruitment is the lifeblood of the guild and these days, that ethos is as true as ever. We lose players from the guild roster through natural wastage, people stop logging in for whatever reason and eventually find their characters guildless. Meanwhile, at the other end we are constantly bringing in fresh minds to join our cause and almost always the new players get an immediate and impactful sense that they have found something special.

I absolutely love it when we overwhelm a new Dambuster with rapturous welcome messages and that’s happening more and more. It’s a sign of how we operate when Ironwall are raiding, deep in raid thoughts yet we take a moment to welcome new players along with everybody else.

I hope that attitude never leaves us. It’s what makes us Dambusters!

/Salute