Ganking guild rules and guidelines

Update: the ganking project ended, do not apply.
Since there are no weekend posts anymore, I use the space here to post the rules and guidelines of the guild both to specify it to members and wannabe members, and to show the readers how and why we work.

Recruitment is permanent. You can join any time.

Invitation: everyone gets invited, unless his character name is retarded or offensive (or has no clue what kind of guild we are just wants a tag). "Offensive" means a term that is dirty or racist or something like that IRL. "Retarded" will be defined below. This is a crucial rule, and I think one of the largest mistake of good guilds. "Applications" can be copy&pasted, and besides terrible morons, everyone can act like an intelligent being during an interview. So the application process is just extra work for everyone, unable to catch the non-complete-retards but great to exclude those who are not really good in expressing themselves or just not too good with English.

Kicking: anyone who violates the below rules gets warning(s) and if does not fix his error, kicked. I see it the second biggest problem of guilds, in connection with the first. If you got in (and survived initiation period), you can do practically anything (besides really terrible behavior) and get away with it. Not here. I don't care if you are a founding member and a good player, if you violate the rules, you are out.

Retarded behavior: if you act this way, you're out! It mostly apply to the guild chat, as it is the place where retarded behavior hits the guild. If you like to tea-bag ganked hordies, it's not punished, despite it's completely stupid and childish. The guild chat on the other hand is the main information exchange of the guild and must be protected. So "lol", "rolf", "ftw", "ffs", "I pwned som n00b", AlTeRnaTiNgCaSe, insults, dirty words (#$%@#$%#) and terrible grammar are not tolerated. Of course in a chat I don't expect perfectly formed sentences, especially since English is not native language for many, but "can som1 mak me som enchats" does not fly. So I'd like to implement rule #1 from EJ.

Answering to ganked hordies in an offensive manner. If the ganked hordie makes a lvl1 ally and start whispering you, you must not be offensive with him, even if he is extremely offensive with you. We don't sink to the level of crybabies. Simply inform him about the option of the server transfer and /ignore. Or, be completely polite and screenshot the conversation. The commenters responded very badly to the end of "morons of the week", I might start a new column, "crybabies of the week".

IRL things: (aka "meg fox is soo hot lol"). No way! We are from different backgrounds and here for one and only thing: we like to play this game. We may have different purposes (like I am fighting the social behavior), but that does not belong to the guild chat. You may like soccer. Or movies. Or Megan Fox. But others may not and chatting about these are pointless spam to them at best, and alienating, excluding environment at worst. So don't! Of course you can talk about whatever you want in party chat, whisper or create some own channel. I don't care if you make the /megfoxtits channel if that's your heart's desire. But don't force other 50 people to read it.

No gz! As you progress in the game, you perform great, unique achievements, like reaching lvl 10, get a mount, or a pet. Blizzard decided to inform us from these. It's annoying enough on its own, but also useful as it keeps us updated where your progress stands (unfortunately there is no such option as "display only achievements that a brain-dead baboon cannot get"). However increasing the litter on chat by 10 lines of "gratz" is absolutely unnecessary and annoying. If you find the achievement really great, congratulate in whisper!

Absolutely no drama! If you don't like someone, don't play with him. No one forces you to group with him. You can even put him on ignore. But if you start "Jhonny said bad things about me" or "Melanie did not pass [item] for me when I asked", you are out! This is a very strongly enforced rule, extreme cases can result in kick without warning. If you think someone in the guild harmed you (harming means causing damage, saying things does not count, we are not in kinder garden), come to me in whisper, and I may fix the situation (or more likely tell you to just /ignore him). You can get kicked for making drama even if you were right! I mean if you spam the gchat "Melanie warlock ninjaed my melee dagger", you and Melanie both go.

No terrible playing! You can be new to the game or the class or the role. You may need more time practicing. We are tolerant and helpful for gaming mistakes. But you must improve, and this improvement is your responsibility and yours only. Repeating the error again and again after someone pointed it out is no go. Neither gemless-enchantless lvl80 gear. Even better leveling pieces deserve gems/enchants. Damaging below the healer, not being able to use core class abilities (rogue unable to kick spellcaster) are no go. If you are unsure, ask, read, practice! Refusing helpful advice in a defensive manner gets you kicked ("don't tell me how to play").

