Project Lore

Snow is no fun alone.

Last night I did something that I have never done in my MMO career, I gquit.  Even when I quit the game for a few brief months around The Burning Crusade's launch, my fingers never actually typed that sequence into World of Warcraft's command prompt.  In fact, at that time of my relapse into real life, I was the second oldest member in the guild.  And no, the GM wasn't the longest-standing member, my IRL boss was.  It stayed that way until my subscription ran its course, then I was promptly gkicked.

Upon returning to World of Warcraft more than a year ago I found it fairly difficult to readjust.  Going from arguably the best guild on the server to bouncing from guild to guild as they repeatedly disintegrated was a drain on the soul, and my intentions to continue playing.  My former guild finally "collapsed" - GM quit and guild was reformed under a new name - shortly after TBC's launch.  The pieces were quickly picked up by a few of the dedicated members and reformed as a hardcore, min-maxing powerhouse of a guild.  Not something I wanted.  I fought through the ups and downs, and eventually stumbled into a guild of close knit friends.  Not only were many of them real-life friends, but they happened to be French-Canadian. They were a good group of people, some of them excellent players, others, not so much.  They made a good run towards the end of TBC to get through all of the raid content.  They brought me along on those raids when they could, but I never felt that I was part of the guild.  I was just that rogue they'd bring along if they needed some melee DPS.  I was the guy who could get anything cooked, or would waste time fishing.  I was the gnome that was always at the AH.  I was the dagger lover they'd ask lore questions to.  I was the uneducated person who couldn't speak French.  I was THAT guy, not one of them. Nevertheless, I did have some good times and late nights with them, and thank them for the support they showed me and instances we ran together.  I even scored some going away gems along with the well wishes and good lucks. With my trusty rogue finally at level cap and geared enough to enter Naxxramas, it was time to look ahead.  Wrath of the Lich King brought more than a few friends from my old guild back to the game, so I created a private channel for us to chat in due to our guild separation.  Slowly the channel filled up as old friendship were re-kindled or re-discovered.  Loot drama forgotten - a priest taking tanking loot to use the stamina as a PvP item - we have fallen back under the same banner one by one.  A banner that I will join as soon as the GM gets online.  Till that time, Solidsamm remains guildless, but this time on his own terms.  Soon, I shall return to dominating Naxxramas! It feels good to be excited to raid again.

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The folks over at Topless Robot recently held a contest for their readers asking people to give their most traumatic video game related stories. Before I give you the link, it does contain some spoilers for Final Fantasy VII and some content on the racy side, but fair warning has been given, so here is Topless Robot's contest. There were a couple of WoW related stories in the comments, which is quite understandable. World of Warcraft takes internet anonymity, combines it with social interaction and great value placed on in-game goods, which creates opportunities ripe for emotional trauma. The most interesting WoW story was one by a person named Jason. He wrote:

My video game of choice for the past seven years has been World of Warcraft. To say i play a lot would be an understatement. At level 60, and that was several years ago, i had two chars that were both at over 100 days of active playtime. As of today I have 3 level 80's with one of them haveing over 300 days played. For those of you that do not play wow that means i had spent over 300 days logged into the game on that char.

Now for my story.

I go to bed Christmas eve with my char wishing all my guildies a merry Christmas. I logged out In Dalaran wearing my full Christmas costume. Fast froward 14 hour. I get back from my grandparents where i just spent all morning acting like was excited about a new sweater vest. Now i go to log in, and i notice something is wrong. My char has no clothes on. A sense of dread floods over me. I go to log in as my main, a prot warrior just recently 80 and almost in full heroic epics. The zone loads and here i am standing in Westfall. Thats when it hit me, i had been hacked. Later my wife will tell me i kept muttering oh no oh no oh no.... Sometime in the middle of all of it i get sick and throw up... also my fist ends up going through a wall.

