1.7. Tricks of our Trade

Kerulak gazes up at Ragnaros during
40-Man Raid work in Molten Core.

Fine Tuning

Raiding in Vanilla was unlike anything I had participated in throughout my gaming career. Just getting over the initial hump of requiring 40 players to be online at once, and coordinating their efforts in real-time struck me as somewhat of a miracle. Only once fireballs were flying across the giant dungeons, felling great behemoths left and right, did we begin to realize that we would need to proactively find ways to improve, even if it meant a tiny little little bit each week. These marginal improvements that we'd apply from week-to-week would infamously come to be known as baby steps, which was our only real weapon against the competition: other raiding guilds vying for bragging rights and new raiding recruits -- some of whom could easily come from our own roster. It was my job as Guild Leader to provide a raiding environment that was both fun and successful. Other guilds were doing the same thing, so I had to find a way to do it better.

In order to stand out amongst a sea of raiding guilds, Descendants of Draenor needed to collectively assess class role, ensuring that we would approach our raids with the highest level of professionalism possible. Other raiding guilds were failing by being extremely wasteful; they would send players into raids without knowing who should play which role, instead just playing “however they wanted”. By looking at some of the world's best raiding guilds (at the time) we discovered a fact early on. Each class in WoW had a specific role in raids, and in order to be effective, deviation from those predetermined roles wasn't an option. In many cases the choice was obvious: A Rogue, for example, is a class that leaps out from the shadows and quickly ends his foe's life with razor-sharp daggers or swords. In a raid, rogues play only one role: Melee DPS (Damage Per Second). Rogues fall into a "pure" category class, alongside Mages, Warlocks, and Hunters. They do one thing: kill bosses in the face until dead.

The remainder of classes in WoW, however, can play multiple roles. This is based on how they have their talent points applied (what we refer to as their Talent Specialization or "Spec"). A Shaman, for example, could be specced to hurl lightning bolts from a distance, making them a Ranged DPS class. Or, they could be specced to utilize two one-handed weapons up close, swinging them at their target with the fury of the winds, standing side-by-side with a Rogue. This style plants them firmly in the Melee DPS department. Alternately, they could spec a third way, remaining at the back of the raid, blanketing their friendly party members with a protective layer of spells which replenishes health and grants shields. This style of play falls into the Healing category. We refer to classes that can play multiple roles based on their talent specialization as "hybrids". During Vanilla, the hybrids of WoW were the Shamans (if Horde), Paladins (if Alliance), Druids, Warriors, and Priests.

Just Because You Can...

While multiple roles were available to the Shaman in a raiding situation, there was truly only one spec that was viable due to the way Blizzard had balanced each of the nine classes. The cards of fate revealed to me that Shamans were to play the role of a healer, nothing more. The raiders in Descendants of Draenor quickly assessed what their role was, and embraced it, and if they didn't, they would be replaced by players that did. To lead by example, I was the first Shaman to lay down my weapons, and take on the responsibilities of a healer. I began to spread this belief system across the raiders of Descendants of Draenor, so that they, too, would embrace their class's fated role. Many did without hesitation. Some, however, remained in denial. They had originally chosen their class because of the emotion it instilled in them when they saw the class tearing monsters apart upon the lands of Azeroth. Choosing a Druid, for example, may have spoken to certain players because of their ability to shapeshift, taking on the form of a Bear that was virtually un-killable, or perhaps to a Cat, entering stealth (like a Rogue) and sneaking up on a foe, tearing them limb-from-limb. 

Being told that in order to perform at your maximum capacity, you were to stay in the back of the raid and cast healing spells on your party, came as an awful blow to some. Once provided with this revelation, many threw up their arms in disgust and walked away from raiding. Others bit their tongue and played their fated role as was expected of them...but they did not enjoy it nor embrace it. This produced a large subset of players that were often performing at 50% or 75% of their maximum efficiency, and was a sad result of Blizzard's design we had no control over. Flexibility in class role would not come until much later.

There were ten bosses in Molten Core. With our raiders now playing the role cards they had been dealt, if we were diligent, we could get the first three bosses done in two hours. I thought our speed was reasonable, but at the amount of bosses in Molten Core, the reality of making an entire clear in one evening seemed unfathomable. We only had a few hours each week to make our attempts, and because we employed such a wide variety of players across North America, managing multiple time-zones and keeping players focused and awake left us a small window of time to execute content. There had to be a way to increase our speed.

As Kerulak finalizes raid invites,
Haribo announces healing assignments.

The Moment of Clarity

One night, I stumbled across a video uploaded by a European WoW guild called The Axemen, who performed a full clear of Molten Core in 1 hour and 30 minutes. After watching the video with mouth agape, I had a moment of clarity. Immediately, I sent it to my Warrior raid-leader, Ater, telling him we needed to crank our clear times up. He pulled the video apart piece-by-piece and began discussing it with the other Class Officers. The Axemen employed a strategy known as "Chain-Pulling": the raid is in a constant state of pulling trash and killing it...as trash is about to die, tanks are already moving into position to pull the next pack. We began to train our raiders to expect this kind of chain-pulling so that they were not surprised when there was little time to break, sit, drink...breathe. We pulled monsters non-stop.

In order to facilitate this chain-pulling, our healers (having a finite amount of mana) had to come up with new ways of maximizing their endurance. Previously, they could sit down and drink after each pack of trash or boss was killed. Our new chain-pulling methodology removed this as a viable option. As we pulled trash faster and faster, our healers slowly expunged their mana pools until wrung dry like a sponge. This reduction in raid healing cascaded into player deaths, which only served to slow us down further. My Priest officer, Haribo (named after the candy company) came up with the concept of "Healing Buddies" to remedy this situation. 

Haribo's idea was simple, yet elegant. Every healer would be paired with another healer. As we began to clear trash on our way to each boss in the instance, one "buddy" from each pair would perform heals on the tanks and raid, while the other just followed along, doing nothing. Then, as each of the first "buddies" began to run low on mana, Haribo would spam out a “SWITCH!” macro in a channel he created (unsurprisingly named "dodhealers"). This would alert the healers to swap to the other buddy in each pair. Now, the new buddy would assume the role of healing the raid, while the first buddy followed along, slowly regaining mana. This saved us from having to constantly stop at various times between trash pulls while the healers drank and regained their precious mana. With Chain Pulling and Healing Buddies in full effect, we were able to increase our boss kill count from three to five in the first two hours, killing Lucifron, Magmadar, Gehennas, Garr and Baron Geddon. If it were a particularly exceptional night, we could even fold Shazzrah, a sixth boss, into that two-hour block.

