In an effort to encourage you all to tell GD the brief story of how you found your main guild I here present to you my own story! This blog post was inspired by a reader commenting on my blog post “Social Identity and Guilds in MMORPGs“. After reading the comment I thought it would be interesting to read your stories so even though I’m really cagey when it comes to writing about myself I will try to start this off!
As mentioned before in “Language, pls! Gaming slang, offensive?“:
When I started playing SWTOR my past gaming experiences were very limited. I remember playing a bit of Sonic on my uncles old SEGA but at the time I must have been about nine years old. Over ten years later I ran into SWTOR. Since reading and writing has always been a passion of mine I found this new medium of storytelling fascinating. I eventually found the little button on the minimap which lead me into warzone queues and that was that. I no longer cared about story content, I could beat people up in warzones instead. Well, get beaten up mostly really but for some reason I still enjoyed it immensely.
This was when I started looking for guilds to join. I was new to the server, new to the game and abhorrently bad at my own class. I first joined a guild called “Shadow of the Republic“. I soon learnt what an interesting place the game can be for observing human behaviour and interactions. The brief time I spent with SotR was very drama filled, or so it seemed to me (to someone else it would probably have seemed really tame!) being unfamiliar with the notion of any type of feelings being spawned in an environment such as this. My time here was limited as I realised this was a heavy PvE focused guild. I had been promised to kill red in warzones. I also didn’t love the atmosphere on TS (sorry SotR!) it was imbued with seriousness and much focus was placed on the hierarchy of ranks within the guild. On I moved.
I ended up jumping guilds quite a bit after /gquitting SotR. I left the coming guilds either due to the fact that they were PvE focused or that drama erupted. I was really developing an allergy to silly in-game drama. So the coming six months or so I went through a number of guilds which I stayed in for different durations ranging from 12 hours to a few months but no longer than that. The guilds were “Alliance Templars“, “Elite Warlords” and “Fearless“. I also joined “Haribo Kids” eventually, and this was were I started to really enjoy being part of a guild. 100% PvP 100% of the time and 100% drama free! Yatta!
With no TS or website the feeling of belonging to a community within the guild was quite non existent but the guild chat was sometimes entertaining to read, there were people to queue with and it was completely void of in-game drama. It was a small and not very close knit guild however. It soon became inactive. When Haribo died I didn’t really want to join a new guild. I knew exactly what kind of guild I wanted but there wasn’t one around like it. So me and a friend made a new guild which would later be known as “ominous latin name“.
In the start it was only a handful of people. The person I created the guild with however shortly ended up no longer active in game. Luckily my soon to be close friend Popps, the scoundrel healer, joined me and we got working. We wanted a small guild with a close knit group of people to have fun with. The problem with finding good players was that I only wanted to accept the ones that also weren’t elitist and unfriendly. I wanted to find people that I really enjoyed playing with and hanging out with on TS. Popps told me straight off that it would be easy to keep the guild small then as skill and humility rarely come together. The minimum skill level I looked for was someone of the same competence as myself (which was really not a lot to ask, trust me!).
We eventually recruited a few members by luring them in with pretty heals and guards. We had many causal drinking nights, a lot of hilarious conversations on TS and many inside jokes. I remember those days in the beginning very fondly. Whenever someone new joined we’d have initiation nights. We would commit ourselves to making the newcomers wildly uncomfortable with personal questions of all sorts during initiation nights. Once in a bluemoon we’d get our hands dirty with PvE. We would then make sure we would have enough alcohol available to compensate for the lack of PvP action. The operation we did with ominous is still one of my favourite memories from SWTOR, but shh don’t tell anyone…
Well, all good things must come to an end. I lost my motivation to play for a while and the guild slowly died down after that. Since then the activity within the guild has gone up and down a bit. Regardless of what happens to ominous, say I was the only person left in the guild, I would never leave it. There are too many fond memories.
What is your story? What game did you find your home in? Did you jump from guild to guild like me or did your home become the first guild you joined? Tell us your story in the comments below!
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