When everything is tallied up, gone is all my gear, gone is all my gold on all my toons. 9k of my own hard saved gold, gone. Gone was hundreds of days of gear. Then it really hits me, i am GM of my guild. I run to the flight master, the bastards even deleted my hearth stone. I get to the flight master with no gold to buy a flight home. So now i mount up and run to stormwind. I get into the bank to see it empty. 5 Tabs full of mats and boe gear gone, the 12k in guild bank funds gone. I become sick again. I get back to my computer and then the worst part of all of it hits me. I get a whisper from one of my guilds officers asking why i kicked him. The thief kicked everyone from the guild, leaving myself alone in a shell that once held 200+ members.

At the total cost the thief stole close to 50k gold worth of gold and mats and left me alone in my guild, all on Christmas day. 5 years worth of effort undone in mere hours. Traumatic doesn't begin to describe the loss of 7 years.

This is a very sad story. Losing everything in the World (of Warcraft) on Christmas Day? It doesn't get much worse. Unfortunately, it was also posted on the internet in hopes of winning a contest. The cynic in me, which is a very big part of me, wants to ask how true Jason's story is (and just did). It's hard to lose seven or even five years of work when WoW has only been released for four. There is no real way of knowing how true this story is, but this type of thing happens all too often. How many of you have similar stories? I've talked about mine, so tell us about yours!