Raids were moving noticeably faster. As with anything you do in life, the faster you go, the greater the chance of making a mistake. Some players simply did not adapt as quickly as we had hoped; either they had computer performance issues that held them back, or they simply lacked the reflexes to respond at a moment's notice to an emergency situation. Players would randomly find themselves face down in the dirt, killed because of a simple mistake. No amount of "better play from other raiders" could help offset this. We needed a contingency plan. Additional research revealed many hardcore raiding guilds were utilizing "out-of-combat battle resurrection". This surreptitious strategy called for certain players to keep a healthy distance behind the core raiders doing the work on the boss. By remaining far away from the action, they would kept themselves out-of-combat, which granted them access to spells normally disabled during the raid. One such spell was resurrection: the ability to bring a dead player back to life. Resurrect spells were disabled in-combat to add a degree of ownership to the raid; simply rezzing the dead over and over throughout the course of the fight meant instantly trivializing encounters, allowing players to sloppily die in fire with no repercussions. Theoretically, it was a valid guard-rail to empower players to be accountable as a team. In practice, unsolvable latency-related issues leading to lag-driven death were not considered for. Out-of-combat battle rezzes were a reasonable-if-slightly-unethetical way to combat infrastructure mechanics for which Blizzard provided no legitimate solution to.

Descendants of Draenor clear their first raid
 in its entirety: Molten Core

Bearing Fruit

Employing a delicate mix of improvements, either self-created or shamelessly stolen from other successful guilds, resulted in a dramatic increase in our efficiency. We were able to defeat Onyxia (our first official Internet Dragon!) on November 21st, 2005, and were soon farming her regularly for better weapons and armor. Meanwhile, we continued to clear content in Molten Core, faster and faster each week, pushing deeper into the instance, collecting up the materials necessary to craft fire resistance gear; equipment vitally necessary to withstand the fiery wrath of Ragnaros. Then, on the fateful evening of February 10th, 2006, Descendants of Draenor returned to Molten Core, stood before the mighty Elemental Lord of Fire, and delivered a final, fatal blow, sending him back into the depths of Blackrock Mountain. I almost went deaf with the victorious screams and cries of forty players calling out in digital unison, piped into my headset via our Ventrilo server.

We now not only had a structure in place to facilitate an efficient raiding system, we had proof that it worked: an entire 40-Man raid instance was cleared. We were filled with excitement and pride, and as we strode through Orgrimmar, displaying our weapons and armor from the instance, we began to turn more heads and garner additional interest in our guild. This came at a pivotal time, as we would soon discover (as other raiding guilds had), the difficulty of Molten Core and the next instance, Blackwing Lair, were as different as night and day.

We were about to get a wake-up call. One that would require that addition of a single Rogue that would forever change the course of history in Descendants of Draenor.

1.6. Asymmetric Insight

2nd-in-command of DoD, Graulm, shot next to
DoD's Warlock Officer, Gutrippa

Emotionally Intelligent

As the new year of 2006 rung in, I was at last enjoying the benefit of a fruitful, prosperous guild. The many late nights I'd poured into negotiating guild merges, strategizing takeovers, poaching skillful raiders that were unhappy in their current situations...had all paid off. The result was a 40-Man raiding machine, now making weekly clears of Molten Core, diligently scooping up loot, and acquiring the necessary materials to craft fire resistance gear; items that would be vitally important to the defeat of Ragnaros, one of the four Elemental Lords in the WoWniverse. Structurally, we were rock solid. Per Graulm's suggestions, I had appointed one officer for each of the classes, and this delegation of authority allowed us to ease the administrative nightmare surrounding 40-Man logistics. The officers were sharp, each was an expert in their respective field, and I perceived them to be equals, all contributing to one another as they guided the raid teams down the serpentine caverns of brimstone that lay hidden beneath Blackrock Mountain.

My officers were extremely competent in their respective class departments; part of what made them effective was their ability to understand and convey complex raid mechanics to the team. A simple example of this was the decision behind forcing our melee DPS to attack mobs from behind. Any player worth their salt will tell you why this is so: attacks from behind can't be parried, which improves the player's DPS. Less parrying equals more strikes on the target, and more strikes, therefore, means more damage. However, there was a far more subtle mechanic at work, and when less-than-stellar players tried to defend their incompetence and laziness, my officers would step up and bring out the big guns: Attacks that were parried by a boss caused the boss's swing timer to reset, producing the effect of another instantaneous attack. This "parry-hasted" swing, coupled with a random mechanic in Vanilla raids known as a "Crushing Blow" -- a strike at 150% damage of the normal attack -- could potentially take a tank out in a single shot. It was about more than just improving damage, it was also about implicitly increasing the survival of the tank. Luckily, I had Ater leading the troops into battle, and thanks to his qualities in directing raid-related traffic, the raiders of Descendants of Draenor knew and understood the value of the individual contributing to the greater good.

This WoW-related expertise lay completely at the mechanical level. As players often joke, much of it isn't "rocket surgery". Where things become truly complex and difficult to understand are when one must make an evaluation of a person. It's easy to see why one person's damage is in the toilet, and remedy the situation with a new set of gear or spell rotations; it's an entirely different can of worms to try to predict why people behave the way they do, what their intentions are, and what their hidden agenda is. Some leaders, as it turns out, have an innate ability to read people; their emotional quotient is high and attuned to the nuances of behavior. Others mistake their "reads" of people, unaware of their own cognitive biases. This leads them to falsely blame one set of behaviors as the cause, when an entirely different set of variables are at play.

And this is where Ater the Idealist and Graulm the Realist began to bonk heads.

Khaevil makes a sarcastic comment
about what girls want in WoW

'Til Death Do Us Part

Xorena the Priest and Khaevil the Mage were a husband and wife team recruited into the guild in late October of 2005. A seemingly pleasant couple, their intention was to join the 40-Man raid team and offer their services in our quest to clear content. They were extremely well played; Xorena healed like a champ as mists of holy energy washed across the raid from her lightning-like reflexes, and Khaevil produced stupidly high damage as he let fire fly from his fingertips. They joined our 40-Man roster and continued to strengthen our raiding backbone. Additionally, they loved to PvP together, and found themselves in battlegrounds alongside other DoD veterans who enjoying seeing the Alliance scream and writhe in agony. Haribo and Annihilation, my Priest Officer and Warrior Officer, respectively, often entered Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin with Xorena and Khaevil at their side. To all, it would seem, Xorena and Khaevil were team players and soon to be considered a part of the DoD family.

All, except Graulm.

Graulm expressed concerns to me early on regarding Xorena and Khaevil. Their intentions were not with 40-Man raid team, or with progression at all. He had already sized them up, and confirmed his beliefs with another Officer, Annihilation -- another guildy who possessed the innate ability to read people. And to them, Xorena and Khaveil read like a children's book. The husband / wife team cared little for 40-Man raid progression, and were only there to collect loot for their personal benefit in PvP. As soon as they acquired what they wanted, I could expect to see their priorities shift...and not in favor of the raid team. My default modus operandi was to try to see the good side of the situation, to artificially inflate the pros over the cons, but Graulm stayed firm: it was a mistake to move forward with them, and I needed to cut them loose.