No communist collective! You are not required to travel to the other end of the world just to craft something to a guildy. You are not required to craft for a guildy free, since leveling your prof had costs and opportunity cost of not having one more gatherer prof. You are not required to pass BoE items to a guildy. You are not required to remove your item from the AH and sell it to a guildy for discount. Your guildy has no monopoly rights on any segment of the AH. You are absolutely not required to boost a guildy. Of course you can still do it. But discuss it in whisper. Asking for any of the above on /gchat is forbidden. If you seek a crafter, offer him fee. He will most probably reject it, but it is his right to take it.

Ganking guideline: you can of course gank lowbies for fun. But that does not count. To give the players personal incentive, I will post ganking hall of fame, where World PvP HK - World PvP Deaths * 20 is listed. At the start prepare for some negative numbers. If you move in larger group, everyone of you get the HK (like the timbermaw rep), and the chance of death decrease.

Hi/bye guideline: Everyone can see if you are online or not. If they are especially interested, they can switch on an interface option to notify them if guildies come online/offline. No need to spam the chat with 10 lines of hi/bye! So if you write "Hi all!" and get no response, they don't hate you, they just don't spam the gchat.

Alt guideline: Complete your main before you start an alt. If you changed your mind and want other class, quit with the old one. The reason is simple: I don't want to inflate the list on the armory with zillion alts. One char = one active player. The same thing explains why everyone kicked after a month inactivity. If you just had to leave the game for whatever reason, you can come back when you are active again.

This post will be augmented when new problems emerge. Feel free to ask and discuss.

Worse than zero

Ganking update: we already have 65 accounts and need more. If you are up to some serious ganking, join!

I had my worst instance. Ever. It beats UK HC by a mile where I did 55% of the damage in blue gear in the presence of a full T9 (petless 0/0/71) hunter. It was Wailing Caverns with an OK tank, and a tolerable DPS paladin. The other 2 slots were rotated between hellspawn retards. We couldn't finish it in 2 hours.

The fun thing is that I soloed the same place on lvl 19 and I was lvl 19 with the group. Assuming I did not forget to play in the time between, what the hell could happen? I mean if I can solo it and we add more players, no matter how small their contribution is, we shall finish faster.

And it would be true if "bad player" would simply mean what it says: bad player: someone who is bad in the game mechanics. A petless hunter. A melee mage. A totemless enhancement shaman spamming lightning bolt. A rogue who does not use finishing moves. A restodruid using no hots. A spirit cloth geared warrior.

But what about the 2H wielder tank pulling 4 packs and yelling "FFS YOU N00B HEALER DO YOUR FCKIN JOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"? How about the guy who pulls while the healer has 0 mana and spammed a macro "Please don't pull, I need to drink mana or I cannot heal!"? How about the healer who simply does not heal, and claims "if I hit them too, they die fast, I heal you after combat", after repeatedly asked to heal in combat? How about the guy who jumps up and down around spamming "go lol" while others are discussing the strat and in his merry jumping he falls down the edge into a big pack of monsters? How about the guy who must be put to /ignore since he spams the chat with nonsense about some TV show or IRL or whatever in his stoned/wasted mind?

Are the above (and endless other) activities belongs to bad playing?

These people have negative skill, meaning that the group would progress better in their absence than with them. How can it be possible? A game skill cannot be less than zero. You start the game with zero knowledge and you learn. It can only be a positive number.

Because it's not about playing skill. It's about certain IRL human skills that are so obvious to us as breathing or reading. Oh wait, half of the planet is illiterate. When we imagine a complete newbie, we automatically assume he has the human skills needed to do any group activity, like having a functional brain, being able to read (as the communication is written), exchange ideas, listen to reason, share observations, express opinion clearly and don't be abusive.

The filth in that Wailing run definitely lacked these. They were not bad players. They were simply useless people.

Of course a social would say they were just new to the game and lacked the gear to perform better (see anonymous comment at 11:53). Let's boost them more! I say the game is so simple that no one can be bad in it unless he lacks IRL skills. Those who suck are simply worthless people who deserve rejection and exclusion from our groups. Let's give them the greatest possible punishment: force them to be with similar filth. I would love to see 5 such M&S together in an instance. Or trying to produce food for themselves IRL without welfare.

