Posted by TwinHits | 22 Comments

United We Stand: Cops and Robbers

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

I absolutely love hard mode Flashpoints. To anyone on the Dreshdae Cantina server, look me up and let’s run some. My freakin’ legs won’t drop in Directive 7.

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of sitting in a parenting Sunday school class with my parents. I’m still not sure how I got there, I certainly didn’t fit in, it was early in the morning and I’m not a morning person so I kind of just came to consciousness in the room. However, one thing that stuck out to me was I heard a mother ask was, “Should I be concerned if my child takes the ‘bad side’ in a violent game?”

I thought this was an incredibly interesting question and a new turn in the discussion about whether or not violent games are bad for younger children. While we gamers have our own opinions on the subject, for most of us might say that we are better off from our violent games, what about our alignment choices? What does it mean when we pick the ‘evil’ choice in a conversation, or choose to play our characters as violent, immoral people?

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United We Stand: Happiness Is Anyone Or Anything At All

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Happy New Years! I’ve decided my new year’s resolution is to become friends with all the other level 50’s on server.

Yeah, I know that’s ambitious and kind of ridiculous, but right now it’s not that hard because there’s only like fifty of us (even so, I’d say I’m only friends with about fifteen). But for me the point is the effort and the progress that I will make along the way, the people that I will meet, the experiences that I will have, and the joys that we will be able to create for each other.

This is really what brings us back to the point of online gaming: the people that we meet here are what make the game real and important. I think particularly at the beginning of a game’s life, a.k.a. the last few weeks for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is especially clear. Less people, less content, a less clear understanding of the game all make it more important that we meet others and build community.

Several nights ago I had my first TOR raiding experience. We went into Eternity Vault and Kragga’s Palace and cleared them both on normal. While half of this example is just to brag, the other half is to serve as an illustration about how important to is to build relationships with other people on one’s server. As much as I would like for this to be an accomplishment of my guild, it wasn’t.

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United We Stand: Visibility, Channels, And Giant Droids, Oh My!

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Happy day after launch day! It’s the little days that count…

One of the awesome things about Star Wars: The Old Republic (of many, of course) is that there are heroic world bosses on every planet, each requiring a full raid of on-level characters to kill. During beta, I came across the first one Republic players get to see, SD-0 on Coruscant, and my roommate GenerallyAwesome turns to me and says. “Dude, I totally know what our guild is doing first.” Thus, we did.

It was an awesome feeling, there were four of us online so we immediately started advertising wherever we currently were and /whispering all our new server friends asking them to come lend a hand. However, it was on Coruscant that we really got the majority of our help. It was refreshing to see how quickly and easily people came to us when we started talking about it in general chat.

If the day comes where this game becomes so routine, especially at such a low level, that players are unwilling to stop their questing and come together to try something new, I will be very disappointed. It was this awesome feeling that reminded me of why I love MMORPGs like Star Wars: The Old Republic (or at least one of the many reasons why): because of how easy it is to for groups and go do something cool. With the exception of GenerallyAwesome and myself, it’s highly unlikely that any of us even live in the same city, yet we gathered together for about half an hour to kill a giant robot.

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Posted by TwinHits | 8 Comments

United We Stand: Four Rules Of TOR

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Yesterday morning at about 10:00 AM, I had a moment. When you know something like this is coming, it’s weird. You can’t imagine what it will be like once it has passed, what it will be like once Star Wars: The Old Republic has become a norm in your life. But, until that time, it seemed like it will never come. But, as my mouse hovered over the “Play” button beneath the carefully picked appearance bars, I took a moment to think about what I was doing. I was preparing to fully immerse myself in a whole new world, a world where I would meet people from anywhere from across the world to right across the street. I looked at the name I had typed in for years, and realized I needed to decide exactly who TwinHits is. We want to become what we want to be, and who do I want her to be?

Thus,  I want to share with you the “Four Rules of TOR”, four rules which I will play by, and I hope that you will play by as well. These rules are meant to encompass every action and every decision that you make, both within the game and within the community, and to guide us with wisdom towards a better game.

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Posted by TwinHits | 11 Comments

United We Stand: A Living Document

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

I hope everyone enjoyed their chance to play Star Wars: The Old Republic recently; I spent my time meticulously writing down the exact values for my Twi’leks’ appearance bars. Time well spent.

Last time we talked about the idea of a governing document guided by the concept of transparency to embody the vision of your core message. We could quite literally go on for weeks just about how to write a good guild charter, but unfortunately there are so many other fascinating things about Star War: The Old Republic and its community that we should discuss.

This week, however, I want to highlight a guild charter that as offered up in the comments of last week’s article. GhostBoy submitted this document, one from his own World of Warcraft endgame PvE guild.

The interesting thing about reading GhostBoy’s charter is that you can tell it’s been in use for a long time, there are articles and sections that seem out of place because they were added in later in order to address an issue that came up after the charter was written. This is the natural evolution of a governing document and a sign of a healthy and attentive leadership.

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Posted by TwinHits | 16 Comments

United We Stand: Simplicity Isn’t a Vice

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi column focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Four weeks to go! We are so excited. It’s important to remain on track and not get derailed by the excitement, so let us return to our topic: how to build a guild from the ground up. Two weeks ago before I got distracted, we talked about how to build your core message, how to define your vision, and how to share your guild’s promise with everyone. 

We talked about what a good core message has and about how writing one will help you understand what you want the guild to become. We decided that when you write your message, you want to show what you want to do and the guild you want to become so that you will attract the right kind of members.

What do you do with this message? Well, basically you expand it to all the parts of your guild that you have to build. From this message we can develop a governing document, discuss how to make your guild visible, how to build legitimacy, and how to develop server presence. You can take parts out of the message and apply them to every situation, this way your guild remains true to a central vision.

The first thing that we need to do with our core message is to build our governing document. Yes, think the U.S. Constitution except written for your guild. The principle that we want to follow is transparency. This is usually used to talk about the governed understanding the processes of the governors, which is also important, but mainly in this case we mean simplicity. We want to build a simple, clear, and transparent document that anyone can read and understand. It should detail how your guild works, where one can refer to when there’s a problem, and outline and effectively accomplish the promise of your guild.

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