Severing them from the raiding artery was a huge risk, it meant the possibility of the the raid team bleeding out. I raised this concern with Ater. His assessment was much more idealistic than Graulm's; he saw the "good" in people, and was loathe to make judgments on observations of behavior -- especially ones in a game which cloaked us all as good guys or bad guys. He had a very supportive mindset and was sympathetic towards all players, giving them a chance in Molten Core that most raid leaders would shy away from. Even though it went against my gut, I leaned towards Ater on this decision, and allowed Xorena and Khaevil to stay. I believed them to be valuable contributors, and that minor PvP-related preferences would not get in the way.

Kerulak mediates loot drama with Khaevil while the raid
continues to clear trash in Molten Core

Double Standards

The husband, Khaevil, was an excellent, professionally-played character, and one of the top damage dealers in our raid. Unfortunately, he was absolutely awful as a human being. He was extraordinarily disrespectful and rude to both players in my guild, and players in other guilds. This, of course, upset me greatly. Descendants of Draenor was founded on being different in that we weren't going to be a bunch of foul-mouthed shit-talkers like every other guild on the server. We were going to make an concerted effort to be a little bit better. Yet, Khaevil's treatment of players went against everything I wanted the guild to stand for. And I sat by, letting the behavior continue, lying to myself and convincing myself "it wasn't that bad" and that if people built up a thick-enough skin, we'd be able to carry on. If I ever doubted my decision, I fell back to Ater, who showed me the light, and confirmed my bias. Thus, Khaevil and Xorena continued on in DoD, creating an unhealthy double standard that others would soon take notice of.

Graulm grew increasingly frustrated, eventually to the point of breaking. He'd had enough of Khaevil's disrespectful attitude, and was tired of me ignoring him, instead favoring this "new, fantastic Warrior" as my go-to person to solve all the guild's problems. I can imagine he also grew disgusted with my disregard for upholding the guild's ideals at the risk of sacrificing raid progression. As the weeks turned to months, he withdrew increasingly from the officer spotlight. He contributed less to guild management, which I can only assume was due to the fact that he felt whatever he would bring to the table, I would simply snuff out by contrasting with Ater's stance. Eventually, his position as 2nd-in-command of DoD became nothing more than a title in the guild roster, and by the fall of '06, he packed up his stuff, and walked away. It was a huge hole to fill, both in officership and in 40-Man progression. 

The party did not end there.

Graulm pictured at the base of Blackrock Mountain
in full Tier 2 (Felheart) Warlock gear.

Cleaning up the Mess

Five months after Graulm left Descendants of Draenor, I took Xorena into our Ventrilo server one evening and gave her and Khaevil their walking papers. I’ll never forget how horribly upset she was; devastated is probably a good way to describe it. She was emotionally distraught, crying in Vent, trying to find a way to negotiate the situation, to see if there was any other recourse. There wasn't. They had to leave. The ejection left me physically exhausted; I wasn't prepared for her response. It was tough to take. The best part? Not only had I lost a core Priest and Mage out of 40-Man progression, I had sacrificed my 2nd-in-command in the process. I hadn't listened to him; I hadn't taken his concerns seriously enough. It was important to stay true to who we were as a guild, and that was more important than a boss kill. I couldn't make "allowances" for players, based solely on their damage meters; it was a double standard that would eat away at the core of the guild. And by ignoring the problem, I simply made the situation worse -- instead of losing two players (which I would have lost either way), I also lost the person that started to teach me the basics of leadership. I avoided the situation because I thought it would go away; that maybe perhaps some other officer would eject them on my behalf. I learned fast that nobody wants to do that. Nobody wants to be the enforcer of the rules, the bearer of bad news. Nobody wants to hear a gal plead with you in Vent while choking down tears that there must be another way to solve this issue. 

People avoid conflict for a reason.

And so, with the guild down an officer and two core raiders, I learned my lesson about double standards and vowed not to let it happen again. I discovered in practice that it was one of the hardest rules to enforce in the context of WoW. We would ultimately go on to gain a multitude of expertly played individuals over the course of many years of raiding, and some of them had horrible personalities. It took every ounce of energy to keep the roster filled with players able to rotate into spots that were left by players we ejected due to shitty behavior; it simply wasn't realistic, to be honest -- it became a full-time job. And it weighed heavily on my mind those months we worked on Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. I didn't give up. I was determined to see us succeed, at whatever the cost. My hope was that I would be able to continue to turn to Ater for advice, while tempering it with what Graulm had taught me.

Yet, the unanswered questions kept me up at night. Why did Ater put good faith into people that so obviously backfired? Was Graulm right about his assessment, or was there a far more complex set of circumstances working toward the Husband/Wife team being forced out? As my time with Ater continued on, he would prove to me he had far greater insight into people than I.

And thus, my training began.

1.5. The Idealist and the Realist

Kerulak holds his healing position during an Onyxia (40-Man) attempt.

Leadership Emerges

After only a few weeks of absorbing The Final Cut, we had become a fully-staffed 40-Man Raiding guild, and were executing bosses with extreme prejudice. We had a lot of ground to cover; Vanilla had already been out for nearly a year, and Blizzard was hard at work in preparation for the next tier of raid content, The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj. For us, it seemed a lifetime away, since two raids and 18 bosses stood between us and that next tier. Luckily, our roster had finally reached full capacity; a talented, eager set of players that were determined to raid. It was during this next year that we experienced a multitude of wins and losses, of tragedies and victories, and ultimately gave me my first real lesson in what it took to maintain a successful raiding guild: beware the double-standard.

I remember flying out to California in late October ‘05 to attend the first BlizzCon, and while I took the stage in the voice competition, busting out an impression of Deckard Cain from the Diablo series, the Descendants of Draenor raid team was back home, executing boss kills in Molten Core, earning us both credibility and gear. We also broke ground in a separate one-boss raid, Onyxia’s Lair, and began working on killing our first dragon, a raid that would ultimately take weeks and weeks of practice. I met a few of my guildies in-person at BlizzCon that October, and it was a cool feeling to be able to finally put a real-life face to an in-game character. WoW was, after all, a social experience. If I was going to keep Descendants of Draenor on the winning path, I would not only have to embrace my character’s role and responsibility in raids, I was going to have to learn more about the people behind the characters. Then, I could be certain they would work well together as a team.

