a guild of their own

It’s amazing how many people I know who play World of Warcraft. Even Shamus is getting sucked back in 🙂

I was thinking aloud a while back about how I’d love to start a guild named for Haibane Renmei. Most of my toons are Alliance, so I think a Horde guild would be fresher, and I have one alt on Staghelm I’d be willing to move to just about anywhere. The question is, is anyone else interested? The focus would be to stock a bank for leveling alts and grouping for end-game raids.

The main question is what server is would be, ideally a PvE server in CST to make it maximally convenient for everyone to be online roughly at the same time. I’d welcome suggestions as to what server we should pick. How many of you would be willing to bring a Horde toon or start a new one if we got this rolling? chime in on comments…

(as far as Cata content goes, like everyone else I am itching to play a Worgen, but for my Alliance toons I am content to stay on Staghelm as that’s where a lot of my friends are.)

UPDATE: We are officially Haibane Renmei on Blackhand! Here is the official Guild page.

60 thoughts on “a guild of their own”

  1. I was looking at the server list and I think the Chicago datacenter would be best since it’s centrally located and thus we would have decent latency for people joining the guild on either the west or the east coast. Picking a server in Boston or LA would hurt the guildies on the opposite side.

    There is actually only one RP server (non-PvE) in Chicago on CST, Kirin Tor. RP might be a lot of fun, and hopefully the idiots will be fewer there. Anyone have any comment about Kirin Tor as an option?

  2. no role play plzzzz ….. pve is best, for AH and the new ranked battlegrounds.
    rp servers have weak economies and very few pvpers.
    we will be able to do decent 10 man pve. the drops will be the same in Cata for 10 and 25.
    i check out the battlegroups for chicago datacenter pve servers.
    i want to make a worgen like willow….alliance please?

  3. i guess if others are more interested in ally then i am willing too. but i dont know much about the end game content – you will have to educate me.

    as far as RP vs pve i have no clue really about these issues. But from my experieence everything on staghelm’s AH is way overpriced. I would have intuitively thought that a rp server would have mroe reasonable pricing, but i guess i could be wrong. where do you learn all this from?

  4. I agree, PVE over RP…I am of two minds on the Ally vs. Horde thing. I think making a Horde guild is a better idea because we’d already have 2 Horde chars at 80 (and another approaching 80 if you race-changed your warrior). When Cata comes out we’d be making worgen from scratch, so getting into one of the established Ally leveling guilds with a good GB might actually be better than having to feed them out of the pockets of our own mains. And if worst came to worst, there’s always money laundering via the neutral AHs, which is even easier now that there’s cross-faction chat.

    Plus, pre-Cata, the Horde is getting awesome new content: a huge q-line to help the newly emerged troll druids retake the Echo Isles. That would be fun to do as a guild. And in Cata the Horde capitals are getting really nice (and much needed) facelifts, so hanging out at the Orgrimmar gates will potentially be a more aesthetic experience.

  5. At the end of the day, however, I could go either way. I would be willing to race-change the troll for the good of posterity. Though I would shed a small tear.

  6. I am definitely up for it! I started a new char on Staghelm for the moment anyway: Dawood, an Orc Warrior (never been one before, only other toon is a retri pally) so feel free to add me to help out or just chat etc.

    The time difference might be an issue as I am in Eastern Australia, but we can work something out I am sure. =)

  7. i like blackhand, greymane, and stormrage and hellscream so far.
    blackhand is my fav, good horde alli ratio, and its in the rampage battlegroup with illidan. stormrage is the highest ranked tho…but in Ruin battlegroup that i dont know well.
    ima make a toon and check the AH out.

  8. Sweet, if any of you are around Steghelm, say hello… my toon name is the same as mine here 😀

  9. Woah! I’m amazed you’re able to get a playable connection with Staghelm all the way from Australia. I assume you guys usually use the Asia Pacific servers?

