Leadership – Interview with RC’s Rummel and Anthis

After a Skype chat with Ravs about gaming and blogging we decided to write a twin piece about in-game leadership – specifically that required when leading a guild in SWTOR. She would focus on PvE guilds and me PvP. My very first thought was that I would love to get an interview with the GM of old Reality Check; a guild which gained it’s reputation on the server for putting up a fight against Nostrum Dolus. By going from occasionally queuing with unfavourable compositions Autumn 2012 to being a force to be reckoned with on TOFN by mid 2013 RC managed to establish themselves in the top tier bracket. With 60+ members, a lot of which were extremely strong minded, stubborn individuals, how does one manage the guild and keep it together?

Since the removal of 8v8 warzones the guild has unfortunately been mostly inactive. Being new to the game this interview would be especially interesting to me since I was not around at the time of ranked 8v8. Getting it however was not easy, I had to use all my powers of persuasion, but luckily for me I somehow tend to get what I want in the end. Rummel, GM of RC, finally agreed to conduct the interview with me under the condition that his friend, confidant and Co-GM Anthis could join – a condition I was happy to agree to.

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“Rules of conduct” and Ranked

As a part of our theme week focusing on SWTOR and Ranked PvP previous to patch 2.0, I decided to write a piece about the rules that were agreed upon back in the beginning of year 2013. Anthis from Reality Check and Mylex from TWATS were two of the people present at the meeting held setting the terms of this agreement. Last Friday I brought them both on the GD TS hoping to find out more.

Mylex begins by telling me that before the server transfers between Nightmare Lands and TRE there was some but not much in terms of ranked activity on TRE. When the server merges happened the best team on TRE was LotD and on Nightmare Lands it was Nostrum Dolus. Mylex continues to explain that LotD didn’t do that well against ND in those first few days of queuing and subsequently over a period of time fell apart. A few of their better players moved to ToFN for a time. Eventually RC started queuing but up until then the only other regular teams were ND and TWATS.

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8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 2

To read part 1 of this article follow this link

By October or November 2012 the server had two regular teams in TWATs and Nostrum and some new semi-regular teams in Spaceballs, Dxun, Drop it like it’s Hoth and the first version of Reality Check.

Now, these guys started queuing of their own accord, either for the first time or as a return to action, but they benefited from coming in to an environment that had lost a lot of it’s toxicity. For that change in atmosphere to have taken place I clearly could not be the only person reaching out and building bridges. On the forums, where every word would be analysed and the fuse leading to the drama-bomb sat ready to be lit, an interesting thing started to happen. Unprompted, someone from each team would post each morning thanking the teams they had played the previous night and give hints as to the results, whilst being good losers and gracious winners. This in itself caught the eye of the guys in Group Three. When Group Three also got a sense of the positive and friendly atmosphere afforded to new teams, it became much easier for those guys to persuade the guildies to try some 8v8 ranked. They could, in good conscience, promise that they won’t get laughed it, that it will be fun and (because of the forums thread) they knew of people on both fleets that they could talk to about good times to queue etc.

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8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 (Why our server was better than yours)

Introduction:
Interested in the player involvement which SWTOR has always seemed to need to get ranked PvP off it’s feet I decided to ask Mylex to write us something about his own experiences on the subject. In the days of ranked 8v8 (despite heavy imbalance between classes and a shrinking PvP population on the server) Mylex and a few others made the competitive PvP scene a dynamic experience. This was done through tireless networking and forum activity. Here’s what happened!
-Noctua

8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 – Why our server was better than yours!

Okay, maybe not. But it was good and we went from virtually zero activity to 5-10 teams in the queue each day, which was unusual for the PVP servers and unheard of on the other PVE servers. It was also a great time to play on The Red Eclipse, but it was a long road to get that point.

And this is the story…

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GD’s first theme week!

I’m excited to announce GD’s first theme week which will start day after tomorrow on Monday the 13th. We will be focusing on SWTOR, specifically Ranked PvP previous to patch 2.0. Below is what you can expect to see this coming week.

Monday 13th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 1 (Why our server was better than yours) by Mylex
We are starting the week off by welcoming Mylex to the GD family with his first guest post. Interested in the player involvement needed to get ranked PvP in SWTOR off it’s feet I asked Mylex to share his experiences of ranked back in the days of 8v8.

Tuesday 14th: 8v8 Ranked on TRE Part 2 by Mylex
The end of Mylex story as well as some advice to anyone looking to try to make competitive PvP happen.

Thursday 16th: “Rules of conduct” and Ranked by Noctua
January 26th, 2013 members from RC, TWATS and ND held a meeting agreeing upon a list of rules that would improve the state of PvP which was suffering from heavy imbalance between classes. Yesterday I brought Mylex and Anthis to the GD TS and asked them questions about this occurrence. In this post we will go over what happened at the time as well as encourage a discussion about rules and agreements for ranked PvP in games like SWTOR.