During the next several months of raiding Molten Core, I noted that there were a few personalities we gained from The Final Cut that had tremendous leadership potential. One Warrior in particular had an extremely commanding presence about him. His name was Ater. He had offered to pick up the leadership reigns of Molten Core, having driven his own 20-Man Zul’Gurub raids throughout the week. Like clockwork, every three days (the reset timer for old 20-Man raids) he would rally the troops, taking the very best of the guild, and plow through the instance, with his sights set on killing Hakkar. Few guilds at that time had a Hakkar kill under their belt, and Ater felt that it was a reasonable accomplishment to work towards. It wasn't that the raid was necessarily difficult, but 20-Man Zul'Gurub fell into an awkward category in those days.

Kerulak snaps a picture next to Ater within Molten Core

Rewards Match Effort

Guilds of 40-Man raiding size were focused on much more challenging 40-Man content. To them, a raid that was half the size also meant half the challenge -- and rightly so. Those 40-Man raiding guilds that chose to tackle Zul'Gurub "as a goof" ended up wrecking the place. Gurgthock and his Elitist Jerks artificially increased the challenge by leaving nearly all the priests alive while killing Hakkar, causing the Blood God to gain a series of buffs making him nearly invincible. Without inflating Hakkar's difficulty, it wasn't worth their time. Zul'Gurub's rewards matched its effort, and in those days, the piddly blue items couldn't hold a candle to the gear that dropped out of a 40-Man raid. 

And yet, guilds that didn't boast our size or dedication to raiding simply could not put a random group of players together to do Zul'Gurub. Short of the first two bosses, High Priestess Jeklik and High Priest Venoxis, Zul'Gurub's 20-Man breadth remained out-of-reach for most casual players; any player even able to catch a glimpse of High Priestess Marli or beyond was considered a sharpshooter.  As a result, Zul'Gurub often went unfinished on servers. Vanilla's meta-game of gearing for raids was paradoxical in retrospect: To make any kind of raid progress, one required raid gear, but the gear wasn't available unless you raided. This design acted as an artificial gate to prevent casuals who had no business setting foot in a raid from even bothering. The flip side, however, was that getting your foot in the door meant exploring every option, finding any hidden tip, tactic, secret, strategy, or obscure loot that would augment your play just enough to keep it together for that first boss kill -- ones that ended with nearly the entire raid face down in the dirt. This artificial gating design of Vanilla WoW drove some players to push themselves to the absolute limit.

Ater was one of those players.

Ater was determined to execute Zul'Gurub in its entirety, since it was the only reasonable content he had a shot at completing during his membership in The Final Cut. He didn't care about the gear, regardless of its inferiority to Molten Core, he cared about the accomplishment. I heard it in his voice over our guild Ventrilo many nights -- that passion and hunger to complete content, just like any dedicated gamer who's focused on beating a game. His passion for gaming, and demonstrated leadership via Zul'Gurub, led me to hand him the wheel in our 40-Man raids as well, and it wasn't long before I promoted him to an officer rank, sitting alongside my existing DoD officers. But with his promotion also came dissent. Ater, while liked by many in my guild, held philosophies that clashed with others I put in a role of responsibility. Unfortunately, I had to bear the brunt of that fallout on my shoulders alone. 

Hanzo's alt, Oxanna the Tauren Druid, acts as
Guild Bank during Vanilla

The Basic Building Blocks

My 2nd-in-command was a Warlock named Graulm who had brought his EverQuest guild experience to the table, helping me lay the foundations for all the basics a guild would need. I originally met him in Stranglethorn Vale, while playing my Mage, Elephantine. We struck up a conversation, helped each other with a few quests, and continued to chat and assist each other over the next few weeks. During my assimilation phase, I stalked and harassed him to throw in the towel with his existing guild, and tried to make him see "the one true way". He fought me at first, but I eventually managed to sway his opinion. Once on board, it became clear his EverQuest guild-management experience would play a vital role in my learning process. While other guild members were focused on questing and clearing 10-Man Stratholme, Graulm was busy laying a foundation for Descendants of Draenor. The guild lacked structure, and leadership was essentially only an extension of the /ginvite command. He aimed to resolve that.

One of the first orders of business was a guild bank, which Graulm directed me to set up early on. Back in Vanilla, it was comprised solely of a series of alts holding items in bag space, since WoW wouldn't actually introduce true guild vaults until the first expansion. My alts, therefore, were used to store guild- and raid-related items, ferrying things like Gurubashi Coins around to players as needed. Graulm pointed out that there was more to this than purely convenience; it ensured that the management retained leverage over the guildies. He reasoned that it would keep them in line, so they would remember who was in charge; storming out of the guild in a tantrum of drama would mean walking away from earnings they themselves contributed to. An implicit psychological attachment to raid tokens would keep people loyal. Ownership, as it turned out, was a powerful motivational tool.

Graulm also identified a key flaw in my guild's forums that he felt needed to be addressed: we lacked an officer-only section of the forums. Managers needed to be able to go behind closed doors, and discreetly discuss the management of the guild. Often, this meant engaging in conversations about how to handle certain individuals. It wasn't appropriate to speak in public about the disciplinary actions surrounding a particular player in the guild. Graulm showed me that, like a business, the guild had a responsibility to conduct itself in a professional manner. Being respectful toward one another goes both ways, he reasoned, and if I was compelling the guild to follow my moral compass of treating each other with dignity, it had to start with leadership setting the example. I remember vividly the day I locked the non-officers out of a section of the forums; panic ensued. What was I hiding from them? What were we planning on doing that they weren't allowed to know? Graulm eased my anxiety. This response was expected, and was par for the course.

These basic building blocks of a guild structure may seem like common sense to seasoned guild leaders, but back then, I was but a babe in the woods. Thankfully, I was able to get Guild Leadership 101 from Graulm, and provide enough structure to conduct ourselves in a semi-coherent fashion. Up until that point, Graulm had been acting as the little man behind the curtain to which no one paid attention, but he himself knew intimately the role he played, and his value directing traffic on my behalf. And there was no one to question his authority by proxy, since he alone pulled the strings; I simply danced on his behalf.

So, you can imagine what happened when another influential leader entered the stage, one with a difference in opinion of people than what Graulm held. The effect was not unlike trying to push two magnets together. The positives didn't want to play nice, and neither did the negatives.

1.4. Two Suns in the Sunset

Kerulak and crew make their way through Zul'Gurub (20-Man)

Outlook: Hazy

In the meta game to build up my ranks to 40-man raid size, I was beaten black and blue. Guild leaders were hard to read and size up, especially without seeing them face-to-face. There were no hints, clues, body language to pick up on. Were they bluffing or giving me the straight story? Could I trust them or would they eat my guild up from the inside out, turning my players against me? Were they as skilled as they claimed to be, or were they “face-rollers” -- players who seemed so completely inept and incapable of stringing together a series of abilities that it seemed as if they were literally rolling their faces across the keyboard, randomly pressing a multitude of buttons in the process. The art of negotiation took extreme finesse, I had to listen carefully to what opposing guild leaders meant, which wasn't always the same as what they said. My experience with Juxta proved this: When he said one thing, Atrocity did another. Their raid coordination was non-existent, as was their leadership. I learned an awful lesson about blindly trusting players on the server, in the name of building a raid team, and Descendants of Draenor had a chunk of flesh missing as a result.

