Former guild structure retired

Effective immediately, the by-laws, ranks and rules listed on the old guild forums are retired. By way of background, there have been many incarnations of structure the different leaderships of the guild have used in order to bring everyone the most satisfaction we can through the belonging we call colloquially “our guild”. The previous manifestation of said structure was created by those of us currently serving the guild in our capacity as officers and was created as a means to immediately assume the roles of officers and share the weight of leading the guild at a time of sudden change in order to prevent the guild closing its doors. However, the tenets upon which the structure was based were never fully realized and the by-laws were not given their full support nor exercise. Since then, the guild has prospered and returned to a healthy state and the former structure is obsolete and past its time.

The guild is currently structured in that traditional incarnation of a sole guild leader supported by active officers and the great people that make our guild such a wonderful and rewarding experience. We are evaluating whether to create a new home for our forums which would contain newly published rules; meanwhile, our traditions and culture continue to be in place and drive our behaviors: respect, fun and reliability.

Recruiting

In less than two weeks, we all have an opportunity to once again enjoy the wonders of leveling and gearing at end cap! As you level and gear to re-start raiding at level 85, your paths will cross with a myriad of types of players - some kind and some inconsiderate. We would like to attract and retain the respectful, kind and fun players! We encourage you to keep an active eye open for the kinds of players that you think we would enjoy spending hours with in raids and in vent, or just in general guild chat with. As always, the foundational characteristics of players we seek are respectful, fun and reliable.

Watch for players we should invite into the guild and let both them know and an officer know right away so that we can chat with them and get them into the guild before they get lost in the leveling shuffle.

Everyone in the guild has the power to recommend someone for a guild invitation. Sergeants and Officers can approach and invite players to join the guild.

Officers: Reminder to give potential new guild members your utmost attention if within your ability at the moment and to make a note in their Officer Note field as to who referred them. If at the moment, you cannot spend the requisite time to discuss the guild and themselves, set a time when you will both do so and follow up with the person making the referral.

On Comings and Goings

With the arrival of the Cataclysm expansion, we fully expect that long-time dormant players will return to the game - some of whom have their toons in our guild and some that do not. There will be all kinds of comings and goings. You should expect to see some people re-activate their accounts and stay in guild, and some will leave to be with friends that had departed in the past or been removed. Some re-activations will return to KOU from having left at a prior time. Active players may leave to be with old friends returning to the game and some will return to KOU for the same reasons.

Remember that just as re-activations will be people familiar to some and unknown to others, many of us will also be unfamiliar to them and some will be quite familiar. Our guild has changed significantly since the time when many players went inactive and has also stayed the same. Our structure and leadership has changed; our principles of respect, fun and reliability have not.

Changes of this magnitude can have unsettling effects and foster uncertainty. They are also opportunities to be times of great fun and reunions. Throughout all the comings and goings, KOU will be here and we wish everyone a happy holiday season and fun times during these cataclysmic changes!

We look forward to the exciting times ahead and to raiding the new content together.

Leveling: Pressures and Priorities to Get to 85

There are no pressures to race to 85. Enjoy the new leveling experience. The right time for you to arrive at level 85 is when you get to 85. We have long been a home and not a job and that is not being sundered during the cataclysm. Granted, we would like to take our place as an end game raiding guild on our server earlier rather than later and it would certainly be better to be amongst the first; however, we are not attempting to compete to be the first.

The priority toon to level is the one you want to level first. Our raid group will recruit whatever we are missing when we get there and take a look at who and what we have. Do not let your current role in our raid groups drive what you must prioritize to level to 85 first. Now is a perfectly well-timed point to completely switch out to something else if that is what you have been wanting to do! If we find that we have too many of one thing and too few of another, we will adjust, recruit and use raiding seat rotations if the lop-sided numbers so vastly exceed raiding group sizes (highly unlikely).

If I have to draw a line in the sand as to when should you be at 85 to get a relatively early jump start on raiding the new content, I would suggest that the last week of December typically offers a large amount of leisure time to people and that we are likely to see raiding begin at that time if it has not begun earlier.

If you know (or at least feel you know at this time) which role (tank, healer, melee dps, ranged dps) and which class you will want to enter raiding at 85 with, let us know as that allows us to improve our planning and target our recruiting better.

Have Friends that will Start WoW?

Blizzard is currently making it price-attractive to pick up WoW for new players (they have slashed prices on the original and BC to $5 each and slashed the price on Wrath to $10). Now is a great time to invite your friends to join WoW (and join our guild!). If you invite them by sending them a trial invitation, and afterwards they use the license numbers they get to move from Trial to full installation, you and they both get a month of free time and you get that snazzy two-seater rocket mount you see zipping around!

Already have the refer-a-friend mount on all of your toons and still have friends you’d like to invite to play the game? Let us know so that we can send them an invitation and we can share the refer-a-friend-mount love around the guild! Just mention in guild chat to us that you need someone to send a trial account invitation for the refer-a-friend program.

Gearing for Raids at Level 85

While the quest and instance rewards and drops will provide you ample “blues” (rare items) and prepare you for level-85 heroic 5-man instances, those drops will not equip you adequately for raiding the new level 85 raid content. The first priority, after learning your new spells etc at level 85, is to start running heroics with the guild. Running heroics with the guild will get you heroic blue gear and will increase our guild xp. You will need the heroic blue gear (not the regular blue gear) in order to get into raid instances and perform successfully.

