My girlfriend and I have started a completely new World of Warcraft guild and we have officially opened recruitment yesterday! In our first evening we had some interest already and we’ve even had some applications before the first 24-hours have gone by! That makes me hopeful for the future and hopefully we will be able to stir the interest of many more people and lure them into our newly built home!

So without further ado, a shameless plug for A Drop of Rain! We’re a Horde guild on the European Quel’Thalas realm. Our new home can be found at http://ador-guild.storminajar.net! Here’s our recruitment statement:

Greetings,

<A Drop of Rain> is a new raiding guild on the European realm Quel’Thalas, and we’re what you would call a smartcore guild.

We aim to be a progression guild with a hardcore attitude during raids, meaning we take our guild progression seriously and want to clear the available content within reasonable time, while retaining a casual and friendly atmosphere inside and outside of the guild.

We’re starting from scratch and don’t have a single team of raiders yet, but that’s okay, because we’re aiming to be a Cataclysm raiding guild and aren’t worried about clearing WotLK content at this point in time. However, if we get enough people, we’ll visit ICC and RS and attempt to clear them.

So, in order to be ready and prepared for the launch of Cataclysm, we’re looking to recruit players. However, we won’t be taking in just any player; you need to show that you’re capable of meeting our standards as a raider and that you’d be dedicated to helping the guild clear content. We don’t want to be a casual guild that takes in people who sign for one or two raids, don’t read up on tactics and then don’t sign up any more. We want a team of dedicated people who work together and have the same goals – to clear the content with skilled players without the elitist attitudes, toward guildies as well as non-guildies.

Currently, we’d like to recruit enough people to be able to do 25 man raids, but we’re obviously aware that we won’t be able to do that right away and we’re cool with only doing 10 mans to start with. Regardless of whether we’re doing 10 and/or 25 mans, we’d like to do heroic modes as well. So, because we’re starting from scratch and because we need to build up our team(s), we require people who have enough patience to wait until we’re ready to start raiding.

We’re welcoming re-rollers as well. People from the Alliance and even from other realms are welcome to apply if our goals as a guild spark an interest. Even if you decide to make a new character and make that your main for Cataclysm, and even if you start that new character now or when Cataclysm comes out, you’re welcome to apply as long as you’re sure that we’re the right guild for you and that you’ll stick with us patiently. We’ll also be taking our team(s) of recruits (level 80s, obviously) through Ulduar hardmodes to test how well each member deals with different situations.

So, now that you’ve gotten this far and know what we’re all about, we’ll list what we’re recruiting…

Everything!

If you’d like to learn more about us and/or apply, please visit our website at http://ador-guild.storminajar.net Please take the time to look around, we appreciate people who put in the time to get to know guilds as well as possible before applying.

If after exploring the website you have any unanswered questions, please contact either myself on Survar / Sparxolife, or Grognak.

Thanks for your time, and may you have epic adventures! RP lolwut.

What are you waiting for?! Come on folks, make us the best guild that has ever existed!

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. The reason is a little technical, but in short it comes down to website maintenance. All the technical tidbits should be sorted out now and I’ll try to be a little more active again.

A good start is to conclude the Real ID posts I’ve made. The last time I wrote about it, there was a huge uproar about Blizzard going to publish our first and last names on their official forums as they were planning to attach them to the posts we made in an attempt to improve the quality of discussions (read: get rid of all the forum trolls). However, I don’t think they had anticipated such an enormous amount of protest coming from the community. No doubt the very same forum trolls were very vocal, but as I stated, I felt that there certainly were valid grounds against such a policy.

Not too long after the shitstorm hit, there was an open letter from Mike Morhaime (CEO & Co-founder Blizzard Entertainment):

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters (http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/about/mission.html), and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Thankfully they’ve come to their senses about this! It gets even better though! As you might know I have been a little… sceptical about the “friends of friends” feature that was introduced with Real ID. From an interview with the developers on Twitter, it appears they’re going to introduce an option to disable this feature!

Q: Do you have any plans to allow players to not show their real name to friends of friends while using the Real ID system?
A: As with any new feature we add to our games, we’ve been evaluating how Real ID has been used since its release to identify new functionality that would help improve our players’ experience. The in-game Real ID “friends of friends” list is designed to give players a convenient way to populate their Real ID friends list with other players they know and trust in real life, allowing them to quickly and easily send Real ID friend requests to these people without having to enter their Battle.net® account names. However, we recognize that some players would prefer not to be displayed on friends lists in this fashion, so we plan to include an option that will allow players to opt out of appearing on their Real ID friends’ “friends of friends” lists. We’re anticipating this feature to be available for StarCraft II shortly after release of the game, and World of Warcraft at around the same time — we’ll have more information for you in the coming weeks.

So, good news! My concerns are laid to rest for now. I’d still prefer an alias to be shown, instead of my real name, but due to the removal of friends of friends, it’s not quite as big a deal any more.