It is an amazingly dreary day here in Tulsaland.  As we were going for our evening walk last night the thunderheads were rolling in, and it quickened our pace a bit hoping to make the loop before getting rained on.  Throughout the course of the night there were some extreme bouts of house rattling thunder.  So other than braving the rain to go grab some breakfast… this is the perfect kind of day to stay inside and hide.

Bring July Showers

As we slept apparently bad things were happening, and we awoke this morning to the sound of the bedroom window leaking again.  We thought this was past us… so it was a pretty major hit in the gut to hear it happening again.  Last year we put a new roof on the house after some “vandalism”… otherwise known as opportunists going up onto our roof and making hail damage.  After getting a reputable company to replace the roof the leak had stopped.  The thing is I think it has nothing to do with the roof.

We have a second floor deck, and I think somehow it is leaking in up there and running down the wall and finally finds its way in via the window.  This only seems to happen with particularly horizontal rains…  which sadly happens quite frequently in Oklahoma.  Ultimately we will need to call the roofers out… because while I don’t think they have anything to do with it… I also certainly have no clue how to fix it more permanently.  I figure the roofers are a good starting place.

So my solid sleep stopped about 5 am when after a really loud thunder boom we noticed the drip.  While we tried to ignore it… the drip drip drip permeated all attempts to sleep.  Eventually at one point I needed to run to the bathroom… and when I went to jiggle the handle my wife begged me not to.  Apparently the sound of the toilet running was greatly preferable to the sporadic dripping of the window.  Just add this to the long list of things that need to get taken care of soon.

The Guild Grows

Yesterday we added several more people to the ranks, and I have been amazed at just how smooth and organic the growth has been.  I think that is ultimately what killed the WoW Stalwart for me… the growth ceased to be organic… and with the changes in Cataclysm we diluted the overall culture of the guild too much by taking on far too many people.  I said the other day that our guild has a really strong culture, and with it a certain brand of ethics.  When we used to grow a person or two at a time… it was easy to keep these common shared values.

However when we enveloped all of the guilds that raided as a part of Duranub Raiding Company… we grew too large too fast.  I don’t necessarily feel like the size of a guild is what is critical… it is the rate of acquisition of new members that ends up causing problems.  If you double your size over night… you greatly damage your guilds common core.  So as we continue to grow I will have to be weary of this.  Always in the past I sought out like minded people and abducted them into my guild, and I think this method will work well going forward as well.

Simple Message

I think what also helps is that House Stalwart has a really simple message, and this is personified by our three simple rules.  It used to be two simple rules… but i added a third because I felt it added just the right flavor to the mix to help reinforce the shared values.

1 – To Be A Member, You Must Have a Member in Good Standing Vouch for You.

This is one of the most important tenants I think.  Essentially it assures that anyone that joins the guild is already grounded in the culture through at least one existing member.  Additionally it is explained that this is a two way street.  When you choose to sponsor someone, you are also putting your own reputation on the line.  If you do not feel like a person is a good fit for the guild, then simply do not invite them.  We have a social channel that is completely viable to let folks into without necessarily inviting them to the guild.

2 – Don’t Be A Dick

The universal rule of the internet… the Wheaton rule.  The phrasing is a little harsh but it is also fairly ubiquitous with internet culture.  Our interpretation covers pretty much everything.  Don’t be a dick anywhere at all.  Some guilds compartmentalize… so long as their members don’t start trouble in the guild they don’t care what they are doing in the greater gaming  community.  I care… I care deeply.  We expect our members to represent the guild well outside the bounds of guild chat.  It used to make my day when some random stranger would message me just to let me know how much they enjoyed grouping with a member of House Stalwart in a dungeon or out in the world.  The attitude of our members is the best recruitment poster we will ever have.

3 – Help Others, As Often As Possible

This is the newest rule but I feel it sets the tone for the shared values.  If someone needs help… help them if you can.  If a guild member is stuck on a quest, if a random stranger out in the world is about to die to a mob, if someone needs that one last widget to craft something epic…  help them out if you have the ability to do so.  This is not to say that you should bend over backwards and put yourself in harms way just so someone else can benefit from your pain.  But if it is in your power, and you have the ability to do so… lend a helping hand whenever you can.