Equipped with heroic blue gear, you will find a spot in our guild raid groups welcoming you! Depending on the number of raiders available in the first weeks, we will set how many and how large the raids are. By mid to late January, we should certainly have settled into who is raiding when and with whom - which in effect forms the base rosters of the level 85 raid groups. While each raid group will drive its own culture and rhythm, we will have at least one raid group that has a more hard core than casual approach and likely one raid group that is more laid back. This will give you the choice of how often and how hard you want to raid!

We have selected our Horde home: Mal’Ganis Server!

After intensive analysis, many hours test-driving servers (including server transfers) and polling guild members also testing servers, we chose Mal’Ganis server as the home of our Horde toons. For the Horde!

We had to select a different server in order to satisfy the need that players needed to free up character slots on Alleria server. We selected Mal’Ganis because it exceeded or was at the top of the category in all of the categories assessed - and because it made significant impressions on all of our guild members that test-drove the server.

There are at least ten of our players that have already moved characters to that server or started new characters there. For today, we are congregating in a guild I picked up at a cheap price with three bank tabs (I was using it for my bank toon). It seemed like a good staging ground to get everyone together once again on the new server and we will then create our new guild charter and sign it with all guildies signing it! (The current bank toon guild name is not something we have any interest in keeping as our guild go-forward: “Troublemakerz”).

Let us know Alleria-side and we can hop over and /ginvite you or if you know we are over there, simply /who Troublemakerz.

The changes to Orgrimmar alone have been absolutely amazing and while for some of us it will be leveling in the game akin to whole new game, even for those that have long-played Horde, the new changes are seriously bringing out about new content and look and feel. We are excited about giving ourselves a Horde home.

For the Horde!

Horde Server Analysis

To support the decision on which server to recommend as the suggested home of our Horde toons, we analyzed servers based on economy, progression, timezone, server type, population and ratio of Alliance to Horde. The clear leader is the Mal'Ganis server which was the only server to score positively in all of the categories.

For each analysis category (e.g. progression, server type) we allocated a server a value of a '1' or a '0' depending on whether they met best interest criteria from the Horde perspective. Each category is described below.

Economy - Each server's auction house was inspected on the Horde side, in Orgrimmar. For comparison's sake the same items were checked for pricing and volume to serve as benchmarks indicative both of the potential for obtaining gear or mats at achievable prices and for making gold by supplying the auction house. Example items were Primordial Saronite, herbs, ores, cloth, leathers, gems, crafted items such as Boots of Impending Death, flasks, enchant scrolls, cut gems, Miscellaneous Mounts, Miscellaneous Pets, Miscellaneous Other (looking for volume and pricing of the items sold from ICC raids conquering Lich King with Deathmourne). On server checks were validated with the Undermine auction history tool.

Progression - The top three servers to have the most guilds in the top 100 progression-based were awarded 1 point. The list was derived by using wowprogress.com and validated using other servers posting similar information. The criteria of progression speaks to the pool of players from which we would be recruiting and to the caliber of the PUGs.

Timezone - Servers with a timezone of CST were awarded one point due to their alignment with our current server's timezone.

Server Type - Servers of a PVE nature were awarded one point as were PVP servers where the Horde population so vastly outnumbered the Alliance population as to render that insignificant. Subjectively, on the Mal'Ganis server, I leveled one character 1 to 80 and saw one Alliance player once - whom did not gank me when he had the chance.

Population - Servers with a strong population base were awarded one point in the interest of ease of finding groups. It was found during the analysis of the servers that servers with low populations have very long 5-man queues and trade chat was filled with requests for LFM that lasted longer periods compared to servers with high populations where 5-man queues were under 5 minutes and raids were filled quickly with LFM requests. This category also looked at the impact of the population in regards to lag or queues to log in to the server. The servers with the highest populations counter-intuitively also had the lowest lag - or rather, no lag - when zoning into Dalaran or Orgrimmar (I suspect that the best hardware is running the servers upon which the best progression guilds make their homes - it may be the case that the guilds that require the least lag in order to optimize being the best in the world moved to low latency servers or it may be that Blizzard makes sure their servers are tuned best with the resources they have available to them; either way, there is no lag in Dalaran on a server with 30,000 people at the same time that there is lag on Alleria with only 9,000 people.)

Ratio Alliance to Horde - Server population alone is not a sufficient indicator without taking into account how many of those on the server are Horde. Additionally, this factor comes into play with Server Type where it was found that Mal'Ganis despite being a PVP server, has such a lopsided 1:11.8 ratio that for all intents and purposes it is akin to a PVE server.

CONCLUSION - While there were some surprises (the servers with the best PVE progression are actually of the Server Type PVP), based on the criteria, Mal'Ganis is clearly the leader in suggested realm for our Horde toons.

Guild Focus for Remainder 2010

We have posted the focus and notes for the guild for the remainder of 2010. Clicking the cover image left will link you over to the Google Docs -hosted .PDF presentation file. We recognize that many guild members have not had the time yet to digest all of the reported changes in recent patches, coming patches and the impact post-release of the new expansion. This package attempts to compile the most relevant of these changes as related to what you can do to better aide the guild in advancing in Cataclysm.
As always, contact an officer in game with any questions or suggestions.

Looking forward to breaking into the new content with you all!