Hello everyone. As promised, here is the guild recap for those who were unable to make it to the meeting. If I forget anything, I apologize — feel free to leave a comment if I forgot anything, or share your opinions or thoughts.Before I get into the meeting itself, I just want to ask and emphasize how important it is for people in Pox to use the features on the calendar. If you are going to be there, accept. If you’re not sure, go tentative. If you can’t, select Decline. This helps your guild leaders – me and the officers – adequately plan events.
I want to take a moment to shout out to Fendel, Blasphemous, Teufelia and Toroka, who specifically let us know they would be late or absent. That one small moment of consideration was appreciated.
I’m not going to be a nag about this, but it would be really nice if you guys could help us out by doing this.
Moving On!
Role-play
The general consensus from attendees was Pox is a role-play guild and therefore should have a certain amount of focus on role-play, more so than what has happened through this expansion. My earlier post regarding role-play, coming from the guild officers’ meeting and as a preview for this meeting, was generally accepted by all present. At least, if anyone had any reservations, they kept them to themselves.
The issue of turning guild chat wholly in-character, or designating an RP-channel, was brought up. This is not something Pox is going to do, and there are several reasons.
While channel RP is entirely possible, it is not suitable for guild chat. We have tried that in the past, with guild OOC chatter taking place in Poxic (which is like Toxic, not Pox IC…a Britney Spears thing. Don’t ask).
With no way to adequately and continually protect chat channels from outsiders, there is no privacy. When guild chat happens in guild channel, no one uses it.
These are all things seen in previous attempts.
But also, we have had people quit Pox, but say they are remaining in channel and it would be like they never left. And the question I ask then is this: If you can have all the benefits of being IN Pox, why would you STAY in Pox?
(Or, as someone once put it, why would you buy porn when you can have it for free?)
Additionally, RP in guild chat is intrusive. Not everyone wants to be an observer to your stories. This is not a bad thing. You don’t eat pizza every meal, every day. You may love Heavy Metal but you don’t want to hear it blaring from a neighbour’s apartment at 1 a.m. when you have to wake up at 5 a.m., right?
A suggestion to increase RP was an increase use of the guild forums. This was brought up by Erlandi, and it’s something I would love to see. Blog your RP encounters. Share them with people. Post them on the forum. Then people can read them when they want, and take actions ICly to try to insert themselves into these stories.
Teestirina brought up how she would like to have more story-telling events, but Arela fairly pointed out they aren’t as successful. At the previous event, Arela essentially said I had to bribe people into telling stories.
This has been a long-time fault within Pox events, going back three years. You cannot always passively participate. Sometimes, you must do so actively.
It is not enjoyable for event leaders to have to goad and chide and essentially hand-hold the crew and convince them to participate. So make an effort to chime in. It may feel silly to you but everyone appreciates it.
I also have some interest in holding a “shady market” (not quite black market) event on a weekly or bi-weekly occassion, and opening it to the server.
I also will be running one mage class and one paladin class per month (Paladins who may want to lead this can contact me, as I’d love to share the idea). If anyone else wants to hold ‘class lectures’ let me know.
On the website there is also a new area, called IC resources. Here I will be writing documentation about in character places, histories, etc.
The guild is also looking for chroniclers, who may want to write up guild events into little “newspaper articles” for the website, to help us maintain a history for the guild.
Next up: Raiding
The consensus here wasn’t really a consensus. There were a lot of mixed feelings. I appreciate that and I appreciate everyone taking the time to share their thoughts.
In some quarters, people feel there has been too much emphasis on raiding. They feel left out as the same 10ish people going to raids and being invited to 25 man PUGs. They feel there has been too much emphasis on raiding and the other aspects of the guild, PvP and RP, are hurting.
In other quarters, people are wanting to kill Arthas and see more content, are willing to try 25 man raiding. With changes coming up in Cataclysm, we won’t be able to do both 10 and 25 man raids since they will share a lock out. But right now we can, and we get better loot from 25s.
So how do we satisfy each side?
Pox isn’t going to officially do more than two days of raiding a week. However, to better our chances at reaching and defeating the Lich King, starting next week we will extend raid lock outs for two weeks. We will start a new “week” every other week, giving us four nights to advance.
We will also move back to raiding until 10 p.m. server time, or about 15 minutes less that for the EST idiots like me, Fendel and Sinsaria.
Blasphemous is running a 25 man PUG Saturdays and Sundays. These PUGs will go to TOC and ICC, alternating which day each week. These are not a required event — people do not have to go to them if they don’t want to — but if you sign up on the calendar, you had best show up. Not doing so is rude. The PUG will fill from the Pox pool of people first, then PUG the rest.
Anyone who’s 80 can go. Gearscore doesn’t matter, though if your gear is horribly bad, you may want to run some instances to get badge-gear.
These weekend events may occassionally be pre-empted by guild events, but those will be announced decently in advance.
Finally, we’re going to make an effort to have a guild meeting once per month. These should be minimally OOC and mostly IC.
We will also be holding one PvP night a month, where we slaughter a town or something. These may or may not increase in frequency as Cataclysm approaches, but considering Pox’s roots and founding cause, I wouldn’t be surprised if it became more frequent.