    I’m adding your char now…

  10. I am in Org right now and around Durotar – have all the low level questing to do once again. If we can get something set up, I might transfer my main toon from Nagrand (a blood elf retri pally)

  11. There are east aussie timezone servers….off the LA datacenter tho.
    Bloodlust and Vengence battle groups.
    Do we have easterners?
    I didnt care for Stag as a server..its way weak in progression guilds.
    good progression guilds make it easier to do random dungeons and bgs, and put gold into the economy, and make for fab learning pugs for us scrubs. Stag is 126 in realm progression rank, greymane is 49.
    stormrage is eastern time zone but 26 in rank. blackhand is 56.

  12. well….im flexible about faction change.
    basically we need a good tank to form a guild.
    the rest will come.
    so if Aziz wants to tank, we should all endeavor to please him :).
    my main toons are all healers (druid, shammy, priesty, pali) with dps offspecs, except the priesty that has discipline pvp as offspec.

  13. and….when we pick a server we need a guild website so we can have theorycrafting forums and resource threads for addons and wow news.
    imam, i think we could be a mostly muslim guild, but we will get trolled if we advertise it.
    🙂
    and i have always thought Haibane Renmei is the most beautiful name for a guild evah….Ash Feather Federation. but it isn’t very islamic.

  14. Some quick thoughts,

    Horde seems better from willows assessment above, esp for Cata.

    My pally can tank, def. But everyone should try to have at least one tank spec toon.

    Greymane would be a great setverr name for ash feathers 🙂

  15. I have a troll hunter at 80 and wouldn’t mind starting a warrior or something so we have more tanks. It sounds like we’d be set for healers. If Dawood has a ret palli that’s almost a full quorum for 5-mans. So I guess the main thing now is deciding on a server. If Matoko likes Greymane or Blackhand we can investigate those.

  16. Server change would be fine by me, the main thing I am concerned about is the time difference and if we can all get game time etc. together. My pally is basically set up as DPS for both PvE and PvP (on offspec). I play a lot of Wintergrasp and do the random BG’s most days I have time. I’ve also wanted to do arena but not had enough game time to get decent enough at duelling to last long enough in there. 😛

    I have some purples for both tanking and healing in my bank (that is BoP), but have not really used it yet. I played around with tanking for a while before I settled on the PvP spec though never had good enough gear to keep the agg on heroics but did fine in norms.

    Anyway, this could be fun 🙂 In the meantime I will keep trying to level my warrior and doing the dailys on my main toon so I can save Seals and Emblems to get BoA gear in case I make an alt (or even for this warrior).

    Hopefully will see you all around some time!

  17. By the way, for those who are on Staghelm, what’s your toons names? Mine there is Dawood.

  18. My troll is Elonwy. 🙂

    Greymane looks great in terms of progression but the Ally: Horde ration is 2.2:1 according to Wowwiki. Would that hurt us?

  19. I think Matoko is right and Blackhand would be the best bet. Slightly higher Horde pop than Ally pop but not so extreme as to make things boring…it’s classified as a high population realm but according to Realm Stats it has roughly the same number of players as Staghelm.

  20. I will defer to your collective judgement on it all – I don’t know much about all of that stuff. Once we can arrange something, I (we?) can either begin new toons (you guys tell me what our guild would need, happy to learn to play any role) or I could probably transfer my 80 over.

    On Staghelm I have approx 550ms latency, which is definitely not bad, although have not done an instance or bg yet. I would assume that it would be similar on other US servers too, so that’s fine.

  21. Ally: Horde ration is 2.2:1 according to Wowwiki. Would that hurt us?
    it makes WG and bg randoms unfun…..
    >:(
    blackhand is the highest server rank with a near 1:1 horde alli ration.
    rampage is good becuz Illidan is in the battlegroup.
    Illidan is the best pvp server in all the reams and the #2 US realm in progression.
    some very good players there.

  22. Are you on Staghelm too Shams? And what about this RealID thing they are rolling out – would it be useful for us right now? (Happy to share my email address with you guys but I have heard a lot of players have complained about the whole setup)

  23. im very leery of realid.
    i think its an invitation to getting your account hacked.
    ima wait a bit before i use it….to see if the hackers exploit it.
    i think i might have a low lvl toon there still….ill check.

