It’s no secret that Cataclysm is going revamp Guilds by providing numerous improvements such as guild levels and guild talents. While these broad, sweeping changes will be very welcomed, there are a few very simple improvements that I would like to see implemented.
He goes by “X”…and all your noobs are belong to him. He is the guild master of Un Guilded, number one ranked guild on Silver Hand (www.guildox.com ), and raid leader for the Raiding Charter (raiding alliance) Blameroll . WoWGiggity was able to chat with X and pick his brain about his experience with WOW, with Un Guilded, and of course higher orders of computational reasoning. Catch the interview after the page break.
Despair, Inc.
Today at 3:42PM MST Punch & Pie, our raiding charter within Leftovers Raiding , was approved to host and run 25-Man raids. Considering that in our first few years we barely had the membership to run an all guild 5-man, this latest development is a little mind boggling. While we have the approval to run the new content, we certainly aren’t going to jump straight into 25-Man content. In fact, we may not ever fully make the transition.
The topic of 25-Man runs has been discussed by the guild a great deal. There are some very obvious benefits to making the transition. For example, we have consistently had more than 10 guild signups for our raids the past couple of months. This has lead to our members not always being able to raid every week and non-guild members never get to raid with us. While the latter part of that doesn’t bother me all too much, it does mean that the guild is somewhat isolated from fresh ideas and building good relationships with non-guild raiders. Not having a consistent pool of non-guild raiders to pull from has made certain raiding weeks difficult to properly fill out… which was essentially why we came to LO in the first place.
In addition to not having to turn away guild members from our raids, the transition would improve our overall gear quality, provide opportunities for new achievements and raid challenges. All of these are good things associated with the transition, so why the hesitation? Well, do we have the gear to make the transition? I think it would be safe to say that we’d be geared to run Naxx 25 or Uld 25… But now that the Lich King is within reach, re-visiting older content doesn’t sit too well with some of us. Also, is our guild leadership, namely me, ready to organize and run a 25-man raid? I have very little experience outside of 10-man raids and the additional complexities of a 25-man raid seem daunting.
So there it is… Potentially the next step in The Order of Copernicus’s evolution.
In some guilds the simple offering of 20 Alterac Swiss may be all that is needed to join the ranks, but not so in the Order of Copernicus. To join the vaunted ranks of our Guild you must meet a pretty stringent requirement… You must work with us, be related to one of our guild members, or be the personal friend of one of our members. This means that pretty much all of our guild members know each other personally. In fact there are only a few of us that don’t live reasonably close to each other. Sure our membership rules do allow for a Seven Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon kind of thing, so in theory we could eventually have a member that only one of us knows, but so far that has not happened… nor has Kevin Bacon joined our ranks.
The make up and close ties within our guild give us some pretty unique dynamics. The Center of Excellence, from where many of these musing first originated, is actually our lunch break. Not only does the Center of Excellence help us develop blog posts but it also has kept our members very familiar with the other’s classes and races. This has allowed even the most casual of us to leverage off of the knowledge of those of us that are more… involved. I believe this is a large reason of why we perform so well as a team in our raids. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, we know what to expect from the others on the team.
Another major impact of who we are is reduced drama. We deal with each other personally and professionally on a very regular basis. We are not anonymous players to each other, which brings with it a high level of respect when we interact with each other in game. When drama does occur, because it naturally does, it gets resolved quickly and usually without deadly fallout. Read the rest of this entry »
On 8/20/2009 the Order of Copernicus turned Four. That’s right, we’ve been bringing our special brand of awesome to the World of Warcraft for four years now. Our guild has come along way from our very humble beginnings four years ago when we were barely able to run a full 5-Man to now as we are successfully challenging the 10-Man raid content.
Pretty much since our beginning, ranks within our Guild have had no real meaning. Slowly over time that has been changing. Our first steps into Karazhan created our Raiding Rank the Champion. Our move to Leftovers created our Officer Rank the Commander and now we have another change, one that finally gives our ranks true meaning.
Before I get into what the change is, you might be wondering why we even need a change in the first place. To answer that I need to describe how we have been slotting raids and how we will continue to slot raids in the future as this is a change from what have been doing in the past. Previously, we have maintained that the Guild comes first in slotting our raids, this is no longer entirely the case. Now that we have a Charter to maintain slotting priority will no longer be given to Guild Members, but rather to our most active and prepared raiders with the charter. This is something that I have been struggling with for awhile now. To me it is not fair to slot a Guild member who has not been actively raiding with our Charter over a raider that has been. The Raider that has shown up week after week and helped us progress further into the end game has shown us loyalty and I intend to show them loyalty in return. As a result I have assigned essentially a rank to each of our raiders (both Guild and Non-Guild). That rank is based primarily on your sign ups, but preparedness and willingness to help are also factors. So without further procrastination here are the new ranks and their meanings.
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