Guild Charter

Read it, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like it, I'll post it on the website.

Feel free to suggest revisions.

Guild Charter of The Voltron Force

I thought of writing this in the style of an old 17th Century colonial charter—you know, like the Pilgrims on board the Mayflower wrote. But then I thought that you didn’t want to read old English or pious declarations of how God had blessed them with starvation and a big freakin rock. That and we’re nothing like the Pilgrims. We openly practice witchcraft, and we find debates about the purity of the Anglican Church to be trite and dated.

The only similarity we have to the pilgrims is that we’re a group of people that has come together for reasons that have something to do with shared values. Despite our laid back, fun-loving, and often irreverent attitudes, those of us in the Voltron Force believe in more than the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter and long, slow, deep soft, wet kisses that last three days.

Oh, the Pilgrims didn’t believe in those things either? Well, they damn well ought to have. But yeah, we’re nothing like them.

What we are like is a bunch of relatively young (think 20 and 30 somethings) goofballs that have fun playing World of Warcraft. Pretty much all of us have jobs or are students. Some of us are working on professional degress, others are on a six year plan. We have aspiring lawyers, opera singers, engineers and AV geeks. Some of us are hopeless enough to root for the Chicago Cubs, while others were dumb enough to buy into John Madden’s 1990’s garbage about the Dalls Cowboys being America’s team. No more than one of us believes that Rex Grossman will turn into a good and consistent NFL quarterback.

We’re very open and welcoming. We’ll listen to you bitch about work, the incompetence of your favorite sports teams, your hangover, or whatever else is on your mind. Odds are, we can empathize… or are desperate enough to need someone to make us feel better about our day. Either way, we’re happy to listen to you in /g.

We also do fun things in game. We PvP together, and we even have healers who heal in PvP. We ninja the arena trinket in STV, even when other guilds devote the better part of their full resources to getting it. We taunt alliance toons into world PvP. We run instances at least 3 nights a week, and we laugh when our noob priest, main healer, and Guildmaster wipes us in ways that were previously thought impossible. We actually help each other with quests and shit. We even have Vent to coordinate our exercises in hilarity, ownership, or futility. It just sorta depends on the night.

A lot of us have a good amount of experience. We’ve been there for Nef and Twin Emps first kills. (And second, and 30th, etc.) We got tired of the raiding as grinding, consumable farming, six night a week commitment it got to be. We saw how it could polarize a guild between the hardcore and more casual players. We saw how raiding systems that gave priority to officers and how bad DKP systems could alienate casual, but loyal and committed members. We’ve lived, loved, wiped, one-shotted, grinded, swore at five consecutive weeks of time lapse on Chromaggus (yes, five weeks), and hopefully through it all, learned a lot.

We want to build on that past experience and eventually get to Kharazan. We want to kick the teeth in of whatever Medivh left behind. We also hope Blizzard will allow for chess matches between raid members on Medivh’s chess board. But we aren’t going to break our necks to do this. We even want to move beyond Kharazan and kill some Nagas, Gruul, etc. But again, our pace, our terms.

If you join this guild, you can expect a fun environment. We’re casual, but we want to win. We will PvP. We will arena. We will Kharazan. We will raid. We will treat you fairly. We all do selfless things for the better of the guild. We all accept that we have to sacrifice more often than not (you are just one person of many), but we’re all very grateful when everyone does something nice for us. This is the glue that holds us together (God knows it’s not my humor). There are no officers, no ranks, no hierarchy. Instead, you get sweet ranks like “Lion Force,” or “Evil General,” or “CTU Tac Team,” or something you make up and want to be called.

We need druids and warlocks badly. But even more importantly, we need good people. If this is you, please, come join us. Type “/Who VF” and ask one of us about the guild. Everyone has /ginvite privileges. Who knows. You might get one.

Like Always... Evil Lackeys Lack Evil

It's so difficult being evil these days... what, with that spoiled Prince turned Regicidal Lich holed up in that frozen glacier up north and all... Who died and made him Oedipus Rex? Or that vain, Arayan Blood Elf that's pretending to rule that hunk of rock known as 'Outland.' God knows what he's doing, playing the vain magical mad scientist out there... He's probably melting the heads off of female Blood Elf dolls and frying lost dranei with magnifying glasses. But you know it just has to be pure evil if he gets his own patch and fortress replete with multiple winged dungeons. That's evil to the third, or fifth, or however many wings he has.

And here we are, wandering around Azeroth, trying to get a level 10 Dranei Shaman to cower at our feet. The people we beat up for lunch money are lucky to have two flipping silver on them. One of our biggest evil accomplishments to date has been killing three vikings who fell off the pages of Cunegonde' s Astreix comic book and landed in Uldaman. Our evil, denoted by the same symbol that will mark Barry Bonds' eventual home run record.

And we didn't even take steroids.

Well, we had an opportunity for some real, pure evil tonight, when level 20, Princess Peaches stepped into the free-for-all of the Gurubashi Arena with evil lackeys--or lacking evil--Hunk and Sovain to get the treasure chest and the +5 stamina trinket. Giving this reward to a level 20 Paladin is funny and evil in its own right.

But it's not nearly as funny and evil as then killing said paladin until her res timer exceeds her level.

A failure to see this is what separates the evil lackeys from the evil geniuses. At a time when so many evils are diverting the world's attention from us, we could've used some cheap publicity--a screenshot of the level 20 Paladin attmepting to bubble hearth out of the arena and away from her own guildmates.

That's the sort of evil that you can't teach. That's the sort of evil that the world respects and admires with awe. That's the sort of evil that takes names like 'Illidan' and 'Oedipus'... er 'Arthas' off of people's tongues and puts yours on it.

Unfortunately, it seems that's the sort of evil that only I am capable of. Evil help, it's just so hard to find these days.