Going Forward

The key is that wherever we are… my hope is that we continue to carry the same values.  The World of Warcraft guild has strayed a bit from the basic message, and it is in part because rule three never existed there.  So people are following rule 1 and 2 well, but without 3… and with me no longer tending the flock it felt like that shared ethic of helping others when they need it without thought of remuneration was lost.  My goal has always been to keep the rules super simple, because if you have to lift up the weight of your rule book in order to determine the correct course it means your rules will ultimately get discarded.

So far the Rift community has been pretty awesome, and the Rift guild feels like home with everyone pulling together for the greater good.  Here is hoping we can maintain this momentum and keep the three tenants in mind as we go forward.  I know we still have several people who have not been online since the move, and that we will be increasing our numbers slightly.  Additionally I am always open to awesome people joining our ranks.  I have always been one that cares far more about the character of the person… rather than the skill at performing some game related task.  I am completely fine if Stalwart is nothing but a social guild… but hopefully Rift provides us with more than enough group based activities that we can get together and hang out.

Wrapping Up

Well I didn’t really intend this to be a treatise on my guild believes… but it turned into that.  I have a grumpy cat trying hard to snuggle with me… but ending up moved regularly to type… so I am going to spend some time petting her after I wrap this up.  I hope you all have a good rest of the weekend… for me I am completely fine being “rainbound” of sorts… but i know we ultimately need to get out and go to the grocery store.  Here is hoping we have a break in the rain somewhere… and I have the “give a shit” to actually get up and around and go.

This morning has pretty much sucked.  Fairly late last night we found out that we were expected to be at my wife’s mothers at roughly 9 am this morning.  This is completely separate from a long list of errands we needed to run this morning.  As a result I am finally getting home and able to blog today… additionally as a result I am extremely grumpy from having my routine demolished so completely.  The most frustrating thing is… that we essentially spent 3 hours on the road for nothing at all.  The reason why we were going… could have been easily dealt with over the phone.  So now I am finally setting down to try and make a post that hopefully does not sound angry at the world.

As the Guild Turns

As stated the other night, after the vote of Rift Stalwarts, we decided to break out into our own guild.  Since Thursday night we have gathered up about 15 members with more that I know will be joining that just have not logged in yet.  It is really starting to feel like a real guild again.  Last night guild chat was relatively active, and while things still feel a bit under construction we have managed to push through to level 2 already.  It will be a long ways from having all the nifty perks that we might have had in previous guilds, but we have unlocked more or less the most important ones like mass rez and the ability to plant rally banners.

It is awesome getting everyone together under one roof again.  I still am not sure what directions we will take, but it finally feels like home.  Silent Strike folk have been extremely awesome about the path we chose, and Saleny the leader offered a warm welcome both as a comment on the blog yesterday, and as an email.  I am hoping that we can find ways to do some joint stuff with the Strike folks.  Right now there are only two of us with high level characters, but it would be cool to go do a night of hunt rifts or something soon.

Home Decor

As I said yesterday, I pretty much bankrupted myself personally to make sure the guild had a dimension and a vault.  Rae is a pretty amazing dimension decorator, and she has done some truly awesome things with her personal Moonshade pools instance.  When it came to our Stone Tavern Inn instance… I told her the sky was the limit… do whatever the hell she wanted.  She has delivered massively.  I spent most of the evening whittling away on the 500 planar mobs and 50 planar rifts guild quest.  Over the course of the two hours it took me to almost complete the quest… she had been completely quiet.

When I finally decided I needed to take a break and we were like 5 rifts away from finishing the quest… she just mentioned in passing over guild chat that she had done some work on the guild hall and that I should check it out.  So in the course of the hour or so time since i had last heard anything from her… she had completed this entire bar area from scratch.  I was completely floored… it looked amazing.  So much so that some of you may have seen it last night when I tweeted it.  Most of last night the dimension looked pretty much the same.. included this amazing bar and the start of a second story.

When I just logged into the guild hall to see if any more progress had been done I was greeted with a lot of changes.  The first picture I posted in this section shows the amazing entrance you are greeted with when you first log in… including a dragonbone entrance with glowing green eyes.  The main floor of the inn appears to be mostly done and now there is a candelabra reaching down from the new upper story.  Some work has been done up there but it is still pretty Spartan… though I am sure she has plans for that space as well.