Opps, almost forgot the most important: how can you protect yourself from such beings? Join a decent guild or at least have a friend list of good players. Go to LFD only if there are 3 of you, so you have the kick ability. While LFD still will give you bad players who are carried by you, at least you can kick those who are worse than zero.

Trading in a dead economy

One of the points of the ganking plan is trading and living in a practically dead economy. On the alliance side there are 1.8-2.1K items in the AH. Many items are missing or terribly overpriced. The quantities are small. The professional goldfarmers are missing, so don't expect 10 pages of icethorn from the same seller.

At first, the above situation is anything but tragedy. In WoW, most services are provided by vendors. Of course that needs gold, and as lowbies you don't have it. However as lowbie you don't have high needs. You may want 4 frostweave bags, but 4 8-slot bags are enough for a lowbie. So survival is not a problem. Also, I send 20G to every lvl19, so no one has to walk on his feet.

However the lack of trading opportunities threaten us with terrible fate: we may have to farm our gold or tradeskill materials. That's of course inacceptable to any goblin, at least in the HC form: flying over and over for nodes or doing dailies. None of us can fall so deep! Of course I encourage every leveling players to get at least one, or rather 2 gathering professions, to pick the herbs/ores/skins where he already is.

Of course we can use the neutral AH. That's what I did when I rolled Gevlon here. I traded ally-only pets and cooking recipes. Now I intensified the same business, asking my GF to create chars here, so I list the items on the neutral AH for low, she buys it on a horde alt, trade face to face to my horde alt, and I list it on the horde AH. But this is a very limited market, and besides these ally-only vendor items, we have nothing to offer to the horde that they couldn't get. On the top of that, they can get everything more efficiently, since the bigger market means higher specialization. If we also mention PvP, meaning we always have to look over our shoulder and they do not, it's obvious that any item can be gained faster by a hordie than by us.

Such neutral trade can still be efficient in a sense that it's still better than any other option. However I don't think we could gain significant amount of gold selling things to the hordies. On the other hand it can be pretty efficient to gain items from the hordies. The most obvious goblinish choice here is starting a hordie DK, level it to 65, and have an industry on the horde side, making gold there, then buy items and transfer them cheap to the ally side. This way the hordie M&S support their own ganking.


The most important thing on the other hand is that the economy is not dead. There are people with needs and people with supply. There are lvl80-es with gold. Hoping that the "market" will handle things is just as communist idea in its core as the "state" will. Strike that, the "state" is an existing body, while the "market" is just a term for people, just like "hordie" or "priest". These communist-in-heart people expect some mythical "market" to care for them. It won't.

The "market" is a collective term for lot of businessmen, suppliers and customers. There is opportunity to trade if there is someone who wants to buy my stuff and has something I need. And in WoW the wants of the people are very simple: glyphs, gems, flasks, mounts, pets, recipes. If you can supply, they will buy. It's true that you'll have much less potential customers than you'd have on a full server. But you'll also have much less competitors. Look at the screenshot below. Do you see hopelessness? Because I see hell of a profit!
PS: the guild has no bank and it stays that way. It's also forbidden to use /gchat as /trade, offering items. If someone has to sell, visit the AH (of course one can ask for an item that cannot be found in AH).

Why the naysayers are wrong?

Ganking update: as I promised, I post on the realm forum, telling the hordies about their inevitable fate.

Actually it's not proven that they are wrong, the experiment runs exactly to prove them wrong. So hereby I show my idea that will be verified (or falsified) by the experiment.

Yesterday I've announced my plan of starting an ally gank guild in order to make the hordies transfer away from EU-Maghteridon, where they currently have 10-20 more players than ally.

Got huge amount of naysayer comments, and - surprisingly - naysayer e-mails. Not troll mails, but intelligently written ones. These people would like to contribute by proving by logic that it's a waste of time.

Technically, the naysayers are right when they claim we cannot force the horde to go away. We will be a 100-200 members guild against 3-4K active hordies. We can assume that we will win PvP fights, as we will be in groups, PvP gear, PvP spec, PvP experience and we jump on them, using "unhonorable" tactics like attacking someone fighting monsters. However if a 3 man group kills a hordie every minute, that means 1/3 kills/minute/gangker, and due to the 1:20 ganker:hordie ratio, the hordie death rate will be 1/hour. I assume they die more often by stepping on their shoelace and falling to their own swords, so we are just minor annoyance to them, not a problem.