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Can video games improve your resume?

In the past, I wrote about a tech startup called Knack on my blog which used video games as a means to test job readiness and streamline the hiring process. Like comic books long ago, video games are at an odd place. The industry makes billions, spans the globe, and continues to grow. More and more colleges are adding video game-related majors. Video games have even boomed as watchable entertainment, either through Twitch and YouTube or by having them broadcast on cable television as sporting events. Despite this, the perceived value of playing a video game remains in question, even when the skills a gamer might learn from doing so could easily transfer into real world success.

During my tenure in World of Warcraft, I raided on a schedule with my guild. As I was promoted up the ranks into a leadership role, raiding in WoW took on many attributes similar to a management position at a company, despite being something I did for fun and entertainment. I often handled training, I helped maintain and exemplify our community culture and behavior policies, and I sometimes had to discipline people. Raiding also required project management skills, both in the raids themselves or leading up to them.

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LEILANI AMOREY

I would really like to give a shout out to this artist I recently found!

Leilani Amorey is an artist and illustrator, living in the South of England. On Lei’s website she describes herself like this:
“I works hard and try not to take myself too seriously. I am also a hobbit, a blogger, a Tolkien fan, and a LOTRO player. Professionally I am an Online Community Manager and Illustrator , and I have spent the last 10 years working in gaming communities, making art, baking muffins, reading and collecting Tolkien’s books, and gaming (mainly in LOTRO and Landmark).”

If you like me have a weakness for water colours and all things Middle Earth then you should really have a look at the pictures below.

Anduin River

 

Dawn Down The Hill

“Once upon a time there lived a hobbit…just please, remember, what you read here is not the whole story. My life might look sometime like it’s all fairy tales and lovely ‘hobbity’  things, but fairy tales never work without trials, some sadness and a few tears every now and then. Despite that however, I’d rather prefer to show the bright side of things. So this is ‘me’ , a hobbit with the passion for drawing and painting the world of Middle-earth…and a fairy tale or two. – Lei”

The Hill - Hobbiton Across the Water

Here are some pictures from Lei’s “The Hobbit Project” which she is currently working on:

IMG_4876

IMG_5019 IMG_5021IMG_5020

You can find Leilani Amorey on twitter here. Also follow this link to go to the website to check out Leilani’s blog and other work!

collage

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Vizp

The raid that day was canceled, on very short notice. Quite rare. Somebody had an aunt’s birthday, something like that, announced that on the raid sheet in the morning and then others spontaneously decided they had better things to do as well. Vizp didn’t know this, he was on time, – ten minutes early – , and exploded when he found out that nothing was going to happen.

He completely exploded.

People were trying to sooth him. You know, an aunt’s birthday. Things happen.
‘Wtf, canceled,’ he started. ‘Do you even know what I canceled to be here? My girlfriend is in the hospital getting chemo. And I am here. For fucking nothing.’

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Social anxiety and WoW – Interview with Mipsy

I was always quite skeptical to the concept of so called “tweets” which rarely seemed to hold much meaning in their 140 characters. If you’ve read my blog posts you know that expressing deep meaning with just a few words was never an art I mastered. For the sake of the blog however I reluctantly resigned to my fate as a “twitter user”. I have now found that sometimes interesting things do surface, even on twitter. About two weeks ago something caught my attention.

Jun 21
Randomly reading an MMO Champ thread about raiding, just found out there’s an EU WoW guild specifically for people w/ social anxiety.

I instantly knew that I needed to get myself an interview with someone from this guild. It was too interesting to pass up. So I wrote the GM who was friendly and very helpful.

_________________________________________

Guild: Paranoid – GM: Mipsy
Server: Emerald Dream EU
Main faction: Alliance
Game: World of Warcraft

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On Paranoid’s website the following description is given of the guild:
“Paranoid is a guild for the socially awkward, the shy, the people who’d like to raid, but get a headache just thinking about all the things they could screw up. The people who type a message to someone who’s LFM in trade, then backspace, then type, backspace, type, stare at what they’ve written, backspace again and go quest on their own. And if they do press enter, they’re relieved if they get the reply: ‘Sorry, full.’

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+ Defense stats

Guild drama. It is bound to happen. It will happen. Expected or unexpected, in ever changing appearances. It can be entertaining, tiring, frustrating or hurtful. If you are there to witness it, that is.

My luck: drama happened, and I was not around. I picked up traces from different sides; a Death Knight (in the non op days) from the progression team, a good player, had been replaced. Due to his work, he couldn’t play certain months, but he had always kept his place. This time he came back and got kicked. A complete surprise.

Some said he got replaced because the other person was better. (Hard to believe.) Some said it was because he had offended the raid leader. And some speculated it was because he was better than the raid leader.

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