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A little while back, you saw the interview that Nihilum did with Project Lore on their website. Recently, we had the chance to chat with one of Nihilum’s earliest members, Marilyn, who has been in Nihilum since the guild was formed on Burning Legion. He’s been around since it all began and has held both officer and class leader positions in the guild. Currently, he’s a “regular” hardcore progression raiding member, so he knows all about Nihilum and how they have risen to become one of the top gaming organizations in the world. We chatted about a few different topics, like what it takes to be a top progression raider, the upcoming expansion, and PvP. Now, here is the full interview: Nihilum is one of the most well known and fastest progressing guilds in the world. What drives you to become part of one of the top guilds in the world? I am extremely competitive in everything I do. It all started really early, playing soccer, hockey or just playing chess back in my childhood, I just had to be the best and I'm definitely a sore loser. If someone beats me I will play him/her until I win. And the fact that so many people are playing this game and watching our progress, when we kill a boss world first the attention we get is pretty insane, and fun :D Your guild has a number of world first kills, not to mention server firsts. Which one was the most satisfying? Hm, Kel'thuzad, by far, for me. The amount of hours and energy we all put into that fight is something we haven't done again after that. What happened was we had two 1% wipes on Tuesday night. The server would reset for Europeans later that night, so in order to win against the Americans who had their reset 1 day earlier we knew that we had to beat him on that day to claim the world first. But since we failed to kill him that day, we thought the race was lost. But we woke up early the day after and I skipped school, we started raiding at 01:00 pm and we kept going til 05:00 am. By then the whole instance was cleared except Kel'thuzad. On Thursday we started at 02:00 pm, we buffed up and killed him. After so many hours on a boss and so much effort it felt unbelievable to claim him world first and become "the champions". Best World of Warcraft moment for sure :) Your raid team has seen every boss currently in the game. So far, what is your favorite boss encounter in the game? Hm... hard to pick, I've got many favorite bosses. But I have to say Heigan from Naxx 40. You could beat him with 10 people, and usually everyone just died and you had 10 good players standing :) What does your raid schedule look like during progression? It's a lot of hours. Lately it's been a lot more than it usually was. The reason for that is the competition. More guilds want to be the best and therefore more hours are required to succeed. I'd say from 12:00 to 02:00 is expected of us if they release new content. Of course, this is only something that lasts during one week or a few days. We all have real lives that need our attention :) How many times do you wipe before you kill a boss for the first time? Do you have any interesting ways to alleviate some of the frustration that must come with learning a boss with no input from anyone other than your guild? It all depends on the structure of the fight. Generally speaking, I would say at least 2-3 hours before you have the strategy nailed down, then another few hours to make it perfect. That makes it a total of 8-10 hours to know how a boss fight works. Twin Emperors in Sunwell took several days to figure out, so it varies a lot. To answer your second question I must say that keeping people calm is the only way. Take breaks of 10-15 minutes to let people breathe some air and get their mind on something else. Doing something for XX hours straight without a break is never good, no matter what you do. Many guilds have broken up due to drama between members over a variety of issues. How does Nihilum handle these things when they come up? Drama has always been around, it is almost impossible to get up to 40 people to get along. There are different ways to handle it. The reason we are still here is that we've been among the top (if not THE top) guilds out there, always. People in the guild are more serious in their gaming than most others, and with that thought in mind you can expect that people will act professionally. If people get upset or mad about something we just tell everyone to take a breather and we come back rejuvenated and calm, then discuss the matter. But, of course, I can't deny that drama has almost caused collapses within the guild, even for Nihilum. With Wrath of the Lich King right around the corner, how are you as a guild planning to level up? Questing, instancing, grinding mobs? Well, we haven't played much beta, any of us. Some have played it a lot and some haven't. What we did for TBC was just pure instance grinding. It was the fastest and best way to get to lvl 70. With blizzard stating that they don't want people to level that way, I think we will focus more on doing quests and doing random instances for fun! As long as it goes fast :) How will you become the first to clear the new Naxx? Do you play on the beta to get a feel for the encounters or simply hone your skills on the current content and get ready for anything? Nihilum have played Naxx on Beta, and by the looks of it, it will be easy. Also doing Sunwell every Wednesday keeps us in top shape :) Naxx will be cleared by the US guilds before any of the Europeans. Everything is cleared on beta and I predict that we will see a fully cleared Naxxramas 25 man instance within 8-9 days of the release of WotLK, including leveling. The reason for this is, even though they have changed some of the fights, it will still be the same. People know what to do and what to bring. Switching gears to PvP, congratulations to the Nihilum Plasma team that won Blizzard's 3v3 tournament at BlizzCon 2008. SK Gaming recently split their PvE and PvP teams. How much interaction does your raid team have with the arena teams? Is there any cross over between members? Is it difficult for players to be the best in the world at both PvE and PvP content or do both take similar skills? I reckon that most of the people of Nihilum PvE could be the best in the world at PvP if they chose that path. And same goes for PvP players if they decided to go PvE. This game is all about dedication, if you have the right conditions and the will, you will become the best. I'm not in any way trying to undermine our dear PvP players' achievement, they are awesome. But what I'm saying is that everything about Nihilum is professional. We are striving to be the best in the world, both at PvE and PvP. But being the best at PvP and PvE at the same time, I think is not possible. Both areas take a whole lot of time. And time is something that is limited for us all :) To answer the question if the PvP team and PvE team are connected in any way, I have to say that daily chats over mIRC client is all we do atm. They are doing their thing on another server and we on ours. But yes, we all know each other. Do you have any advice for players hoping start an elite guild like Nihilum? To start a guild like Nihilum at this point is hard. What you need is a group of people, 5-10 on the same server with incredible dedication and desire to be the best. You need to be willing to put a lot of time and effort into the matter. When I think about how much time I've spent on this game and the guild Nihilum, it's insane. Never give up on what you want, even when times are rough you have to think back to what you had as the original goal. And strive for it. And try to have a good base of hardcore people, those who do not stop for anything! Finally, what are your impressions of Project Lore? Great looking website, absolutely smashing :) We need more of these types of websites and communities. They all help to grow the game to another level :)