I continued on, seeking new faces for our roster, but it was no less difficult to acquire them. Sometimes I thought I had a guild merge wrapped up, only to find out hours later that they had completely changed their mind and gone a different direction, merging instead with a competing guild. It was stressful and exhausting, and required me being online every night, late into each evening. I'd open up new communications with other guilds, survey the landscape of the server, reach out to new players, and try to spread the word that we were the place to be for 40-Man raiding.

This, of course, was a blatant lie. We'd had about as much raid experience as Fred Savage had playing Super Mario 3 at the end of The Wizard: not a whole hell of a lot.

So, the marketing spin continued. Desperately, I lobbied for Descendants of Draenor, in the hopes someone would bite. Meanwhile, I filled the gaps by piecing together a few Molten Core attempts with whom we had left in the roster, though it was never a complete 40-Man group, and although we managed to make our way past the two Molten Giants at the door, we typically didn't make it much further before people had to start logging off for the night.

How in the hell was I going to keep 40 competent players online, on a regular schedule?

I prayed that I would get another opportunity to make a guild merge happen. If it did, I reasoned, it would be the last opportunity I'd get to make it right; if I botched another merge, all would be over for Descendants of Draenor, and any hope of us ever tackling 40-Man raid content would be swept away into the virtual ocean of WoW guilds on Deathwing-US.

I got my wish.

Kerulak, accompanied by newly acquired
members of The Final Cut, lay waste to Zul'Gurub (20)

The Final Cut

A few weeks after the Ugly Black Warhorses incident, I received an email from a player named Darange who said he wanted to have his guild and officers have a chat with our officers about a possible guild merge. They were members of a guild called “The Final Cut”, and I had no knowledge of them or their exploits on the server. I arranged a meeting between both sets of officers, and we would hold an online chat to discuss any questions they might have for us. Going into that chat, I was a wreck. My guild’s roster was slipping away, and the previous few guild merge attempts all ended in stalemates. This one was going to either make or break us, I thought. I wanted to bring ammunition to that meeting, something that could definitively put us ahead of other competing guilds, but kept coming up snake eyes. We had no proven raid experience. I needed something for us to latch on to, to make us appeal to the members of The Final Cut...I just didn't know what.

We met with them and chatted. Introductions were traded, and we talked about our experience with the game, and where we wanted to go. I was struck by how very well organized they were; they came across as very professional. There was no shit talking, no typical “dude” or “bro” or any of that--the conversation was professional and mature. In fact, as the conversation continued, I couldn't get past the feeling that I was being interviewed for a job. And it was at that precise moment that the light went on upstairs:

Hardcore players take raiding seriously. It needs to be approached with a level of professionalism that casuals simply do not possess. If we want to sell ourselves as a successful raiding guild, without having any actual raid boss kills under our belt, we are going to have to demonstrate this level of professionalism.

I immediately steered the conversation towards the work we had put into the planning stages of our raids. I spoke of our DKP system, and how loot issuing would be enforced. I discussed with them the role of the various officers in the raids (before the officers even knew what I was talking about). And when the other guild asked about our existing efforts in Molten Core, I was sure to communicate that, while we hadn't seen wildly amazing success, we had definitely seen progress, and had a system we would follow, refining until bosses fell over dead.

It seemed a bit bizarre to speak about a video game in much the same way I’d describe performing management-related tasks in my career, but everything about successful raiding guilds spoke to that extreme level of dedication and focus. I must have said the right things, because a few days later, I was mass inviting the members of The Final Cut into Descendants of Draenor. It was the last significant assimilation we needed to push us over the edge into 40-Man raid territory. We began testing the waters with this new set of recruits, dipping our toes into the then-new 20-Man instance Zul’Gurub. Initial reports were fantastic. The new recruits gelled so well with our existing roster, that we made huge improvements in our ability to execute content. Prior to the assimilation of The Final Cut, we hadn't even managed to get much further past the first boss (High Priestess Jeklik)...and were now consistently killing Marli, Venoxis, Thekal and Arlokk, with Hakkar (the final boss) in our sights. The dedication and focus to raiding was paying off.

Descendants of Draenor defeat their first boss,
Lucifron, as a complete 40-Man raid team.

Molten Core

One night, while questing around Stranglethorn Vale, my Shaman officer Kadrok sent me a tell:

“Uh, you know we have 40 people online right now?”

I popped open the guild tab, and sure enough, there they all were.

“Wow. We do have 40 people online. We could totally do Molten Core right now.”

Not a second word was spoken. Immediately, the officers began rallying the troops, and players were suddenly being mass invited to a raid. Was this it? Were we about to become what I had set out to accomplish? Actually be the size enough to field a 40-Man raid and be successful at it? The raid roster filled up with 40 players, and we began our flight to The Burning Steppes, headed towards Blackrock Mountain, where the entrance to the Molten Core awaited. The raid chat lit up like a marquee as officers began organizing their groups of players, figuring out who had which position, who would perform what role. One by one, we arrived at the entrance, leaping over a brick ledge and falling into a sea of lava, only to be quickly teleported into the Molten Core. I’ll never forget zoning in with the guildies surrounding me, as we began to buff, get into position, and nervously make that first pull of the two Molten Giants towering above us at the Core’s entrance. I held my breath, and we pulled. The Warriors ran up, shields in hand and grabbed a hold of the gigantic stone creatures, arcane missiles flew, fireballs and shadow bolts cascaded across the cave entrance, lightning shot out of players’ hands, and our health spiked up and down frantically as the healers struggled to keep us all alive, while the Giants pounded our raid into the ground. We continued to volley attacks at the Giants, the tanks struggling to keep them in position, and eventually, the two gigantic creatures made of molten rock fell over dead with a huge crash. We surveyed the results...we weren’t dead! The two Molten Giants lay silent at our feet, and we had survived.

And just like that, we were a raiding guild. On October 12th, 2005, we executed our first 40-Man boss kill, Lucifron, catapulting us into the raiding spotlight in which there would be no turning back. And the speed bumps were only beginning..

1.3. My First Mistake

Elephantine opens up on Shade of Eranikus,
assisted by Hend, Chariot, Stein and Tandr.

