I’m Insidez Ur Guild Website, Poachin Ur Memberz

Love in SW Inn

Say for example you forgot where the Stormwind reagent vendor is and so you go to the inn and run upstairs looking for the elusive vendor, don’t go charging into the bedrooms without knocking first. Nightelf roleplaying is everywhere.

Since I’ve been occupied with fixing up my guild’s web presence — y’know, front page, forums, extra doodads — let’s talk about guild websites.

My opinion is that a guild’s website has two audiences: guildmembers and the gaming public which includes potential applicants, rival guilds and nosey outsiders. Remembering our audiences, here’s five considerations for your guild’s web presence:

1. Where. There are hosted guild resources available nowadays (read: mostly free) — GuildPortal, for example, and the newly funded GuildCafe (you’re welcome, Tweety), and some games offer guild resources for their players like Sony’s Station Players. Alternatively, your guild can buy its own domain name through a registrar and purchase private hosting.

There are pros and cons to hosted and private solutions beyond the costs, but remember that whoever has admin rights or is paying the bills owns your guild’s public persona. If he or she is a flake, they can nuke your site in a matter of minutes and your guild’s history, messages, DKP, screenshots are all gone. Don’t think that can’t happen, it does ALL THE TIME.

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Congrats Douchebag!

I’d like to create a line of gaming greeting cards. There’s a real market for this!

Congrats Douchebag

Here’s just some of the possibilities:

The douchebag card line – congrats on avoiding a game ban, selling gold for $$$, making everyone’s /ignore list (except for the characters created in the last hour), pulling off a loot and scoot on UberGuild03. Plus, the classics: the loot ninja, the loot whore and turning cyber tricks for loot.

The whole imaginary love scene – congrats on imaginary girlfriend, imaginary fiance, imaginary wedding, the new cyber partner. Also, good luck on keeping it from the real wife (especially after she sees the greeting card in your email/guild boards.)

Just for your guildmates (or your rival guild’s members) – congrats on the promotion for no pay, repeated failing of a gear check (or intell check) mob, proving that human evolution is a myth, also, congrats on the /gkick, the guild hop, or guild poaching.

The key is authenticity. It’s not enough anymore to have a 1950s photo of a guy drinking a cup of shut the fuck up, the market needs authentic-looking flamebait with focused messages.

Even in my free time, I’m thinking of improved methods to best the internet other guy.

The School of Hard Knocks In Session

Sometimes, I enjoy watching the optimism of youth. Y’know, when I’ll warn someone in game to watch him or herself (and their virtual money) around the server jagoff and youth will tell me that I “just don’t know the server jagoff, he really is a nice person and a good player.” Or, that “Server jagoff USED to be a jagoff but now he’s changed.”

Ya. I love optimism like that because it means they’re about to get a lesson from the school of hard knocks.

Like this lesson. Remember several months ago I told you about the World of Warcraft rogue that stole the bank from the Unguildables guild? (Parts I and II) Briefly, this rogue kept applying to join our guild and we kept denying him, so he formed his own guild out of the server’s unguildable players — those prone to drama or ninja’ing — then he did a late-night server transfer with the guild bank and told the Unguildables he had cut a deal with my guild for all of the them to join all of us in happy raid land.

I may have also told you (maybe I didn’t though), he returned to our server on a level one noobie rogue WITH THE SAME NAME as his thief character and was chatting it up with the crowd in Ironforge.

This is how that night went down. A few of us are sitting around in Ironforge after the night’s 40-man raid, marveling that our guild can kill anything with some of the “talent” we have, and I see in /say his noobie rogue chatting with a couple of our guild (ALLEGEDLY) female players. Let’s say his rogue is named Beneful.

Me: /officer wtf. is that fucking beneful?
Officer channel: He transferred. Remember?? He stole that guild bank.
Me: /officer Well I’m looking right at him in Ironforge. Who the fuck else would name their character with that dumass name?
Officer channel: Wow. That’s ballsy.
Me: (to one of the females chatting with him) Is that fucking beneful?
Her: teehee ya. He made a level 1 to chat with people. He’s lonely on his new server.
Me thinks: Musta run out of money.

Ordinarily, in this situation I’d be on high alert to carefully scour any rogue applicant to keep his thieving ass out of the guild, but as we hadn’t tagged a new rogue since 2005, high alert seemed unwarranted.

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