The Other Half.

Okay, today, instead of playing World of Warcraft Alliance side, with my guild and all of the stuff I've built up there, we played some Horde characters we had on another server.

We looked for a guild. We were mostly interested in another RP guild--since the server was an RP server, and we had characters there on purpose. Last night I was doing some searching online for info about RP guilds there, and we finally found one that wasn't horribly specific enough to disqualify our characters, but actually had active players. Today, we jumped through hoops. I understand that if people are willing to go through all sorts of things in order to get a guild invite, they're less likely to beg for stuff and then run. We posted in-character things on this guild's forums. We joined their out-of-character chat channel. We talked to their guild leader.

And we ran around, doing Horde quests and leveling a bit. It was fun. One of the main drawbacks I see to RPing on the Horde side of the game is most of the character races are more monstrous. I play humans because, well, it's fairly simple to figure them out. But when I actually spend time trying, it's not so bad playing a "Hordie." Most of the monstrous races are vaguely (or not) connected to a real-world ethnic or racial group, so if you start there, it's not really much harder than playing a "normal" human, as long as you do a bit of research.

This other server has an actual community of RP, which makes me think about our "home" server a bit differently. Do we have a community for RP? How hard would it be to advertise that a bit more, to get people involved? Beats the hell out of everyone running around, doing their own thing.

Heck, I may be a bit more picky in how my guild recruits. Because if we manage to get space on a Wiki built for the guilds of the server, then people will see us, read about us, decide we're awesome. And making people jump through hoops makes them even more determined to stick around.

After a couple of days of dealing with the Horde side of the game, I've learned a little, and maybe I'll bring some of it back. And maybe I'll keep playing my Horde characters a bit more often. I don't know if you can call it personal growth, but hey--not gonna be picky.

For the Horde.

~j