If we concentrate our effort in time (like "please be online 18:00-19:00 and gank then"), it's easy for the horde to see our pattern and use that time to do instances or log out (they can see us all the time from a lvl1 ally alt).

If we concentrate our effort in a place (like "always gank in Sholozar Basin, cutting them from the herbs"), they can just go somewhere else, then simply trade the herbs we have in abundance for ores or something like that in the common AH.

It is 100% true that we have no chance to win against the horde if they are like the commenting naysayer himself: intelligent, rational people. However the solution comes exactly from where the problem came: they are not intelligent and not at all rational. They are socials.

For a social, being ganked is not equal to die in the fire. Dying in the fire, due to a bad pull or simply by being killed by a 5 level lower single monster is "bad luck lol". They just corpserun and keep doing their nonsense. However being killed by another person has social relevance. He was "pwned". He was found weaker than his peer and his failure was observed by peers (at least by one, the ganker). He was laughed at. Some person somewhere laughs on him IRL. Someone thinks he is weak, a loser. He does not tolerate this situation.

He might choose to fight back. This case he dies and dies again. We are in a group, we are prepared for PvP, we will gank him into the ground. That will make him feel very bad. He might ask help from "friends", but since they are leeching M&S, most of them turn a blind eye on his request.

Or even worse, they get a few friends to help him, but since we are a PvP guild, dedicated to this action, we can get more reinforcements. It is officially required from all online members to travel to the other end of the world if there is a battle that the locals cannot handle. I'm sure that we will win 99% of such guild battles. This will have a devastating effect on them (despite they lost no gold and minimal time). Their group, their major source of self-esteem, was defeated. This is unacceptable for any social. Their primitive brain simply can't process the information that their ingroup, "we" can fail. A rational would say: "hey, we are a PvE guild with 10 people online, they were PvP guild with 15 online, no way we could win". But a social can't live with the thought that we are not the best. He will blame others for "failing in PvP" or "lazy to have PvP gear" or even call those who did not rush to the battle "traitors". They will start drama or simply /gquit to distance themselves from this "fail group".

Since we will act rationally, we cannot be ganked. If they could organize a larger force, we would simply retreat/log out. Remember, there is huge death penalty on everyone in the guild, encouraging them not to rush into uphill battles. So they will lose and lose, and lose, and sometimes have a draw game. They will never feel decisive victory. In WoW there cannot be decisive victory, you can't destroy an enemy, but corpsecamping-ganking feels that way.

Since there can be no victory for them, soon no hordie will rush into battle against us. Of course we are still just minor annoyance causing 1 death/hour. But the feeling of helplessness, the thought that he can be "pwned" any time by us will put a heavy burden to their ape-mind. They will evade "being pawned" by evading the outer world. If just 10% choose to stay in safe zone, it will cause 10% decrease in the influx of both farmable items and gold. Their expenses to NPCs (repair, taxi, skillup, respec) remain, and the decreased item influx increased prices, they start to run out of gold. In the same time the ganking rate increases by 10% on those who still go out making more of them to stay safe.

Of course, rationally a WoW character cannot be starved as he has no material needs. But a social has needs: he must have the new "cool" mount, pet, achievement. He must farm to finally buy his mammoth or bike. He must finish those holiday achievements that require going to ally cities. Imagine if we would guard just one Midsummer fire. Or raid Brill during Noblegarden!

With the economy collapsing and the world becoming dangerous, more and more of them will chose to leave this "fail server". Remember, for socials it's always the others fail, never them. They expect others to help them. Since there are lot more hordies than ally, the failure of the "others" is even more obvious to the social and he leaves quickly.

We will be negligable annoyance to horde players. But we will be unstoppable menace to horde socials. Again, remember twixt. He was all alone. Just like Angwe, the orc rogue. I suggest you read both links before naysaying again.

Darkfall of Maghteridon

We will be cruel to the fanboys, and through our cruelty, they will know who we are.
And the fanboys, will be sickened by us.
And the fanboys, will talk about us.
And the fanboys, will fear us.

(A.R.)