Additionally she has done a lot of work to flesh out the market area.  Where before there was just the Greenscale balloon, now there are a bunch of tents and assorted goodies set up.  I walked around in this area for some time before realizing that there is now a secret path that goes up the waterfall with platforms up there.  I can’t wait to see what she has in store for that area.  Essentially she has taken what is a large but not expansive zone and made it feel much larger than it actually is.  It looks like someone also expanded the item limit for the guildhall by quite a bit, so she still has a ton of items left to play with.

I am still just floored by her talent with dimensions.  I am probably going to get in trouble for showing all these pictures when the guild hall is still in progress, but I think it looks awesome.  Totally a place we will all be proud to call our own.  I believe she is going to enter her own dimension in the contest that is going on.  It really looks amazing, and she is applying that same talent to making ours look extremely cool.  If you are over on Faeblight definitely check out her houses… on the character Caithris.  Additionally swing by our guild hall and check out the progress.  I swear she likely did not sleep last night considering just how much work was done from the time I logged at 11 pm until now.

Wrapping Up

I am still in a rather sour mood… so I am going to go kill things in Rift.  Will look forward to finally having all our people under one roof, so trying to catch them as they log in to coordinate guild invites.  Right now I just want to chill out for a few hours after the frustrating morning.  Hopefully all of you out there have had a better day than mine… and additionally that you have a great weekend.

This morning was the fourth morning in a row that I slept fine without any middle of the night panic attacks… so I feel like the whole walk before bed thing has been vested at this point.  Additionally it gets in a bit of exercise which is always good.  The only real negative is that now I have to start watching the clock and about 10-10:30 I need to be detached from whatever I am doing and get ready for the walk.  This is shortening total available time to play… but the actually getting sleep thing is not too shabby.

Big Changes

Over the last few weeks I have posted off and on about the dilemma my friends and I had with the guild we were in over on Deepwood.  Stalwart has a really strong guild identity and culture, and it has spanned multiple games without really diluting.  Over the years since I left WoW, we have tried to reside as part of another guild.  But each time we end up as a guild within a guild, and this always leads to a bit of discontent.  Essentially after nearly a decade of House Stalwart, we have all come to expect a specific set of guild norms… and when the guild we are in deviates from that…  folks feel uncomfortable.

Since leaving WoW I have pretty much harbor with various friends of mine that have guilds.  Then as the Stalwarts decide they want to join me in that game… I have tried to broker there way into that guild.  The problem is when a critical mass of players arrives there… we stop blending in.  As a result whether or not I intend to.. I fall back into the old “Guild Leader Bel” norms that they expect of me.  Regardless of if I am actually wearing the tin star or not…  I am treated as such by the Stalwarts.

The Outcast Misfits were extremely nice, but for none of the Stalwarts was that guild really home.  Part of this spawned from the fact that we were over on Deepwood… a non-rp server without the roleplaying culture we were used to.  When you are used to this more “evolved” culture you can only see “labiator” so many times before it breaks you… even worse when it was a member of your guild.  So after listening to grumblings for a bit, and the same thoughts going through my head… I decided to send out a question to the Stalwarts.

The Options

Yesterday I created a mailing list and BCC’d everyone that had been a member of House Stalwart that either was actively playing or showed interest in playing Rift.  In the email I explained the situation we were in and laid out three different options.  Essentially I did not want to force my friends down a path they did not want to go down.  Guild Leadership is not a democracy…  but I value the opinions of my friends and for a big change like this I wanted their full buy in if it was ever going to succeed.  I phrased the different paths as numbered options and asked for them to vote either by reply to the email or getting ahold of me some other way.  I used a Google spreadsheet to tabulate the results.

Option 1 – Stay With the Misfits

To be a fair question… we had to include essentially the control… the NO change option.  I didn’t really think anyone would want to go down this path, but essentially this option involved ignoring the things that bugged us and staying with the Misfits as is.  There were a lot of positives about this honestly.  They are an extremely active guild, and have regular raiding opportunities.  However the problem is that while they have a PG guild chat policy… they have no such thing for character names… and in their ranks there were more than a few offensive ones.

One of the Stalwarts plays with his son and daughter fairly regularly.  Another one is likely to let her daughter play now that the game is free to play.  None of them need to see names like “Vulvanatria”…  not that they would necessarily understand it.  Additionally it sticks in my craw a bit that the guild has a built in have and have-not’s setup.  There are raider ranks and non-raider ranks…  and while they never really treated the non-raiders as second class citizens it just bugs me that there is a division at all.  While they are extremely active… you pretty much have to be level 60 to join in any of the “reindeer games”.  The vast majority of the Stalwarts are far younger than that.

