Dark Wolves

Dark Wolves had been on Lightbringer (which was later connected with Mazrigos), since April 2007, when it was first created. We've had members come and go, and come back again. We've had new members join us both from other realms and our own - often drawn to either our guild name, our website, or simply because they'd seen guild members regularly dashing around the realm.

However, since well before Shadowlands was launched, our realm had started leaking players. Some just stopped playing, others transferred to other realms. The amount of people joining our realm just couldn't keep up with the numbers leaving. Something had to be done. And Blizzard announced a fix. They were going to do more connections to solve the problem. We were all buoyed by this information, trusted in them, and held on. Other guilds on the realm, in the meantime, continued to lose members, or have break-ups, and we often benefitted from that. Keeping us strong and keeping us going.

Realm connections kept being announced, and then a new expansion, Shadowlands was getting closer, and people were returning, again we were doing okay, despite even more guilds on our realm closing their doors for the final time.

Realm connections started hitting issues, Blizzard's plan seemed to be faltering, and then suddenly no more realm connection announcements were made. Shadowlands arrived, and more people with it, and we soldiered on.

However, over time, as is normal with any expansion, people got bored again, stopped playing, there were less people around - the trickle of active players away from the realm became a flood. There were no more Mythic raiding guilds. Slowly, over time, there were less guilds raiding at all. And still there was a resolute wall of silence from Blizzard. "Suck it up" seemed to be the message of the day. Even though their preferred message was "we don't update when there are no updates".

A year after Shadowlands launched, more even, people still had hope that Blizzard would return to the issue of low population realms. Threads, hundreds of posts long, continued to be posted on their forums, pleading for information - anything to let them know that their confidence in Blizzard fixing the issue wasn't in vain. Yet still there was silence.

Our guild started feeling the pinch. New members were harder to find, current members were either getting bored and stopped playing (which is natural in every expansion) or simply left to join realms that had a higher population. Guild members started noticing issues such as being unable to create legendaries because there were no items on the auction house to help make them, whispers became shouts .. and we could ignore it no more.

We put out a brief poll, which seemed favourable to a move, but there were suggestions on Blizzard forums that there may be some developments incoming. Talks of free transfers on various Classic realms - would they then turn their attention back to retail? Talks of changing how realm character transfers worked - allowing bulk transfers at a discounted price. Perhaps they were taking note after all?

Again, more time past, very little happened. Classic realms still got their transfers, retail got nothing.

We did a more in-depth poll and found it was viable, and indeed wished for, from a lot members, to transfer the guild to another realm. So we started digging. Checking out realms posts for various realms, looking at population numbers, looking at population types, activity levels, etc.

Then Blizzard announced bulk character transfers were on their way. And with the launch of these, also a sale of these transfers. If we were going to go .. this was the time!

So we announced the move, organised the weekend for the move, warned people that it was happening, informed them of the sale. Collated information needed about the move, any restrictions, how to pay for transfers, etc. Then Blizzard pulled all of the guild services from the Blizzard Store. Suddenly, we were stymied. The guild was stuck. The guild members wanted a move, we'd done all the research, we'd checked the data, we were ready to go. But we couldn't.

We decided that we'd go anyway. Blizzard had confirmed that the guild services issue was a priority, they were working to resolve it, it wouldn't be long. So we'd create a temporary guild, get people moved over, take advantage of the sale before it ended, and then just transfer the guild in the next week or two, when it was once again possible.

The new realm is like a breath of fresh air. There are people everywhere, talking, helping each other, advertising services. The auction house is vibrant. But we're stuck across realms. Some people are in the new realm, some are reluctant to move until the guild moves. We're trying to organise raids across realm, but it's not working very well. We tried setting up a community in order to converse across realms, but that doesn't work properly either.

We're getting closer to the end of the character transfer sale, and still there is no word from Blizzard. They quickly fixed an issue around characters transferring to Role Playing realms, with updates daily, but there had been nothing on characters transferring following a guild transfer. Which they stated was why they'd pulled all guild transfers off the store.

Finally - the sale ends. Some people have bought their transfers, and eventually decide to make the jump anyway. Others haven't. We're a guild on two realms, with no home on either.

So the decision is made. Blizzard aren't going to act any time soon. We needed to be able to get our guild name on our new realm. We had so many social media sites and domain names, based on that guild name. We couldn't take the chance of losing it. So our options were either to create a new Dark Wolves guild temporarily, jump across to it, and hope that we could transfer the old one, at which point we would have to disband our temporary new guild, wait a month for the name to release, before transferring the old one and moving back in - or simply create a new Dark Wolves guild, and live with the fact that our old guild would remain on our old realm - a reminder of what was, and what could have been, had Blizzard been more respectful of it's players.

Based on the amount of admin already done, and aware that some guild members had already been reluctant to move the once from one realm to another, we felt that it wasn't really fair to have the possibility of moving yet again hanging over everyone. One has a bit of excitement to it, twice may be okay .. but doing it a third time, at some unknown time in the future, just seemed one step too far. After all - it's not the history that makes the guild great, it's the members in it.

So we created a new Dark Wolves guild. Got everyone decanted into it, and settled in. Or did our best to - it was nice, admittedly, to start getting loads of guild achievements again - but it felt a little weird because we already HAD those achievements. Then we got notification, around 2-3 weeks AFTER creating the new Dark Wolves guild, that guild transfers were available again.

After some pleading and negotiation with a GM, we managed to avoid the complications that might occur from trying to transfer the guild from the old realm, to the new realm where there was now a guild of the same name, by getting the "new" Dark Wolves renamed by the GM. We then transferred the original guild to the new realm and once again everyone had to pick up their alts, pack their suitcases and treck back to the newly transferred, original guild - hurrah!

This finally felt like home again. We had our guild back, all it's achievements and history, and we were on an active realm. It was all worth it in the end 😉