I joined XL about a month ago, when they were just taking their first steps into raiding. Around that time, they had come off the cuff of having done a shoddy MC run with another guild named Vexed. They were all having fun joking about how the gear distribution was messed up along the way and some classes ended up receiving gear that wasn’t entirely appropriate for their classes. Hubbcapps, a Troll Shaman, ended up rolling on the Sorcerous Dagger which pissed off a lot of caster DPS in Vexed.
XL has no recruiting standards. It’s basically an open spigot and everyone and anyone can invite anyone else. This happens often–the guild is very large! I joined shortly after I transferred to the server and was already level 60 with some pre-Raid BiS. They have a kind of “inner circle” of friends which I wasn’t immediately aware of beforehand, but later I discovered they’ll basically screw you over if it benefits them, no matter your contributions. I’ll get to that later…
I got to know some of these guys over the month and one of them even added me to friends in BattleNet. Jimmybeans, an Orc Rogue, who would often ask me to join UBRS or other endgame dungeons. We ran UBRS quite a few times and I thought we made a great stunlock combo for particular mobs.
One time we were doing UBRS and Jimmy asks me to let another Rogue, Rattlebones, have the Dal’Rend Main Hand weapon since he already had the Off-Hand weapon. I did so; I passed on my roll. To my surprise, the tank–Tarabara–rolls Need on it and says, “Okay, I’m duel-wield tank now!”
I whisper Jimmy later and he has nothing to say in response other than “We all saw.” Later on, I’m talking to Tarabara in Discord about it and he’s like, “Oh yeah, I feel bad about it. But we’ll totally do UBRS more…”
On a side note, I haven’t seen Rattlebones online much after this incident.
Anyway, a week or two later and we’re starting MC and doing endgame attunements. I’m well into getting attuned to Onyxia’s Lair and I even get lucky in LBRS and win all three stones for the Seal of Ascension! Life is good! Eventually, we achieve 7/8 MC and 1/1 Ony. I had the privilege of being part of XL’s first Onyia kill. I even recorded the fight and put it on YouTube for posterity.
The following week, our GM, Roflbawt, says he’s away on vacation and leaves a few officers in charge of our MC and Ony runs. I also happen to be unavailable on Wednesday in addition to Jimmybeans who had personal stuff he wanted to attend to. Nevertheless, XL manages to bring a mass of people into MC made up of a lot of newcomers who had gotten geared and attuned within the last two weeks.
So, Come Sunday (the day I wrote this) and we have a raid scheduled for 7:00PM, as it has been. Now, the call to raiding starts about thirty minutes prior. I come online at 6:00PM, an hour before the raid and am invited to do a quick UBRS run with Jimmy and some other guildies who are working on their attunement. We try to rush through the dungeon ASAP since we want to be ready at 6:30PM for invites.
After the UBRS run, I leave our UBRS group and wait for an invite. It doesn’t come. I whisper two of the officers, Fireball and Hobo. Neither one of them responds. I whisper Jimmy, asking him what’s up and he says he doesn’t know.
I go all the way out to Dustwallow Marsh and arrive at Onyxia’s Lair and see a few other guildies waiting outside. While there, I try whispering several of the officers and asking them for an invite. None of them respond to me.
Next thing I know, Fireball says 3 DPS slots need to be filled. He says this in /guild. This confuses the hell out of me. So, in guild chat, I say that I’ve been online since 6:00PM and then I whisper Fireball again. There was one other guildmember named Moofasa who was waiting outside the instance whom I mentioned was also waiting. Fireball doesn’t respond to me and he doesn’t send me an invite. However, Moofasa eventually enters the instance. So, this was direct confirmation to me that I was being blatantly ignored. Around 7:30, I’m still waiting outside Onyxia’s Lair and DBM notifies me that the guild has engaged the boss. So, I do an immediate /gquit.
I was with XL for about a month. One of the first things I did when I joined was help a Warrior farm a bunch of Devilsaurs for his gloves. Later I made his leggings for him. I made Devilsaur sets for three other people in the guild as well. Morever, I did several UBRS and LBRS runs to help folks with their attunements–in addition to supplying a Seal of Ascension for UBRS access. I was one of the first to be attuned to Onyxia’s Lair and I was part of the original group that took her down for the guild’s first time. I was one of about 3 other people in the guild with Finkle’s Skinner and I was the one elected to skin the Corehounds in MC. I was also one of the few who actually had a Seal of Ascension, which meant that many of our early UBRS runs were made possible because I was in the group.
And I don’t say any of this to stoke my own ego or my importance to the guild. Rather, I say all this because it was, at best, helpful and contributed in our overall progression. I did what I could given the tools I had, be it Devilsaur armor, Ironfeather armor, or Chimera leathers, etc. It doesn’t seem to have mattered now.
These same folks wouldn’t even spare a word when I ask them why they wouldn’t invite me just a week after we downed Onyxia for the first time. They very blatantly ignored me and wouldn’t even offer a simple nor respectful reason as to why. I whispered about four different people whom I had grouped with on many different occaisions and not a single one of them had the balls to tell me what was going on.
You know, I wish I could recommend the guild. I had a lot of good times with folks, but I’m afraid my experience will just follow others. The most disappointing part about all this is that Jimmybeans was a legit fun guy to hang with. I enjoyed my interactions with him right up until he put himself on DND sometime after I asked him what was going on and why none of the officers would respond to me. Way to stand on your laurels, buddy!
TL;DR
Don’t join XL. No matter what you contribute, you’ll eventually get thrown under the bus and these folks won’t even spare any few words telling you the reason why. The guild is large, but there’s a small circle of friends who are very childish and will use you to boost themselves and leave you out to dry once they’re done with you. And they won’t even tell you why.