So in January I had taken us up to the point of September 20 when Destre had set the new guild leaders.

As you can well imagine it was nutty.  The plan was to have people use their brands to auto induct to the new guilds but they generally did not work properly the first night.  In the interest of not alienating people we decided to throw the doors open and anyone who asked to join the guild claiming to be from an old guild was inducted on the spot.  I don’t think that was the universal decision, other guilds may have handled things differently but I wanted GoO to be as open and inclusive as it could be right from day 1.  So away we went, inducting almost automatically, no alt lists, no application notes, nothing at all.  I am certain some people would go nuts without an alt list, but frankly I don’t like rules that I can’t enforce properly and anyone can lie about their alts, so why bother setting something up that only honest people will follow anyway?

Prior to the guild destructions the immortals had transed all the known bots out of Darkhaven to a safe room.  The Guild of Thieves donation bot, Abelard, was transed in by Kinux to mind the new donation room and Ravith provided me access to Jarax, the former Guild of Mages potion bot who took up residence in the second donation room.  Over the next few days, with Destre creating passages for me and helping a great deal, I moved all the contents of the storage rooms into the Guild of Origin mostly by hand.  The largest challenge with a job like this is the capacity of the containers, which is far below the capacity of the room.  If you drop things on the ground you have to remember their keywords because get all does not work in donation rooms.  I got it all squeezed in, save 10k or so empty flasks and the house cleaning began.  When you merge 3 guilds you will end up with a very unusual mix of items.  It was no surprise that we had well over 100 Neptune’s Tridents but I was surprised that every bloody eyepatch and sharktooth necklace was high level.  To this day the low level stuff isn’t really well organized.  It’s a bit tough to gauge what is going to be useful to a leveling thief, warrior or mage and stock it, but we’ve manage to get rid of some of the garbage slowly but surely.

So with this state we were basically “up and running”.  With the help of Ceirana and Destre and the approval of the CoE we were allowed to increase our number of storage containers which tremendously helped with organization.  Hanging out and grabbing some mining carts helped too … I feel better when things are organized, you’d never know it but I’m a closet neat freak (no really, you’d never know it from the state of my office).

Well, that’s all about logistics and things that needed doing.  The flip side of this is getting to know people, something that was going on in all 3 guilds.  For my part I didn’t know a lot of the people in the Guild of Mages and only a few from Guild of Warriors so there were lots of new faces.  In turn I was new to them as well.  The new guy in charge … it’s not entirely comfortable being the leader when you’re new because people don’t necessarily trust you and some feel you shouldn’t the the person chosen to head things up.  Destre was a great source of reassurance, I bounced a lot of ideas off her about how to handle things and she really helped me grow into my role.  For the most part people were very helpful and friendly and it wasn’t long before we got some regular runs going.

Regular runs means getting some rules in place about pops and sharing which we decided collectively and with a lot of discussion.  As we started getting momentum we had to compete for people’s interest as there was a very active Seth run going on looking for warm bodies.  We had a bit of good and bad on that deal, lots of us participated in the run and came away with loot but at the same time it took away from trying to build up momentum in the guild, especially with 1 leader there constantly and 1 leader MIA.  This friction wasn’t isolated to GoO, I had a conversation with at least one other org leader who was wrestling with it.  At the end of the day people will go where the action is, I just look at a more long term picture of building up a good, reliable team and then moving on to bigger and better.  Some of the guys who went on the Seth run were fairly new players and one day they’re on a ‘bliv pop and the next day they don’t know how to favor their character because they’ve never had to supplicate before and they just died on a guild run.

Nonetheless a handful of good people stepped up and started leading some runs, we fielded some good teams at IGQC events and things started moving along nicely.  We started setting up some councils to help involve more people but in a lot of ways what we needed was to get finished with the transition leadership and move along to just “the leadership”.  With the guild’s approval we were ready, set, go for elections.

Oh and for the ever rabid Loril, sorry that my opening sentences are not topical, I’m not a remarkably formal writer 🙂