LoDBlog

LoD celebrated our 5^th birthday on Feb 22^nd 2010.  As part of the celebration I’d like to take a trip down memory lane and go year by year, recounting the trials and tribulations, lessons and achievements, wins and losses, and try to capture what has made this guild home for so many during the years.  Our achievements stand in stark contrast with our humble beginnings and my inexperience.  In fact, I often wonder how we ever made it out of the woods to evolve into a highly successful raiding guild.

Year 1 – 2005

Our story begins, as all good WoW stories do, in Goldshire. 

Scarlet Crusade was opened on Feb 22^nd 2005 as one of a handful of new RP servers.  I had originally started playing on Bleeding Hollow and was frustrated at falling behind the pace of most of the other players.  Back in Vanilla WoW, at least the early days, leveling was the game.  You were your level.  Your level gave you power.  It brought with it a sense of awe and wonder.  So starting on a new server, even in level with everyone else, was an attractive proposition.

Why Ladies of Destiny

RP servers have a shelf life.  As the server ages the number of people still engaging in RP falls off.  People become more interested in other aspects of the game… pvp, raiding, alting etc.  But on day one of a new RP server the role playing is alive and well.  I knew I wanted to start a guild of my own, the previous guild I was in on my old server was really poorly run and I figured since I had hit level 35 on my mage I pretty much knew everything I needed to know about WoW, right?

Tapping into the RPness of Scarlet Crusade was part of my plan to start.  Establishing Ladies of Destiny as a female toon online guild gave it an identity and theme, without being too exclusionary.  Little did I know that this rule would govern and mold the guild for the next three years, not to mention invite many interesting questions about its origins.

Recruitment

Okay, I promised Goldshire… and most of what I did to start the guild happened in Goldshire (mind out of the gutter please).  It was the #1 hot spot for finding new talent! (mind out of the… aww never mind) 

Here’s where my genius as a guild leader really becomes apparent.  When the server first started I employed the same type of recruitment that all new guilds use these days… the tried and true method of General and Trade channel spam…  God I hate myself.  I was a little bit obsessed with wanting to be a really large and influential guild on the server.  I had one main “rival” guild in my quest for  eing a big guild, The Red Hand, and I can’t count how many /who Red Hands I’d do a day, comparing their guild roster size to LoD’s.

Looking back I wonder what my guildies must have thought of their guild leader.  On the one hand you had a very specific theme and identity being established, with an RP base and a female toon only rule, which couldn’t possibly be the brain child of a guy.  On the other hand you had a megalomaniac guild leader using every trick in the book to gain members, creating imaginary and unreciprocated competition with other guilds for members, obsessed with size… total give away…  I am dumb.

So all that aside getting new members was imperative!  The coolest thing about a guild in Vanilla was having a tabard, right?  So the first thing I did was take donations from our earliest members and get a tabard asap.  This was a major recruiting tool!  Do not underestimate how important it was to have a colorful cover for the mish mash of gear you wear in those early levels.  Not to mention it gives you an identity as part of a group when everyone on the server is basically searching for a place to call home.

The other major recruiting tool was the fact that I was a tailor.  Tailors made bags.  Bags hold stuff.  People need to hold stuff.  It was that simple.  That first week I just sat in Goldshire every day, having guild members come to me and give me their linen to be made into bags.

The game used to be a whole lot simpler.  Bags and Tabards, shot-gun recruitment in the trade/general channels… this is how great guilds were formed.

A comedy of errors and luck in these first few years, as you will see.

Another interesting note about recruiting in those early days – As I mentioned earlier, level meant everything in WoW.  Any time you met someone that played WoW you’d ask two questions “Do you play Horde or Alliance?” and “What level are you?”, these questions were even more important than “What class are you?”  or “What kind of gear do you have?”.  So if a guild had a very high (omg level 40!) level player in these early days it was a mark of honor.  You’d root these people on in guild chat as they leveled.  They’d act as mascots, as figureheads of sorts.  “Oh LoD has a level 53 hunter!”

