Friendship, A rare drop?

Note: This is not a picture of the guildies...

A common misconception about gamers by non-gamers is that we are anti-social creatures. The reality is gamers are probably more connected to their friends than people who don't play games. I was recently telling a work colleague about how we recently visited our Warcraft Guild mates in Sydney. "Are you serious?" She asked, "Wouldn't they be weirdos?" I wasn't really surprised by this reaction as when we first went to meet them a few years back I thought the exact same thing...

Enter Vertigo, the Warcraft guild.

I was first introduced to the Vertigo crew through my wife. She was a member of their guild and they helped her gear up for raiding and sharpened her WoW skills. I was in a hardcore raiding guild at the time, the kind of guild that would yell at each other for making mistakes and loved the drama. As most angry screaming nerd guilds do, my guild disbanded, sending team mates over to different servers and teams. It was no big loss to me as I knew I would find another guild to take me in. Court suggested I join her guild and after a while I did. I was under the impression Vertigo was a "care bear" guild who didn't do much raiding. I was wrong. Our first raid I had my game face on, and immediately stuffed up a boss fight. Bracing myself for the aggro, I was surprised to find that the guild was really chilled out about it and after all the pressure was off, I found I was actually enjoying Warcraft again.

It turns out the guild was based in Sydney, and made up of a group of friends there with a few interstate members like my wife and I. Sabiduria, one of the guild's council members, suggested we all meet up for a guild lunch when he found out my wife and I were visiting Sydney. Court was excited... I was not. We packed our bags and headed for Sydney. Each minute the lunch loomed, I was growing more and more nervous.

So we rock up to Sydney and agree to meet the "guildies" at a restaurant in Darling Harbour. I had a lot of trepidation meeting these guys, would they be socially awkward, creating long silence at the lunch table? Or would I be the social pariah, the outcast of the group? Suddenly, this guy walks up to me and asks my wife and I "Are you Hiver and Maladiction?" (Our characters names) "I'm Apolais!" he said as we shook hands. The rest of the guildies turned up one by one shortly after that and I was surprised to see the guys were all "normal." They were just how they were online; polite, friendly, and easy to talk to. We had a blast being shown the sights of Sydney and catching up on the real life stories of our new friends. Sabiduria, led the group around much like he did in our epic Warcraft battles, taking shortcuts around town and before we knew it our guild day was over. It seemed funny to me about how little we talked of Warcraft and how much we found we had in common on other subjects. I wonder if other gaming teams got along so well...

We now visit them every year and even though we don't play much World of Warcraft, the friendships forged in the wars of Azeroth will last long after the servers go down.

Have you made great friends by meeting them in a video game? Sound off on our Facebook page to share your story.

-Sarge out!