Officers' Quarters: Celebrating connected realms
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook.
As Blizzard connects more and more realms, the communities on those realms are waking up, becoming livelier and more social. It's a great opportunity for guilds to make a name for themselves within the newly combined populations. Last month I offered advice on how guilds could leverage the upcoming connections to add new members and establish a positive reputation.
This past Monday, Blizzard connected the realms Llane and Arygos. The guild Spectacular Death on Llane took advantage of the opportunity and threw a realm connection party. Their guild leader wrote to me to share their experience:
I'm Gimmlette, the guild leader of Spectacular Death on Llane. Prior to the start of Blizzard doing these server connections, you posted a column suggesting things a guild could do to make themselves known when servers get connected. One of the things suggested was a server connection party. I posted the column to the Officer's section of the guild web site, which we have dubbed the "Executive Washroom", and we decided a party is what we'd do. I thought I'd share some photos from that party.
We connected with Arygos on Monday. We announced the party upcoming two weeks ago and when Blizzard announced the connection date, we went back to the server forums with a date. We opted to have the party the day after the actual connection, to make sure things were okay and to run tests on trading things with people from Arygos.
We started our party at 9 server time, which works well for SD members. From 9-10, we had a couple people running around SW tossing down an Elune Stone. People were invited to "Fall with Style" onto the pool of light. (This is an SD trait. Falling off things, onto things, through things or jumping off anything high is something we do best.)
While this was going on, we had a variety of guild members "hiding" in SW and giving clues in General Chat as to their location. We had a huge number of 16-slot netherweave bags to give away to anyone level 1-60 if they could find said guild member. Eventually, we just gave them away to anyone who found the guild member. (I was on stone duty and haven't received the photos from guild members on bag patrol.) We didn't give away many of them so we have plans for them during our 6th anniversary in December.
At 10 p.m., we headed to the Keep, handed out snowballs, and, on the count of 3, pelted King Wrynn. From there, we encouraged people to mount up wearing their guild tabards and follow in a parade. We got a few people joining us for the snowball fight and the parade. (Helped me get rid of the over 1100 snowballs I've been squirreling away for years.) The parade took us to the front of Stormwind.
Once the last person from SD made it to the front of Stormwind, guild members set off an amazing fireworks display. We had 2400 fireworks of various kinds and the effect was pretty spectacular. The whole event took 90 minutes start to finish.
I honestly don't expect new members to come from this party. It was all about saying, "Hello" to the people from Arygos. I'm told Trade chat has been "ripe" since Monday and we were worried that we'd get trolled or worse, but people were jovial and polite and seemed to enjoy themselves. Plus, people in Trade were quite confused as to what was going on, which is a victory of sorts. For us, it's not about recruiting. It's about showing people a good time and having a good time ourselves.
Thanks for the great idea. I'm curious if guilds on other connected servers did anything.
Sincerely,
Gimmlette
Thanks for sharing your party experience with us, Gimmlette! This sounds like a very fun night for all involved. I like how one of your contests was on-theme with your fantastic guild name. Also, as a Horde player, I support pelting Varian with snowballs at every opportunity. That guy really needs to loosen up.
Congrats on your upcoming sixth anniversary! It's not easy for a guild to survive for six years. You and all of your officers should take pride in that.
So how about it? Has anyone else thrown a connected realm party so far?
/salute
Officers' Quarters keeps your guild leadership on track to cope with sticky situations such as members turned poachers or the return of an ex-guild leader and looking forward to what guilds need in Mists of Pandaria. Send your own guild-related questions and suggestions to scott@wowinsider.com.