  24. something I missed earlier – I am NOT interested in a “muslims only” guild. Islam does not exiist in Azeroth; it’s irreevant (and this is sort of the reason I was interested in a RP server to be honest. I hate crossing baggage over. I go to Azeroth to escape this world for a while.)

    I dont care if youre muslim or not, and thats irrelevant to me when I play. It certainly has nothing to do with this guild idea.

    Though if there were a muslim guild, it would have to be Horde, admittedly. But this Horde guild (and yeah, lets decide for final now, it’s Horde) is not that guild.

  25. I’ll confess that the talk about server progression, batlegroups, and whatnot is over my head. If someone wants to explain it to me that would be great 🙂

    Im also not clear on what difference the horde-alliance ratio makes. You cant start a bg until both sides are equally staffed, right? And staghelm has a pretty even ratio, but horde seems to always win. so its probably not directly relevant.

    Also i am unclear on where these statistics are coming from. If they are from blizzard’s own database we can trust them, but if they are from polling plugins, then thats not scientific . Even a statistical census needs to be truly random; installing a plugin is self-selection.

    Im not against this server or that. Im just saying, lets not make decisions on bad data. As far as I am concerned, the choice of server is just a detail (but that could be my ignorance speaking – see my first sentence in this comment above). We’ve picked Horde, and have a cool name, and I even have a Tabard design 🙂 we are almost ready to roll!

    though, we are gonna need a few 80s to help us fund our guild bank tabs. my highest horde toon is only lvl 26 so I am useless here.

  26. My highest horde toons are 80, 74, 63, and 58, but my wife would raise holy heck if I moved any of them to another server; I would have to roll new toons.

  27. I have to say, your avatar captures the feeling from your post perfectly Anachronda – lol! (I know it only too well) I am happy rolling new toons as well – it could be fun, and I don’t know about you guys, but I missed out on a lot of content when “rushing” to reach 80 – but it would still be nice to have a few 80’s around to help out if need be, and for the gold issue. I don’t know what the proposed servers are like economy wise, but being a new toon is hard these days without a little gold!

  28. ok – Aelasha is being transferred as we speak to Blackhand!

    I am creating a lowlevel alt to start the paperwork on blackhand for the guild. Anachronda – if your wife has any horde toons, maybe you can both pick one to come over? 🙂

    if not, then rolling a new one would be fun, too right?

    btw my new 1st level toon on blackhand is Mmiselle

  29. Hordies it is!!
    Anachondra (way cool name btw)
    bring your wife.
    😉
    ill bring an 80 holy/disp priest, a 40 something tauren druid (recycled twink), a 64 unholy belf DK, and i have a 61 draeni resto shammy ill turn troll so’s i can pal around with willow.
    i cant bear to make my main druid into a tauren…….mebbe after Cata.

  30. Otaku Kun, the realm ranks are compiled from progression stats….like how many onserver guilds have heroic ICC 25man content.
    the top guilds leverage content for the rest of us, in randoms, in VoA, in pugs.
    its equally boring to always win or always loose in bgs.
    i like a good fight with matched fighters.
    it will be hard for me to go horde…..i built alli twinks the whole first year i played.
    😉
    Death to the Horde!

  31. My wife pretty much refuses to leave Icecrown, so I won’t be able to bring her over. I’ll roll up a toon or two sometime this evening. Maybe even a DK so I don’t have to start everything at 1…

  32. Ok sweet, I will start a new toon on Blackhand when I get home tonight then. Any preference on what I should create? I have only ever been a dps Pally really, although in “vanilla WoW” I did play a troll hunter and a tauren druid for a bit – though never got beyond level 40 back then (which was seen as an awesome level then too – how times have changed!).

    I am happy to go anything, though don’t have experience being either a clothie or DK though am willing to learn from y’all.