Juxta

By late August of 2005, the raiding roster still wasn't where it needed to be. I'd boosted the roster up significantly, and stuck to my guns on keeping our name, and retaining our officership. It was at this time that I was introduced to a player named Juxta. Juxta was doing the exact same thing I was: building up a raiding roster of folks to take on Molten Core, and poaching players from guilds he'd had some ties to. I wasn't clear on the history, only that he had come from Pretty Pink Pwnies, and was looking to construct a more robust raiding machine. His ace in the hole was another player named Atrocity, whom recently formed a new guild and brought Juxta in. Atrocity boasted experience in both leading and managing a raid team. I didn't foresee a merger working with them, so I tried an alternate approach: I began to quietly negotiate with Juxta behind the scenes, because although he wanted changes I was unwilling to compromise on (new guild, shared officership, etc.), I felt it necessary to try to have some kind of back-up plan in the event my guild mergers failed.

Initially, I had a lot of skepticism about dealing with Juxta. We would converse over IM during the day, determining the best course of action regarding schedule, rotations, how to issue loot out, and so on. I'd pitch my stance on DKP vs. Loot Council, he'd concur. Then, I'd find out Atrocity scrapped our mutually agreed upon ideas, in favor of his own. At times, they'd contradict one another: Juxta would track loot by hand, via a spreadsheet, then Atrocity would announce we'd use a mod to import a "DKP string" -- data generated in-game which listed out the details of our loot distribution -- into a website. I continued to negotiate with Juxta and flexed my diplomatic muscle. If I could convince Juxta to see my way on things, I reasoned, he would strong-arm Atrocity into seeing our side. 

Unfortunately, the reverse was becoming true.

As conversations continued between Juxta and I, it became clear that Atrocity was the player in control of this new grass-roots raiding guild, and that Juxta and I were being relegated to mere officership in their proposed structure. Juxta confided in me multiple times that he wished to retain the guild leader position, but it wasn't going to happen. Atrocity was playing favorites to people whom helped form the guild. Was signing a charter a reflection of management experience? Yet it appeared through our discussions that Juxta's players thought he was the Guild Leader. He even went so far as to ask for my vote in determining who the next GL would be. I played the game and assured him I'd be on his side. But his jaded views on loot continued to unnerve me. He claimed running a loot system in his manner "for four months without problems" was a clear indicator that it would succeed. 

Four months wasn't nearly enough time to see the long term negative effects of a poor loot system.

Uld captured in Blackrock Depths.
Also present: Knall, Churaliya, Gutrippa, Sassin,
Chariot, Hend, Yurimaru, and Creepindeath

Ugly Black Warhorses

Juxta claimed that he was fast approaching raid-ready, and wanted new forums setup, along with the loot rules posted for all to see. They had even decided on a name: Ugly Black Warhorses. I felt the guild name left a lot to be desired, but continued to play the role of diplomat and fed him my recommendations; I even went so far as to offer to buy the domain name and set up the website. Besides, owning the domain name was strategic; it might prove useful if I needed leverage down the road. I continued to play the game.

Then, on the evening of September 18th, Juxta dropped a bomb on me. He stated it was time to institute the merge, and we would proceed into Molten Core for our first official unified raid. I had only shared my negotiation strategy with a number of the DoD officers, so my guild was largely unaware of what was about to transpire. I issued out a quick message to those folks that were currently online, stating "not to freak out" and what was about to happen was "only temporary". And just as curious question marks began to arrive in guild chat, I /gquit Descendants of Draenor and accepted an invite to Ugly Black Warhorses, with my officers in tow.

The DoD officers and I sat in this uncomfortable, awkward guild, and a feeling of dread began to sink in. There was absolutely no organization or consistency in communication. People didn't know who was coming, going, in charge of what, or where we even planned to go. Guild chat became an unreadable mess of sentences beginning and ending with "LOL". I whispered over to my DoD officers and sized things up, "this isn't happening." Juxta ordered us up to Molten Core to begin pulling trash, but things fell apart long before we even caught a glimpse of the first boss. As I had suspected, the Ugly Black Warhorses were to become yet another failed guild merger of players unable to coordinate and tackle raid content.

The only problem was: I'd made a terrible mistake in judging how it would affect DoD.

Uld dances next to Jundar and Maergon in Scarlet Monestary.
Jundar would go on to form the guild Horderlies.

The First Exodus

When the officers and I returned to Descendants of Draenor later that night, expressing that...sure enough, it was a failed experiment, and that we were to continue on our own, we were welcomed back with disgust and disappointment. What had been the point of this experiment? Were we really intending on moving forward long-term with Ugly Black Warhorses? Why hadn't the rest of the guild been looped in? What would've happened to DoD had UBW succeeded in Molten Core that night? They were all valid questions, and my guild had every right to know those answers. I had been purposefully ambiguous because I truly didn't know how it would play out. The thought of trying to explain my strategy seemed like it would have confused people, and pissed them off even more. But, keeping silent had the same effect. They felt I betrayed them and their trust. And I had.

I was painted in a new light. The officers may have understood and felt the pain of this failed experiment, but I couldn't say the same for a handful of guildies. They began to challenge the long-term direction of the guild, where we were headed, and even if I was the right person for the job. Passive aggressiveness ensued. Biting remarks and smart-ass comments were directed at me, both in-guild and on the forums. I deserved it. But I didn't it want it to continue. I encouraged those players who truly felt our direction wasn't aligned with their own goals to re-evaluate. So, a handful of them did exactly that.

And so it was, the first exodus of Descendants of Draenor spawned a new guild on Deathwing-US, Horderlies.

I bear no ill-will toward them, because in the end, our goals were different: We wanted to focus more on raid content, they preferred to remain small and casual. But, far more important than that, I wasn't honest with them. They had every right to be looped in on sweeping guild changes, even if my changes had a hidden agenda which favored us in the long term. You reap what you sow. In my attempts to ramp up the guild to an adequate size, I was actually losing people. Things were starting to look grim.

1.2. The Casual and the Hardcore

Kerulak assists in a 15-Man pickup
group or "pug" circa Vanilla,
Upper Blackrock Spire

Casual is Bliss

If you've never played World of Warcraft, there are a wide array of dungeons to explore. These dungeons very typically take 5 players, which consist of a tank (the person responsible for grabbing a hold of a pack of monsters and keeping their attacks focused on him), a healer (a person responsible for keeping the tank from dying), and three miscellaneous players which fall into the category we call “DPS”, which is WoW-speak for “Damage Per Second”. Those three remaining players focus all of their attacks on the monsters, and kill them as fast as they can, before the healer runs out of mana, which in turn, causes the tank to eventually run out of health and die, causing the monsters to turn their attention to the rest of the party, killing them off one by one. This chain of events ultimately leads the entire group of players falling over dead, and having to run back from a graveyard, this is the act of “wiping”.

For seasoned WoW players, this is common knowledge, but what may not be so obvious is that, back in Vanilla, there were a few endgame dungeons that required more than 5 players. Scholomance, for example (a dungeon dedicated to the schooling of dark wizards) wasn't a 5-Man dungeon, it was a 10-Man. And it was not something that was done quickly, it took hours to complete. It took patience and very slow, methodical execution; one wrong move would lead to a wipe, and it could be caused by something as simple as standing 2 ft. to the right of a pack of monsters (“trash” as we call them), rather than 2 ft. backward. Scholomance was an end-game dungeon, and it required everyone to be at the max level (60, at the time), and it was unforgiving to the general populace, because it demanded exquisite control and discipline of your character and the ability to work together.