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Well here's an interesting follow-up to my last post here at ProjectLore.com. In a strange turn of events, I was on WoW the other night. I haven't had much time to play 'cuz I got all these episodes to make for you, but I had a moment or two to do a fishing daily. While I was running around Shatt, I saw a friend pop on that I hadn't seen in some time. I clicked on his name to see where he was and saw that he was no longer in a guild. What happened? This guy was a great pali tank and he wasn't in a guild? Kara, SSC, TK, BT, Hyjal, some Sunwell and no guild? I watched this guy go from pali healer to pali tank over the course of a few months to be one of the best tanks I've ever seen. So what gives? As you can see from the screen capture, something stupid happened (btw - the names have been blurred to protect the innocent (I think they're innocent - who knows)). His guild /gbooted him right out of the guild for being afk for too long. WTF? Their main tank booted 'cause he had to go afk to help his kids out? His RL children needed help and the guild booted him. What a-holes. Now who knows if the his side of the story is the complete picture, but I do know of more stories where someone was kicked out of a guild for some of the stupidest reasons I have ever heard. I've seen people get booted for not showing up to raids or bad mouthing the guild or ninjaing gear in pugs thus soiling the guild's name - all of which are mostly legit reasons to /gkick someone, but I've also seen some absolutely stupid reasons people have been booted. What's the raziest /gboot you've seen or heard of? Did someone not wear their tabard to a raid? Did they not rez someone when it was easier for them to run back? Did they not bring enough mana biscuits? So what was it? Let me know.

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Yes. I am leveling a mage... again. Why you ask. Well I suppose it's a few different reasons. 1. My guild split up and that sucked. 2. 'Old' content is still fun. 3. I can do it better the second time around. This time I'll actually pick a quicker path and use addons to help me. For the first 30 levels or so of my first character, I had no idea about addons. None. Now they are so essential to game play, especially in end-game encounters, that I can't believe I did 30 levels without them. So go get some addons and level up a new toon. You now you want to

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Well how's about that. I started a guild about a year ago and we've been rocking it! We leveled like mad and got tons of 70's pretty quick. Seeing as we were so uber we started farming Kara. Then we moved onto ZA. At about the time we started really owning Kara I started working on this site and took a break from WoW while I did it. My first day back I'm swept up into a Gruul's Lair group and we two shot him for the first time in the guild! Oh the joy!!! So when I got back on and really wanted to start RAIDing with my guild I signed up for ZA on the guild calendar... "Oh there's no way you can go with them." "What? Why?" "Oh that's the group that runs through ZA easy they can't have you with them." Why is ZA so different from Kara? Is it soooo much harder? I know it's the next step up but really? I'm going to cause the group to fail? Me a good DPS rogue who knows how not to be killed. Anyway, rant = over.

Dr Dark

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Oh how I hate puggin'. Pick-up Groups (PUGs) in World of Warcraft are so freakin' random. I have had PUG groups that destroyed Heroic Shattered Halls in 41 min and I've have the unfortunate experience of PUGs wiping multiple times on the first Boss in normal Ramparts. Normal Ramparts! And most of them were level 65+. AHHHHHHH!!!! What to do... what to do... Join a guild is a good option... but sometimes that falls apart. People may not be on at the same time. Or people may not want to do that quest your on. Or what-the-freak-ever reason they have for not helpin' a guildie. And the other thing is that when they do decide to help out, sometimes the people are good and other times they just say that they are good. Mostly the second. Unless it's a group that's developed together over time. Then at least everyone sucks at the same level. I was very fortunate to be in a great cohesive guild for quite some time (Midnight Run, Frostmane thank you very much ) but that fell apart in the space of a weekend 'cuz a few jackasses screwed it up for everyone (that and some other stuff but that's a different blog...). But with that group now fractured beyond recognition, I'm looking for another guild that raids late server time, that knows what they are doing and likes to kill bosses instead of bitch about who got what purple three weeks ago. But back to my point. PUGs generally suck. Seriously. But what do we do about it? I know I know my class and it's responsibilities in a raid or an instance. I know I have the gear and experience in doing serious DPS and CC (Damage Per Second and Crowd Control). I also know what other classes are supposed to do and what spec they should be to do it. So I know what I'm looking for when I try and find a PUG. What I don't know is if some moron is going to go all emo (emotional) when someone else doesn't do their job or if someone who says they know how to hold threat couldn't hold a bucket of water without a forklift and two friends helping. I know we all need to get experience and learn boss strats (one of the reasons I'm helping produce Project Lore), but for heaven's sake - please be conservative in telling people how good you are when looking for a PUG. Be honest just don't tell me your the best lock in the game when you don't know when to use seed of corruption or when to enslave (Kara PUGs come to mind...). BOTTOM LINE: If you are looking to be in a PUG, be kind, be honest and don't be a freakin' moron that goes all emo at losing a greed roll on a stupid mail chest piece you'll never, ever freakin' wear. And if you do go all emo, I will forever ignore you.

