A Message On Guild Events and Unity

[Tbone]

I'm going to get on a soapbox for a moment, so please bare with me...

It's my understanding that one of the things that has always made us so special was our cohesiveness and the unity of our guild. People would see us and comment about how we seemed like one unit, always in formation...always in uniform.

The ironic part is that I don't think we have a very militaristic or strict structure or even a huge set of guidelines. It was always more of a mindset. It was a sense of pride for the group.

As a member of the Furious Angels, we want you to have that feeling of unity and pride. We want our group to be as tight-knit and cohesive as possible. This isn't easy to accomplish before the game is even out yet, but there are a couple of ways that we can start forming good habits now.

The guild comes first. As members of FA, we expect your mindset to be to support the guild first and foremost. That being said, as a guild, our community should be aimed at putting our members first. So I imagine it as a symbiotic relationship. The members take care of the guild and the guild takes care of the members. This is a good mindset to have, but how does it work in practice?

Guild events and members should take priority over non-guild events and players. We encourage you to make friends with the rest of the gaming community, but when push comes to shove, guild members come first. In-game examples:

If a guild member logs on, and your party contains a non-guild player, you should remove that player to make room for the guild member as soon as it is convenient to do so.

If the guild is hosting an event, you should participate in that event if you are logged in instead of playing solo or with other non-guild players.

Let's say you aren't big into RP but a guild member wants to put together an RP event that requires a lot of FA to log on. If you're going to be in-game for that time frame, you should do your best to support that event, even if it isn't important to you because it is beneficial to the guild. Therefore, next time you want to have a hardcore PvP event, that RP member might be more inclined to join in the fun!

So let's get to the meat of this message. How does this apply to us while we are not in game? We are sympathetic of the fact that there is no single game out right now that all of our members want to play, and so a lot of our members are playing a lot of different games with a lot of different people. We even allow our Teamspeak to be a hub for these games regardless of if you are gaming with FA or not.

However, guild events, such as a guild meeting or interview, should take priority over your non-FA gaming sessions, especially if you are using our Teamspeak server to host them.

I fear it is forming bad habits to have 15 FA members all participating in a meeting while a few others opt out and stay in another channel to do what they feel is more important. Even if you don't think there's anything new for you to learn in the meeting that week, at the very least switch to that channel while your gaming so that you can at least hear a little bit of it and be a participant.

We don't make the meetings mandatory - even for staff. Just because they aren't mandatory doesn't mean they aren't important, though. It's the one 30 minute window a week that we strongly encourage everyone who is able to get on Teamspeak at the same time and chat about the guild, the game, or whatever may be important to you. We do this because we feel that every member is important and has something to contribute. We also think that it strengthens the guild's unity and helps us to feel more like one community rather than a bunch of mini-groups.

I wanted to clarify these points in case there was confusion as to what we do expect from you as a member of FA. I hope that this sense of pride and unity is something that we can really develop now and then carry over into Star Wars: The Old Republic so that we can hit the ground running!