However, most of the players in World of Warcraft didn't posses this sensibility, having grown accustomed to the lightweight dungeons they experienced during the 1-60 leveling grind. Today, a multitude of online resources exist, that have combed the depths of WoW and provided guides, tutorials, tips and tactics for players, but in Vanilla, these resources simply did not exist. As a result, the majority of the WoW player-base ultimately remained in a sort of “blissful ignorance”, unaware of the game’s depth and mechanics, and didn't have a clue that their skills could be refined, taking their play to an entirely new level. They were forever lost in the illusion of The Matrix, logging in, checking their auctions, cooking virtual food and mixing/matching sets of armor to tweak their character’s costume.

We called these players casuals.

Uld flirts with Maxxum of Dirty Work, Inc.

Eyes Wide Open

Several months into Vanilla, I struck up a friendship with a player named Maxxum. I had tried (unsuccessfully) to recruit him away from his guild on multiple occasions. He was always polite when he refused, but he would still strike up a chat with me whenever possible. One day he invited me to help fill the 10th spot in a Scholomance clear. I wasn't particularly looking forward to another 2 hour dungeon run, but to help break up the monotony, I said I’d come along. When we got into the dungeon, I was still getting adjusted and settling down in my chair, making sure all my macros were set up when the chaos erupted. Like some kind of bat shit crazy insane players, Maxxum and his guild began tearing Scholomance apart. They moved from pack to pack in a blur, having some kind of unspoken system; their efforts were completely synchronized and coordinated. A Rogue would sap one monster, stunning in position, a Priest would shackle another undead minion, locking it in place. All of the players then focused their attacks onto a single monster at once, the remaining targets left alone, incapacitated. With everyone beating on a single monster at once, it was annihilated.

Maxxum and his guild had a system, and it was like nothing I had experienced before. It was fast, efficient, disciplined. Each member of the team was mindful of every piece of info available to them; where they needed to stand -- the tank facing the mobs away from the party, while the melee DPS positioning themselves carefully behind each target, thereby reducing dodges and parries. The healer took a proactive approach to each pack, contributing to crowd-control, winding up large heals in preparation for big damage, then cancelling if the heal wasn't needed, thus conserving mana. When we walked out of there 45 minutes later, I was stunned. I'd never seen a group of players clear Scholomance in under 2 hours. There was a term that WoW players used to describe this level of dedication to the game, this expert-like knowledge of the game's mechanics, which led to a flawless execution of content.

We called these players hardcore.

Having experienced both ends of the spectrum, I knew that Descendants of Draenor would have to lean less into casual and more into hardcore, in order to truly stand out and provide a respectable, successful home for players on our server. I wanted to know what it would take to get my guild to this level. When questioned, Maxxum gave me two words as a response: Molten Core. I didn't know what it was, only a few people in my guild seemed to have a idea, it was something that was referred to as raid content. But it wasn't just like any dungeon we had explored before, it would require surgical coordination to execute correctly. And it would require a few more players than 10 to run...

...it would take 40 players.

I’ll never forget the last piece of advice Maxxum threw my way: “Watch out for that first pull. It's a doozy.” I started to do research. I snuck into a few Molten Core attempts that had been pieced together by random players in Orgrimmar, thinking they would have enough leadership and coordination to make a few pulls. Those attempts all failed miserably...at the first pull. I would watch as the two towering Molten Giants guarding the entrance would stomp forward, shaking the ground, and bashing the pathetic members of the raid into oblivion. Tanks would fall over dead in one hit, healers would be out of mana in seconds, and players ran around in a panic, trying desperately to get away from the Giants. And one by one, the raid was destroyed. It was embarrassing to see players this incoherent. There was no way I was going to let this content go unfinished. My guild had cleared everything in the game thus far, and it was time to make the leap...the leap to hardcore.

Kerulak surveying the guild roster as he
continues to assimilate guilds during Vanilla

Resistance is Futile

The plan to shift Descendants of Draenor into a new mentality of hardcore raiding seemed very daunting. I wasn't really very sure how we would pull it off, so I began simply in bite-sized chunks. The first order of business: mass guild assimilation. I hiked up my recruitment and began negotiating talks with other guilds on our server who were also interested in starting raids. Guild assimilation was very cut-throat. I was constantly competing with other guilds who were trying to do the very same thing: promise great rewards with absolutely no proof of experience. These competing “raiding” guilds hadn't set foot in Molten Core either.

Said they had. They. Had. Not. 

I had to find a way to make my guild stand out from all the others, even without a track record in the instance. So, I used what I knew we had under our belt as leverage. We were a solid team of passionate individuals, and we had explicitly laid out the most fair and just treatment to all our raiders. We even had a DKP system in place (rules describing how loot is issued out) before even setting foot in Molten Core, having researched this by reading blue posts on the Battle.net forums, taking their advice, ultimately leading us to other successful raiding guilds on other servers (notably, Elitist Jerks of Mal’Ganis-US). I had to make a lot of gut instinct decisions when deciding who to go forward with, and who to hold on, but I stuck to my guns on the most important fundamentals: I wanted players with honesty and integrity, who were respectful to each other, and who would demonstrate loyalty. And the one thing I would not back down on is: I would not give up our guild name. Our guild name would remain unchanged, and our core leadership would always be retained. Many other guilds decided to merge, form new names, and bring officers from both sides. They very rarely worked out; drama and power-struggles often caused these guild merges to end in collapse. We wouldn't follow suit. We would retain our identity. This was simply a non-negotiable for me.

Guild mergers, as I would discover, were not so easy to facilitate. Desperation would lead me to make a decision that would cause the first mass exodus of Descendants of Draenor, and almost cost me the guild in its entirety.

1.1. First Steps

Part I: Vanilla

"Gear doesn't make a bad player good."

World of Warcraft login screen,
during the Vanilla ('04-'07) era
Copyright 2004 © Blizzard Entertainment

The Gamer

Let me make something perfectly clear: EverQuest. fucking. sucked. I squandered four months of my life wandering Norrath trying to establish just what it was, exactly, that everyone found so "revolutionary". It looked awful. The game was brutally unforgiving -- death was unnecessarily punitive, wiping away days of experience. Investment was demanding, hour upon hour of tedious grinds in a less-than-exciting world, and the eventual payoffs were laughable, at best. Huge risk. No reward. I remember being up late one night, standing on a frozen plateau overlooking Everfrost Peaks, and thinking to myself, what the hell am I doing here? I've played this game for four months. I have nothing to show for it. I don’t know anyone online. I haven't met anyone in-game. I don’t know what my goal is. I've barely leveled at all (I was 21)...and I have absolutely no interest in pursuing this further.

