uberguilds
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Premonition gains A Tribute to Mad Skill achievement
Via GuildOx, we have another big raid achievement coming down the pipe for Premonition of the Senjin-US server, who probably needed a boost after that horrible wipe to Hogger at BlizzCon. They've just grabbed the 10-Man Tribute to Mad Skill achievement, which means they defeated the 10-man Coliseum raid on Hard Mode up through and including 10-man Anub'arak with less than 5 wipes over the entire time.Premonition has established itself among the solid lead US guilds before, having also been the first US guild to get Heroic: Alone in the Darkness by killing 25-man Yogg-Saron with no watchers. It looks like they're poised to continue that streak now that all the bosses in the Coliseum are unlocked. Congratulations to them, and good luck in the future!Update: We're attempting to verify this through other means at the moment. Hold onto your pants! -AlexUpdate #2: Confirmed.
GW 2008 RAWR Cup Tournament results
The results are in for the 2008 RAWR Cup Title Series Spring Tournament in Guild Wars. In this second tournament of the series, we are treated to some improvements over last December's contest. The members of the guild Rebel Rising [rawr] in conjunction with GuildCafe, decided to make this edition of the cup into more of a community run event by creating a special GuildCafe Tournament Committee.But more importantly, make sure you check out the in-depth article about this tournament written by Guild Wars Guru Senior Moderator "Billiard" over at the main Guild Wars website. He gives an extensive play-by-play report on many of the major events during the tournament, as well as some insight into effective and not-so-effective strategies that were used.
GuildCafe expands its horizons with GamerDNA
GuildCafe has been often called the Myspace or Facebook for MMO players, but not only is it much more than that, it's expanding even further. This summer, the mega-guild social site will be changing its focus onto a new venture (and company name) called GamerDNA. This new site will have much more than GuildCafe offers currently, and will cater to a larger audience of Xbox gamers, and eventually all platforms. This all stems from the fact that the site has recently received a $3 million Series A investment from Boston's Flybridge Capital Partners.According to GamerDNA's founder and CEO Jon Radoff, "the idea behind GamerDNA is to provide a means of identity-a place where players can record all the stories around all of the cool stuff they've done, be it achievements, accomplishments, or experiences they've had." So in essence, it will help broaden the players experiences in-game, as well as help other players experience games they may not play yet on a much more personalized level. All of this done in a larger scope, reaching a wider audience than GuildCafe alone could do targeted at the MMORPG market alone.[Thanks Sam!]
GuildCafe seeking nominations for Espresso Awards
Sam from Uberguilds sent us word of nominations opening up for GuildCafe's Espresso awards (they're the same company now, remember?). They're looking for your ideas on choosing the best of the year in a number of different categories, including everything from "best gaming blog" to "best user-interface mod" and "best player-written guide."Unfortunately, there's two problems here-- despite coming from GuildCafe, the awards don't seem to be aimed just at MMOs. They have a "player-created map" category, and unless they're talking about Second Life sims, that's not really MMO-centric. And they have strange qualifications for the fansite and gaming blog categories-- in my mind, getting fairly compensated for writing about games doesn't make your work meaningless. (Disclaimer: everyone who writes for Massively gets paid for their work by Weblogs, Inc, which is a division of AOL.)But hey, it's their awards, their rules. You readers are smart folks-- go put some good nominations in there and we'll see what GuildCafe comes up with.
Guildcafe merges with Uberguilds
Guild site hosting is an interesting business-- on the one hand, it's really an ISP function, where you've got to keep the site up and running and make sure it has enough power to take on all that traffic. But on the other hand, it's also a community building venture-- it's your job to put the tools in place to keep guilds together and progressing in game. I have no idea what kind of money is going through it (from my experience, it's mostly an ad-based business-- you provide free hosting in exchange for ad views), but as online games get more and more popular, there's bound to be larger and larger companies coming out of the mix.And here's two now-- Guildcafe has announced on their blog that they've acquired Uberguilds. Guildcafe, from the press release, is apparently going to handle that technical side of things, and Uberguilds, with their broad reach of the community, is going to act as the "Guildcafe Alliance," and use Guildcafe's application to connect guilds and players together.I don't have a lot of experience with either (my WoW guild uses Guildportal, and while it's super ugly, it gets the job done connecting us out of game), but this could be the start of something big-- an ISP/application site combining with known community builders might be just what this "guild hosting" industry needs to become even more widespread.[Via Virgin Worlds]
Endgame guild closeup
This fairly old, but interesting, article from Nick Yee's Daedalus project gives an insight into one of the "uberguilds", guilds that persist across games and aim for the top. As the first to kill Ragnaros on their server, Talon's guild is a marvel of military organisation, but not without criticism--the guild leader prefers not to let women in the guild, for example.Talon's rules for membership are especially clear: you need to be able to take criticism, have good attendance for events, and have the "guild comes first" attitude. Many of us have just joined guilds that were openly recruiting, that had friends in, or that a party member invited us into because they liked our style--this is very different territory.