Unfortunately the types of players that sprinted out in front of everyone else when leveling turn out to be the anti-social misfits of our society.

So basically I was focused on recruiting as many people as possible, with almost zero requirements outside of being a female toon, and I was targeting a sub-section of WoW society that probably can’t play well with others.  This led to a few occasions of drama, which I’ve since stricken from my memory, and lots of guild defections as the high level players from all the different guilds banded together to form one doomed super guild of social misfits.

Whew, the early days.

Losing Guildies

I hate losing members.  As people leveled to 60 everyone started to identify what they wanted to spend their time doing.  With the release of Warsong Gulch some LoD members spent all of their time pvping and waiting in queue.  Other members tried to finish their dungeon sets from Strat and Scholo.  Still others, the best geared or perhaps the most connected of us would be invited to fill raids with larger guilds.  What I hated to have happen was X guild approach a guildie and offer them something that LoD couldn’t, a spot on a stable wsg team or an invite from a “serious” raiding guild.  The only way to stop this from happening was to provide these same opportunities for LoD members within the guild. 

It was an early lesson in how WoW works, those that provide the opportunities hold the power in most any situation.  This rule would play out a few times during LoD’s history.

Raiding

LoD sort of missed the boat in terms of early MC raiding, in fact only a few guilds on the server even zoned into MC when it first came out.  What really defined LoD and what it was to become was Zul Gurub.

Blizzard’s first twenty person instance came along just in time to see many of us finishing our dungeon sets and looking for a challenge.  I remember forming up to raid ZG four or five nights a week.  That wasn’t because we were hardcore and clearing the instance or anything, in fact it was the opposite.  We were hardcore casuals that targeted a boss or two each night.  We’d work on a boss for a few nights in a row before downing him.  Some bosses we spent weeks working on!

We also didn’t raid with entire LoD groups at this time.  We probably pugged a good half of the group, which allowed us to make some fantastic friends along the way.  Unlike most pugs we’d try to invite the same people back each night, eventually forming a semi-regular group which just zoned into ZG every night and had a blast.  We met Pungs, Ning-nings, Eclypses, Darrecks, Wolvis, Faranons, Muttonboys, Jaedes, and Dineas.  I think a lot of people enjoyed raiding with us because we were fun and fair when running raids.

ZG really turned us into a guild in the true sense of the word.  Rather than just adding a green chat channel, being in LoD finally meant that you were a part of something.  For the first time we were working together on difficult encounters as a team.  Seeing someone else get a drop was almost as rewarding as getting one of your own.  Everyone was chatting on vent (somehow we were almost half women, for those wondering) and having a blast.

MMOs require a certain dedication.  Some people can motivate themselves by world rank or gear.  For most others playing the game means enjoying time with friends.  Many people hit a wall in MMOs and there is a critical point where they need to find a group to become a part of or else they just quit and move onto the next game.  I know for many of us ZG raiding was the time period where our interest in the game and each other took hold.  Those few months of raiding are probably responsible for more current WoW addicts than we’d like to take credit for.

ZG was also the instance where we were introduced to some of the simple responsibilities which come from running a raid.  How do we assign loot to a group of people that may vary each night?  How do we give away bijous or coins so that people can get the items they need?  Which bosses do we focus on?  Who do we invite?

It was all a grand experiment and for the most part we did a great job.  People were understanding if something didn’t work right the first time.  It was the perfect way to ease into raiding and establish a group of people that liked spending time together.

There’s more that happened in that first year… an early alliance with Dark Heaven… and from that an eventual alliance with The Fel Watch and Twilights Legacy.  Those stories play a bigger part in 2006 so I’ll leave those for tomorrow.

For now I’m reminded of my high school motto Tenui Nec Dimittam, which means “Take hold and never let go”.  I think these early days of LoD and ZG were the time when the game and guild took hold of many of us and has never let us go.

Humble beginnings…