A Public Service Announcement

For some time now, I have been deliberating as to whether or not I will continue blogging here at der Hexenmeister, and unfortunately I have now come to a decision – I will not.

While you can read about the issue in greater detail in my earlier post, the main problem is that for me, as well as many of you no doubt, this blog is intrinsically linked with World of Warcraft, a game and community with which I am no longer involved. I simply wouldn’t feel comfortable with changing the entire theme of the blog and associating the name with another topic, but I am likewise unhappy with the blog as it currently exists; in a rather subsistent state. The only real option that then remains is to wind things up and move on.

With that said, you can still rest assured about several things. Firstly, DHM will stay exactly where it is – while no new content will appear after I leave, I will retain ownership of the blog and make sure that all the existing content remains online and available. I’d like to think that at least some of the posts I’ve written might be interesting to someone in the future! Secondly, I will not be giving up blogging. I don’t know where, when, or on what topic, but I will continue to blog – and that will include more fictional writing, such as the continuation of my Memoirs series. More details will follow.

I won’t be finishing things off here immediately – there are one or two more posts I’d like to write yet – but it won’t be long. Stay tuned for more information, anyway.

Vel.

P.S. In case you hadn’t guessed, no Weekly Warlock Wind-Up this week.

The importance of being small

My guild, the Imperial Guardsmen, is an exceptionally small guild by most people’s standards.

It always has been no matter how much effort we’ve thrown into recruiting. On average, we’ve tended to have between 40 and 50 members at any given point in our lifetime since I took over as GM, and while we try as hard as we can, we simply can’t manage catch up to other guilds. Of course, this sometimes creates issues. Oftentimes, we get stuck with several people who have really good ideas for things to do, but we just don’t have the human resources to make it work. If things are implemented regardless, they go unappreciated, or fall flat due to lack of interest.

For example, we recently purchased a Ventrilo server for the guild to use, and thus far a total of five different people have used it. Four of them are officers. Another example would be our guild website, which is updated pretty frequently and provides news, forums and a messaging system for our guildies. At the time of writing, we have a total of seven people signed up to the site, and approximately three of them use it regularly. Similarly, we set up a guild Facebook page for anyone who preferred to communicate through that medium, and inevitably it has just four members and has essentially fallen into disuse. The final example I’ll mention is the guild bank; after investing (officers’) gold into buying tabs for it, it is used a couple of times a month and that, again, is mainly by the officers. Hardly the healthy trading situation we had hoped to create.