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As we all know, Season 4 is almost upon us. What does that mean for me? It means Season 2 equipment will be available for Honor. Ideally, I would be grinding out Honor and tokens with the rest of the noobs who don't have Merciless or Vengeful gear yet. I'd love to buy a whole set of Epics, since both my Enhancment and Restoration sets have ugly blue holes in them. Unfortunately, I decided long ago that battlegrounds alone are much worse than battlegrounds with friends. Now, for me, this is pretty much the case with anything in WoW. But most of my time is spent dealing with guild organization (I had no idea what I was getting myself into), raids (same), or financing my habits, both in game and IRL. This leaves precious little time for battlegrounds and even less when friends are available. Alas, Season 2 gear, it seems we are not meant to be. I guess I will have to try and make those ZA runs in the future.

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Ah... when it's done, it's done. It's sad to see it go... but we'll all move on... What am I talking about? One of the worst things that could happen in-game: my guild disbanded. ( /cry ) Yes, a few weeks ago, maybe longer now since time has lost all meaning since I entered this state of mourning, the first guild I joined broke up over internal politics, RL issues, in-fighting, alleged favoritism and a few freakin' stupid idiot jerks ( different people depending on whom you ask ) brought about the final straw that broke the guild's back. I am talking of Midnight Run on Frostmane server. We were good. Really freakin' good. We were almost on farmin' status for Hyjal and BT, gathering mats for boss fights in BT and beginning our venture into Sun Well within a few weeks, but then it happened. On night I logged in at raid time, ready to kick the crap out of Vashj and maybe get a new chest piece, when the GM called all online people over to the Aldor bank. Then he dropped the bomb. It sucked. Really sucked. I meet some really cool people in the guild and had fun takin' down some of the hardest content in the game but now, as I stood at the Aldor bank getting my share of epic gems and wizard oil from the soon-to-be defunk guild bank, it was just dawning on me that I would probably never raid with most of these people again. A damn f'k shame. And I knew some of the reasons why it was disbanding were very legit. RL comes first no matter what anyone says. And the freakin' jerks who were making a mess of the guild's name really f'ked it for everyone. How just a few asses can come in and within a weekend f'k it up for everyone is just astounding to me. So to those who were in Midnight Run, thank you. Puffball, you are a great GM and I would join any guild you make in the future when you come back to the game. Hedone, you are an amazing healer and I look forward to raiding with you soon. Gomja, you rock as a Pali tank. Noodshot, Stings, Legendaryoda, and the rest of the MR crew, thanks for the fun. And now the guild is done. The fractured pieces split into two or three different guilds, each somewhat bashing the other for the downfall and how cool they are now. Whatever. My ego resides in myself and not in how much DPS I can do. That being said... If you have a guild on Frostmane server that raids after 9:30 server time that's lookin' for a raiding fire mage whose sustained DPS is always in the top 10, usually top 5, then give me a call. Loyalty is one thing while there's something to be loyal to, but when it''s done, it's done. Besides I want that freakin' chest to drop off Vashj! So if you need a raid savy fire mage, give me a call, but only if you raid after 9:30 server time on Frostmane. ( btw - The Armory says I'm in Divine Turtle Protectors but that's my alt's guild. And the gear I'm wearing is epic! lol )

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Hey everyone, So I just got this note as a reply in Twitter that Wowinsider featured The Totally Rad Guild's downing of Gruul! I know it's in a list of other guilds that downed things but hey that means someones seeing what we do. We MATTER!!! DrDark

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