EverQuest's publisher (Sony Online Entertainment) made the decision to cancel very easy. Every move they made was textbook of how not to treat your customers. Server crashes would result in massive losses of experience (and therefore, played time), yet no official ever stepped up, apologies, took responsibility, or offered us any kind of refund. Oh. Yeah. About that. We messed up. Tough shit. See you in game. SOE showed me truly selfish and shallow a corporate enterprise could be. When I closed my EQ account, I vowed never to play another MMO again.

Meh, I gave it a solid attempt, but honestly, MMOs weren't for me. I'd been playing video games since childhood, priding myself on my console collection. At its peak, I had a NES, a Sega Master System, a SNES, a Sega Genesis (plus Sega CD), a Turbo-Grafx 16, a 3DO, and even a NeoGeo. When it came to video games, I didn't fuck around. Fighting games were my choice du jour, back in the day, but honestly, I played a little bit of everything: platformers, racing games, puzzles, shooters, RPGs, hell I'd even play a sports game...if it was good. But I nerded out like nobody I knew. Instead of reading comics, I read video game manuals; instead of popular music of the day, I was recording video game music and listening to it on my walkman. Even the nerds that knew me were taken aback. I took this shit seriously.

As I left high school and headed to college, PC gaming...and a new genre...took over: FPS. First, it was DooM, and then with the discovery of the Internet at my local college campus, Quake soon followed. I built a Quake clan and had regular LAN parties that went until all hours of the morning. We played CounterStrike and Team Fortress until we couldn't keep our eyes open. It was at these LAN parties that I was first exposed to another genre of game: RTS.

Kael'thas confers with Lady Vashj after arriving in Outland,
Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

The Gamble

I was enthralled. So much was going on at once, it felt like a human being couldn't keep track of it all...and yet, they did. I watched as my friends played Warcraft II games that culminated in massive attacks, collaborative defense, and tactical advances that slowly edge the game in their favor. It was too late for me to jump on the Warcraft II and Starcraft bandwagon by that time, so once I heard that Warcraft III was in development, I hit the books, hard.

Scouring online forums revealed a level of depth I hadn't really seen in a PC game. The expansiveness of the story, the characters, the plots...this was far more than a similar orcs vs. humans. I was continually stunned by the artwork -- the early Metzen and Didier sketches were so stylized and unique. There was never enough.

Every time I came across something new buried in the Blizzard fandom, I felt drawn toward the franchise. At the release of Warcraft III, I dove in, played through the campaign religiously, watched as the Humans continually ignored the pleas of Medivh about the return of The Burning Legion. It disgusted me. I watched as Thrall took the "bad guys" and constructed the Horde, built Orgrimmar, vowing to fight oncoming invaders. It invigorated me. I watched Arthas fall and become The Lich King; I watched Illidan hunt him while he himself was hunted by Maiev. I built small cities on the fields of Lordaeron, the red dirt of Outland, and the frozen wastes of Northrend. I did it all...and I wanted more.

So, when Blizzard announced their next entry in the Warcraft franchise...my heart sunk.

World of Warcraft? An MMO? Made by people who loved EverQuest?

I'd played video games my entire life -- and I knew what was fun; EQ was the very antithesis of enjoyment. And how that company treated their fans? Would Blizzard be the same? I was very uninterested in pursuing that experience all over again.

So, I had to take a very big gamble.

~~

World of Warcraft was released at the end of November of 2004, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My only previous experience in an MMO had ended in disaster. Once the chaotic servers stabilized after an insanely unprepared launch of the game, Blizzard went out of their way to apologize for the instability. I remember being surprised by this stance. What? A company that cares about its customers? Willing enough to accept responsibility for their lack of preparedness and even issue refunds as an act of good faith?

There were other little signs that World of Warcraft (and Blizzard) would do things a little differently. They took great pains to enforce appropriate names, and even had system built into the interface to allow the reporting of any observed names in violation of the rules. Wow. A company that gives a shit about rules...and actually enforcing them? For the sheer volume of trolls (the gamers, not the race) online, looking to push the envelope as far as they can in every opportunity possible, it was a nice thought to see a company attempting to care. But would they go the distance?

I decided to test this apparent integrity by getting into a routine where where I would catch shitty names, quickly /friend them (adding them to a personalized list of contacts in game), then report their inappropriate names to Blizzard. Then, I would sit back and watch. Sure enough, in less than 24 hours, I would log back in and see the person's name fixed -- renamed to something more appropriate.

Impressive! And...my condolences to "Loves2Sp00ge69". Sorry about getting your name changed.

It was, of course, because Blizzard was different. They did care. At one point, at least. But we'll get into that later.

Kerulak prepares to accept signatures for the

creation of the guild Descendants of Draenor,

Thunder Bluff

The Guild

So, there I was. Back inside a game I swore I'd never set foot in again. Well, I thought, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to set myself up for success. I'll play by the MMO rules, if that's what it'll take.

It became obvious, pretty early on, that I would have to band together with others in-game -- done by forming what is referred to as a "guild" -- in order to get anything accomplished. And creating a guild starts with choosing a name.

Names meant a lot to me; I felt strongly that the first impressions you get after reading a guild name would speak volumes about the folks comprising the guild. And although it might be a kick-in-the-pants to name a guild "FAILURES AT LIFE", I couldn't help but feel like it was a direct reflection of the guild mentality. I wanted my guild to attract a different type of player, one who shared my nerdy love of the Warcraft universe; who would read our guild name, and say to themselves "Ah, clever! Someone knows their Warcraft shit!"

I dug deep into the lore, looking for a clue. The gang of misfits I rolled with all agreed that we would take up the cause of the Horde and fight for the Orcs and their allies, since they were the ones to take a stand against The Burning Legion in Warcraft III -- we chose honor over hubris. Victory...or death.

Back in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, I remember that the Orcs came from another world, one now ravaged and torn by conflict. This broken, barren wasteland was referred to as Outland, but before its destruction, it bore another name: Draenor. It was this name of the Orc home world that struck a chord with me. What better way to identify with the cause of the Horde, originally driven by the Orcs, than to take the name which defined their origins? And with the Tauren, the Forsaken, and the Trolls aligned with the Orcs to form the "evil" faction in the game, the Horde carried on the tradition of those first Orcs that burst through The Dark Portal from Outland into Azeroth. We were the Horde, and we were their descendants.

And so it was, that on that day of November in 2004, we became known as Descendants of Draenor.

It would still be awhile before we set foot into the unexpected territory known as 40-man raiding. You have to crawl before you can walk. And for me, crawling meant not only leveling to 60, but ensuring each member of the guild did as well...without clawing each other's throats out.