  33. OK, I’ve rolled up a couple: Orcmart (bank), Thwacktress (DK), and Clawedette (Rogue).

  34. Ok, I signed guild charter 4 times. Will be a casual in this guild, because as hubby said, I’m on Icecrown in full force with 40 character there. 🙂

    And hello to all my newest friends!

  35. Wow exciting, I will try and find you all probably tomorrow your time, but will add everyone’s toon names on here tonight hopefully. I’m still not sure what role I should play, I am happy to start another pally (though maybe tank/heals this time?) or something completely different for a change. Depends on what you guys think we need, as you all seem to have a lot more experience at this than I have. My one toon feels incredibly puny to your 40 lol!

  36. My troll has been moved to Blackhand (all my macros were deleted in the process! 🙁 sad face) and signed the charter. So we now have one 80. Would be nice to get a couple more…

  37. So that explains why it appeared to take so long in Nexus and Oculus today then lol!
    I will see if I can transfer over in the coming weeks, due to me being broke atm. I am happy to start a new character in the meantime so will hopefully see you all there tomorrow. Trust me to need to go into school the one day this week everyone is active! 🙂

  38. On a philosophical note, I believe Islam does exist in Azeroth, because if God is the Lord of all the Worlds, that includes the world of fiction and simulacra. The real debate is whether religious law holds in that simulacra or not (I favor not). Ie, when an avatar eats a fictional piece of pork, or gets drunk off of digital wine, has a sin been committed?

    As a writer I enjoy these kinds of thought experiments…

  39. Snugglybunny – sorry for leaving you on Echo Isle so suddenly tonight. I wasnt booted, my PC actually crashed with a boot disk error. I tried for 20min to get it back on but cant boot at all. Will have to hope it relents overnight and lets me diagnose 🙁

    but a warlock and mage make a great combo, eh? was fun while it lasted 🙂

  40. do manmade worlds count under All the Worlds? this s sort of like that Tolkien essay on Sub-creation (and accompanying short story, Leaf by Niggle)

  41. Yes, because Man can’t actually create anything in the primal sense. He can think it up, and make up some rules, but there is no such thing as a world, simulated or not, that is outside divine control. A war–or even an extended power outage, or a mass outbreak of disinterest–in the US would wipe Azeroth out of existence forever. It’s not independent.

    And Tolkien never suggested you could dodge God through fiction. Quite the opposite. By subcreation he simply means a story that requires no external reference point to understand. Ie, one with no literary allusion that requires you to have read other books in order to understand this book. But the point of subcreation in his own work–as well as Lewis’s–was to prove that you could create a *Christian* ethos without reference to the Gospels. God is very much in charge of both Middle Earth and Narnia, and designedly so.

  42. Its a conspiracy, I tell you. First my PC has boot issues, now this?

    All realms originally scheduled to be live at 7:00 AM PDT are currently undergoing additional authentication maintenance. As this maintenance affects the authentication process which occurs during log in to Battle.net, access to Battle.net Account Management and forum posting may be unavailable at this time.

    We anticipate that maintenance will complete and these realms will be live and playable by approximately 1:00 PM PDT. We apologize for the delay and are working to have all realms and website services online as soon as possible.

    um, originally scheduled for 7am and now delayed to 1pm? thats airline territory.

  43. We will be extending this maintenance until 2:00PM PDT.
    Wymdar
    Blizzard Entertainment

    yeah.

  44. We broke WoW. o.O

    Is there a patch coming out this week or is this just regular maintenance?

  45. I’m not sure, it seems to be connected to authentication and the like for us, as our selected server wasn’t on the list of those going down for expansions. Maybe it’s all the scammers and hackers who broke WoW? 😛

  46. Does anyone still have any toons on Staghelm they are planning to transfer? I have around 18g on my new toon there that I made in the last few days – there is no point in me transferring him over, but the gold could be useful!

  47. DITTO if anybody’s still got Staghelm toons they’re planning to transfer please speak up. I foolishly failed to send my bank alt’s gold/stuff with my main, and I don’t want to pay $25 to transfer a bank alt.

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