The idea I wrote about non-consensual PvP needs verification, and here it comes. Since I have my blue gear completely and my gold coffers also need no further stockpiling, the blue project needs no more attention from me than participating the raids and promoting new raiders. So in this free time I will start another project.

You might heard of the realm EU-Maghteridon. It was the home of Ensidia, but they departed due to lag. Ensidia is (or was before saronite bombs) the world first guild. Their presence drawn huge amount of idiotic fanboys. This lead to a 1:10-20 alliance:horde ratio. In a PvP realm it means insane ganking. "Stormwind under attack" 24/7, and not just achievement raids, but small groups of 80-es, "for the lulz".

The alliance side is practically dead. I found 70-90 people online on the whole alliance side in prime time. Most of them are lowbies. Ally raiding is non-existent. The AH has 30 pages (horde side: 470), only 200 glyph listed (horde side: 3000). Many common items are missing on the AH, the existing ones are terribly overpriced. Horde can transfer away for free.

I had a project (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) on this dead realm once, proving that one can successfully make gold even there. Luckily I still have 6K gold, I'll put it to good use. It's time for a much larger and nastier operation: I will start an alliance PvP guild on the server. And not some "fair competition" guild that does premade BG-s and organize arena matches (though we will do that for gear).

We are going to gank the horde of the server. We will fight the 1:15 ratio. We will turn the horde's gankfest into alliance gankfest. We bring Darkfall for WoW players. And not to some random players, but to the worst kind. The fanboys and to those who rolled on a horde dominated server to gank the 15 times overwhelmed alliance.

I love missions that seem to be impossible to the naysayers. The goal is to make enough hordies to take on Blizzard's offer and transfer away, closing the free transfer. The progression of the whole project can be seen in the ally:horde ratio. Is it possible? Remember twixt! He alone made huge stir on the servers he played. Imagine the impact of a couple-hundred-sized PvP-guild!

The individual progression is tracked by honorable kills in the outside world. It's written in the statistics page of the armory. But here is a catch, that makes it a challenge and not just another grind: every world PvP death counts as -20 kills. Deaths are measured on the statistics/PvP/Total deaths from other players - statistics/deaths/battlegrounds. Someone could write a script to automatize this calculation, or even better, an addon that makes a toplist. Why make "death penalty"? Because if the enemy kills and dies, it's just PvP and won't convince them to take the free transfer, so we must kill and kill and kill and not die. This will make them feel helpless and go away.

I also hereby challenge all "heplfull freindly ppl" to defend the "innocents" from our "evil griefing". Transfer to horde or roll there and fight back. After the guild is formed, I will post on the realm forums, challenging the hordies openly. We won't just appear as full geared lvl 80 raids, they will have the chance to gank us into the ground as lowbies.

What do I want to prove? The following things:

• I want to disprove Tobold that it's "lack of fairness" that keeps people away from PvP. It's their lack of will to play. They want to get easy status symbols to show off. And they cry like a baby and quit if it gets hard or their sub-par performance is not enough. As PvP cannot be nerfed (as the enemy is also a player), they want welfare-PvE games.
• I want to prove that the M&S - even in huge numbers - can be defeated, since they are a class, but not a group. A class is a bunch of similar people or things (like the priest class). A group acts together, has common goals. One M&S doesn't give a damn if another one is ganked. Their "help each other" idea is a lie. They mean "working people, help me". They give nothing. They help no one. They are leeches. While the horde will outnumber us greatly, we will outnumber the horde players. And we won't even encounter them that much, after all we can't go gank to ICC25 or the arena where the players are. The horde M&S is just trash, killing 10x more is not harder, just longer.
• I want to prove that the socials, despite their big mouth will not help the ganked hordies. They will whine and yell and moan and QQ and write blog posts about ethics and how horrible person I am, but they won't do anything. No one will stand and fight!
  
• Finally I want to see how can we make a market of items where currently there is none. We can't just make money via buy-low-sell-high, since there is no one to sell low and buy high. The alliance AH is dead. I want to prove that goblinish business ideas are not only ripping of M&S, it's also offering useful services. We will revive this server.
  

If you want to get in, roll a character and find Gevlon (online mostly every day somewhere between 18:30 and 20:00). I'll inv everyone, "member" promotion is after a BG premade run, where you shall prove not that you can kill a random punk (the ICC trash does it any day of the week on "LFM ICC reprun NEED 5200+ GS"), but you can do your role, defend a position, support/decurse/save teammates. Gkick for those who spam nonsense, speak childish (lol, pwned, owned, ...), or constantly fail in world PvP.