Option 2 – Move to Faeblight, Join Silent Strike

Faeblight is the defacto roleplaying server, so simply by hopping over to it we are changing to a lot of the social norms our guild expects.  Additionally it is likely the highest population server, and all the cross server channels reside there.  During Vanilla and Burning Crusade era World of Warcraft, House Stalwart was closely allied with the guild Silent Strike.  It was rare that we were running a raid or a dungeon without a decent mix of Strike folks in it.  In the course of my nomadic behavior over on Deepwood… I found out they had a pretty large and active contingency on Faeblight.

Elowynn/Saleny the leader of Silent Strike graciously offered us harbor in their guild, and quite honestly it would be a good home.  I have missed hanging out with the Silent Strike folks greatly over the years.  The guilds drifted apart when Stalwart became far more serious about raiding, but I have always tried to maintain a connection to Strike.  The only problem is that again… we would end up forming a guild within a guild like we always do.  Additionally merging as many people as we would be doing so… would put undue stress on their guild culture.  This was a good option but definitely had its issues as well.

Option 3 – Move to Faeblight, Form official House Stalwart

Moving to Faeblight gave us a lot of the cultural norms we were lacking over on Deepwood and the ability to actually report those heinous names.  Additionally most of the people that I know who are actively playing Rift… are doing so over on Faeblight.  So we have a built in community of shirt tail kin to draw from when we need to fill a group.  Elowynn was willing to introduce us to the HammerStrike folks and that would at least give us a foot in the door if members of Stalwart ended up wanting to raid eventually.  Finally we would actually have a home of our own after all these years of searching for one. 

I had been super reluctant to take this step after leaving World of Warcraft.  However recently I have come to the realization that it was never guild leadership that bothered me.  That is the part I am good at and enjoy, and did for almost a decade without issue.  It was the raid leadership part that killed me, caused me to burn out and almost quit the game.  I hate the herding cats aspect of raid leadership, and I simply never want to do that again.  Guild leadership… that is all the fun stuff, and mostly is just making sure people are feeling heard and help them when they have issues.

The Decision

This all honestly happened far sooner than I had ever intended.  I expected to throw out the email and have no real consensus until later this weekend.  However after a few hours a major pattern emerged, one that was essentially undeniable.  I got a total of 19 votes either through email or through some other means.  18 of the votes were for Option 3… one of them was for Option 2.  So with that clear a mandate, last night I went through the motions to prepare for creating a guild charter over Faeblight.  Once the Stalwart server channel had enough people, we went ahead and set things up.

As of last night House Stalwart on Faeblight is born again.. and I bankrupted myself buying the Stone Tavern Inn guild hall and our first vault page.  By the end of the night we had several people in guild, and hopefully over the weekend we can grab the rest of them.  It will be a long road to level the guild up to the point at which we get a lot of the same perks we had previously…  but it will be our home finally and not just a timeshare with someone else.

I could not deny the statement I kept hearing over and over from people. “I think everyone will feel more at home in an actual HS guild.”  And it is true honestly… I already feel more at home.  Communication is cross server and easy.. and I can still keep in touch with the people I joined Outcast Misfits with.  But it feels good to actually set down some roots in a game again.  The last two years have been good for me… but also very spastic.  I feel like I am jumping games on a weekly basis, never really developing the same kind of network I had with House Stalwart.

After my “MMO Must Haves” series of posts… I realized that the only game that actually has all of those things is Rift.  So I knew all along I guess which game I should be playing as my primary.  Now that House Stalwart exists in that game.. it feels all the more like home.  Hopefully over the coming weeks we can get things set up proper.  Rae has already started adding things to the guild Dimension.. she donated her awesome Greenscale balloon that can be seen in the picture above.  Thalen also donated a number of nifty things, and spent a good chunk of last night whittling down the current kill 500 planar mobs guild quest.  I will take awhile to get all the goodies… but it is ours.

Wrapping Up

Well I have an early meeting this morning so I need to get out of the house and on to work.  Hopefully you all have a great Friday, and a great weekend as well.  So far each day this week there has been a new crisis, and yesterday was no different.  My hope is that I can make it through today without anything breaking, or any customer screaming too loud about something.