The story of my guild in WoW

So it's been an interesting couple of months for me in WoW. My real life work started to finally get busy last month, so I haven't had much time to play the game itself. However between 5.4 dropping hard, gaining almost 30 item levels in around 5 hours of play in the Timeless Isle, and farming ghost iron ore to try and get my hands on the new Sky Golem mount, I've been busy with what little time I have had to play.

Soon..........

But the truth is, it hasn't been the game that has made my recent WoW time interesting, it's something that has happened with the guild I am/was in. I say am because I am still there, and I say was because in around 10 minutes I'm going to be typing /gquit into my chat window. Why? Pull up a chair children it's story time.

The guild that I have been part of basically since I started playing the game is the guild a real life friend of mine was a member of, and his housemate is the GM of said guild. Let's call him Stab. At some point in the last couple of months Stab was automatically flagged and account banned for botting (or at least that is what we thought he was banned for, but more on that later). His response was basically to say, "Well I've had a good run, I'm gonna quit and you guys can take over the guild."

As it turns out however, when I submitted a ticket to support with regards to removing my items from the guild bank, they game back with a strange response:

As the guild itself was apart of our investigation and was associated with an account that participated in illegal activities in game, we decided to remove access to the guild bank and to the guild leadership to anyone in the guild as we were unable to determine what was and was not illegally gained. I apologize. But we will not be able to recover anything from the guild.

Hmmm, not exactly the response we were expecting. As it turns out and with tickets submitted by both my friend and Stab, we were finally able to find out that Blizzard essentially thought that the Guild was being used for real money transactions (or RMT), and that Stab's actions on the auction house (he was basically owning the gem market on our server, and the guild bank was being used to store his wealth) had flagged him as some sort of gold farmer. He has written three emails about this to an email address the support line gave him with no response from Blizzard in the last month. Will we ever get a response? Who knows.

The whole ordeal has made me wary of trying to play the WoW auction house like I do the markets in Eve. If they suspect someone like Stab who was, granted, spending a lot of time updating his buy and sell orders on the auction house, how would they view someone like myself who spends far too much time farming mats and playing around on the markets compared to "normal gameplay". I have no idea how Blizzard would respond to a player like myself. The big problem with this is that it has made me less inclined to play over this last month, as crafting and the generation of huge sums of money is one of the main reasons I like MMOs such as WoW and Eve.

So as I sit in a dead guild pondering the story of the rise and fall of some fun times right at the beginning of my WoW journey, I wonder if my next guild will be as interesting. Chances are, I will never go through what I have with this guild, and I'm not entirely sure it was a bad thing to go through it now, rather than in a years time when I have amassed some more wealth. In any case, it's time to type that magic command and /gquit my way out of a piece of my WoW history.

As always my gaming brothers and sisters:

GAME ON!