Apologies to my guild

The first request in last Sunday's open thread was "you should tell us how your guild is doing this expansion compared to the last one". I would say they are doing great, they have downed 9 out of 12 bosses in Icecrown Citadel. [EDIT: I miscounted. In reality it is 10 out of 12.] Unfortunately that has very little to do with me. I raided with my guild through Naxxramas and at the start of Ulduar, but then didn't like WotLK raiding all that much, took a break, and now my guild is too far advanced for me. I never got to finish Ulduar, and now my guild's raid calendar is full of ICC runs with the occasional ToC thrown in. I still don't like WotLK raiding, and I'm not a huge fan of leeching as a tourist in a guild raid, so I don't sign up for guild raids any more.

I also played my paladin a lot this year, which is on a different faction and server than my guild. So I just occasionally log on a character who is guilded, and if the opportunity arises, I do a guild run to some heroic with them. Thus my interaction with my guild isn't very strong, and I would like to apologize for that to them. I still love you, guys! :) It is just that the interests and activities of the guild have diverged from mine.

I don't think that is anybody's fault, except maybe the fault of game design. Organizing raids is a heavy organizational burden, and thus practically every guild only organizes raids to the place where *most* people want to go, which is more often than not the highest place the guild has "progressed" to. It is simply not possible to accomodate the preferences of every single guild member who might have fallen behind. World of Warcraft doesn't really have much opportunity for players to interact with their guild beyond chat, raiding, and running heroics.

I do have hopes that my situation with my guild improves with Cataclysm. If all the announcements about the changes to raid healing come true, I should like raiding in Cataclysm much better than I liked WotLK raiding. And raid progress will "reset", so we'll all be interested in visiting the same raid dungeon. Thus I might be raiding with my guild again in the next expansion. Fortunately for me they are a rather generous and forgiving lot. Which is why I'm with them since the day I signed the guild charter on release day, over 5 years ago, with some breaks. And who knows, maybe the new guild progress system in Cataclysm will enable better interaction between players and their guilds even if they aren't at the same point of raid progress.