I give 20G to everyone at lvl 19, it's not much, but enough to buy some vendor bags (no cloth in the AH), pay your training and mount. You can transfer some lowbie, but no lvl70+. You can roll DK of course. Let's give the fanboys a chance to stop us before we reach full strength. We will accept lvl 80-es after we have 20+ 80-es ourselves. If you want to transfer, don't just bring gold, rather bring half of your wealth in tradeskill materials. If you are not in the EU and still want to participate, you have to buy an EU account. You may not have to buy the hard copy of the game files, read what Aeonus wrote in the comment section to modify your files. Time zones does not matter, you can gank any time you want. You may miss the huge raids, but there is plenty of blood for you too! Roll any class/spec you like!

The "member" and "ganker" ranked players will form war parties (lead by a "ganker" if available) and bring death and destruction to the fanboys who dare to venture into the outside world to farm, do dailies, or whatever nonsense they waste their time with instead of playing competitive PvE or PvP. And of course the crown jewel: wintergrasp, taken and held from the hordies. They are so used to having WG that at first they won't even understand why can't they get into VoA. How can one be promoted to "ganker"?

"Each and every men under my command owes me one thousand fanboy scalps.
And I want my scalps"

Disclaimer: Blizzard says "Actions that would typically be considered "dishonorable" are considered legitimate PvP tactics and will not be addressed by our Game Master (GM) staff", "GMs will only involve themselves in extreme or excessive circumstances". You can't get honor for killing lowbies and players under the effect of honorless target and resurrection sickness buffs. They are not meant to be killed and - I assume - excessive killing them can result GM action. Players giving honor reward meant to be killed by Blizzard as they reward us for killing them.

PS: why don't I go to arena? Because there are other PvP players there and I see no reason fighting them. Nothing to prove there. I want to fight socials and prove they can't fight back, despite their vast numbers and superior gearscore.


Hot tip from a commenter: roll gnomes if possible. Hordies consider it very shameful and offending to be killed by a gnome.

Business suggestion: have at least one gathering profession. There are simply no tradeskill materials in the AH to level a crafting prof.

Concerning dragons

Saturday, as usual, after some waiting, exactly 10 raiders were online. We thought that we will progress gradually. After all, it's hard mode content, intended for people who farmed Naxx and Sarth+0. So we did Sarth+1. 2 shotted it.

Then we went to Malygos. 1 shotted him.

Since we still had time, started seeking some more dragons, and heard that one, by the name Razorscale, set up her residence in Ulduar. For little complication, the other mage had to leave, so I had to be frost again, and I was the only ranged.

After 1-shotting FL (8 wipes once upon a time), we 2 shotted the last dragon of the day, also the guy who proves that smoking a pot and being raidboss is a bad idea, and finally the most annoying boss ever. The wipes were because of (admittedly) doing it first time in the current role for many people. And they also demanded screenshot. From XT. Weird.

Logs here. Too bad that the old logs already expired, but I have a screenshot of it in an old post. The raid DPS was 20700 on XT, now we had 22800 in a highly sub-optimal group (3 DK, 2 warr, 2 sham, 1 priest, 1 druid, 1 mage, 2 of us on offspec). The old group was of a hard mode raiding guild, who just picked some random ilvl170-190 blues, and with their normal spec and rotation came to raid. The current group geared and specced for this purpose.


How about you? Unless you are in the top 5% hard mode guilds, what are you doing? Helping "yet undergeared" people getting ready for something (striking e-peen in Dalaran)? I hope soon everyone will see that there is no such thing as "undergeared", just "firedancing, drooling retard", and stop helping them. If you are already fed up with them, but don't have time to raid in HC guilds, join. We'd like to raid in 25 man too, and it's pretty hard if only 10 are online. There are no attendance requirements, you can come for part of the raid and you can raid on any spec you like (as long as you do it right).

Next week we will finish this Ulduar. I think we'll skip Mimiron. But of course not the way the "yet undergeared" people used to do (before they abandoned Ulduar for the ToC loot shower)


Tomorrow I'll post my most evil plan ever. Stay tuned!