A Look Back - How I Became a Fajita

So I guess this post has been a long time in coming. It's one that I've thought about several times, and one that I started a few times. I had been planning on writing it, but kids were interrupting me and then Stop wrote this and I don't know, it felt like it would be redundant.

I guess it's been several months now, so I can try again to write my own accounting of TTGF, the Fajitas* and how I found my in-game home.



I hadn't really had a place that I belonged in World of Warcraft for so very long. I started off playing with a couple of friends and then I dragged my husband into playing. In the early days there were guilds that I loved that crashed and burned. (I still miss my Pink Bunnies.) For a while I felt cursed because each guild I joined just didn't seem to last very long. When my husband got into raiding there was no place for me there, and it didn't really fit with my work schedule anyway. My main was a warrior and I'd never learned how to tank. I spent hours farming mats to contribute to the raid team, because I had nothing better to do. I was your go to girl for Stonescale Eels. I kind of resented the amount of time that he spent with raiding because it meant that we never played together anymore. All my other friends had quit and he didn't have the free time to do stuff with me, and he's never been into playing alts. Still I did get to go into some of the vanilla raids and do off-tank duties when they were on farm and short handed so it wasn't all bad.

But vanilla was a long time ago. I followed Jeff as he changed guilds once, maybe twice since then. My main characters changed, but always I favored alliance. Gnome warrior, mage, and rogue were the characters that got advanced to end game and learned their professions. We sat with our characters in a guild that was mostly dead towards the end of Wrath, came back briefly in Cataclysm and then was gone again. The guild note was changed a few weeks into Mists to mention what Guild Wars server to go to. The GM finally lost custody of the guild late last year, and it's still dead but at least not promoting a different game anymore.

By the time I was leveling my second 90 and tooting around in Throne of Thunder LFRs with my mage I was kind of tired of playing all by myself. Sometimes husband and I would queue together, but mostly he didn't play much or we just weren't playing the same hours. I did find us a new guild alliance side, but even they weren't terribly active and I still logged on to be the only member a lot of times. While he did eventually do a couple of raids with them, before the raid team fell apart, that was after I'd quit logging in alliance side.

I'd been chatting with several members of TTGF on twitter, including Orkchop(s) who had also moved from Kilrogg. I wanted to come play with these people that I liked talking to, but how to do you invite yourself to someone else's house? If you're me you just keep saying that you want fun people to play with until they invite you to come over and then you move in and never leave.... Okay, so you shouldn't do that in a real life house, that would be rude, but it worked for me in World of Warcraft.


TTGF is horde though, so in stepped Caffpow the goblin warlock. It was May 11th 2013 that I transferred Caffpow from Kilrogg to Drenden, and I have never even for one minute regretted that decision.

I don't think that when I joined TTGF that I really wanted to raid. What I wanted was to join these people that I liked from Twitter and who seemed to have so much fun together, and I wanted to not be alone playing WoW anymore. Guild chat does go a little quiet during raids, so I asked if I could sit in on vent, and it was worth it. These people are hilarious. I leveled to 90 and started gearing up in LFRs and just hanging out and getting to know everyone. The guild was quite small and I still found myself logging on to be alone a fair amount, but that was okay because even if they weren't in game they were on Twitter and they were actively raiding, so they'd log on at least twice a week regularly.

I started making sure to log in for raid times, because that's when people were on, and somewhere in there I realized I wished I could join them. This is what my friends were doing for fun, and I was missing out. One dark night it happened that TTGF was short a few people and rather than do nothing they asked for warm bodies to head into Jin'rokh for a quick farm run. I'd done the fight on LFR, it wasn't like I'd never been in the room before but suddenly I was so nervous. My hands were shaking and honestly I played terribly. I died before the first lightning storm, was rezzed, and died during that lightning storm and I was so mortified. They killed him, they really didn't need me after all, but I put in a sad showing for sure. A week or two later(?) I was invited to go again, and I almost didn't because I was afraid of a repeat and I didn't want everyone to hate me for sucking so bad. I don't even remember what happened that night. I know I did better, but I can't remember if I lived or not.

I went along just to fill in a few times, and then after a while, more often than not I was invited. I got better at it, and I got better gear, and I read online guides, and I got a lot of help from Krizhek and Cynwise. Then one day I realized that I was going to be really sad if I wasn't needed anymore. I never said anything, because I didn't join the guild to be a raider, I never app'd, they were under no obligation to keep me along. I always felt like a tag-a-long, but I tried hard and had so much fun that I just hoped that I'd get to keep doing it. How do you accidentally become a raider? These people are so wonderful and fun, that somehow I'm a raider. I'm not scared anymore, not really. I'm not always confident, but I know that even if I totally blow it my guild has my back.

Last night my hands were shaking for an entirely new reason, we finally beat Garrosh. While I had gone raiding during Throne of Thunder while it was current, it wasn't until Siege of Orgrimmar that I actually raided, full time real raiding, an entire current tier during progression. I had a suspicion that I confirmed later that night, we wiped on Garrosh exactly 100 times. The 101st pull, the one that we talk about mini pets and have a death before the first transition, the one with some not quite safe for work jokes made in phase 2, that's when everything clicked and we did it. What a trip.

This is one of my favorite tweets from today as we all chatted about killing Garrosh.

@walkstweets @thingwhatwows @_Rades well, we converted TK from "literally afraid to raid" to "downed endboss, is core raider" so: success
— Phil (@stoppableforce) January 9, 2014

TTGF is kind of not a tiny guild anymore, though I suppose it's still small by a lot of standards. We've had quite a few people wander over lately to play with us. Some people want to raid, others just want the company, and I hope they all find the happiness I have even if we aren't their cup of tea.

The past 8 months have been some of the most fun that I have ever had playing World of Warcraft, and I'm looking forward to much more. If I had a picture of me hugging all my guildies this is where I would put it, because that's how you do it. This will have to do. (photo credit to Rades)

Bwalo

*Courtesy of Narci (I think is where I first heard it) because Tsu Tain Guu Faitaa ... no too much. You get TTGF or Fajitas, sorry.