Meeting 5 - November 12th

[Deleted]

The Highlights from the 5th meeting:

Guild Affiliation Talks

• Our focus in this guild is community and a bigger community = more fun
• We've talked with Divine Nobility recently and have offered them to join us on our myriad of events. The Officers and Events post will be updated with more detailed information as part of this.
• Divine Nobility members now have access to our forums. They will be marked with member names colored in purple. 
• We will be looking to expand talks to include Drop Forged Death soon as well.

Event Updates

PvP

• Eriu has returned from his leave of absence due to rl. We will be aiming to get pvp events up and running soon.
• Keep an eye out for a rescheduling of the Naked PvP Tournament.

Pet Battles

• We've enlisted Yon's help once more with getting tournaments set up.
• Keep an eye out for an announcement regarding potential change of days for tournaments.

Roleplay

• The forums are beginning to garner backgrounds for characters.
• Personal plots are being drafted currently based on backgrounds submitted.
• RP will be incorporating more active play in the form of quests, rping through dungeons/raids etc.

Old School Raid Night

• We've finally finished Wrath raids and have now entered Cata raids.
• We'll be going through them in order of release.
• We've already finished Bastion of Twilight, Throne of 4 Winds and Baradin Hold. We will double back for these later for guild achievement credit as we ran with smaller groups initially.
• Blackwing's Lair is next with Firelands in 2 weeks.
• We will spend a lot of time in Firelands and Dragon Soul working on legendary weapons for whoever wants them.

Raid Team

• We've finished clearing Throne of Thunder and moved on to Siege of Orgrimmar via Flex.
• Of all the guilds on this server, we are the 5th to finish Throne, meaning the vast majority simply haven't come as far as us. In 6 months of this guild existing we have managed to organize a successful raid team to being one of the most competitive guilds on the server in terms of progression.
• We will attempt a 10-man progression in Siege soon to see if this is viable. Flex efforts will continue.

New Initiatives

LFR Farming

• A idea born from the Gold Making Workshop a few weeks ago.
• Kill elite/rare on Isle of Thunder for Key to Lei Shen's Palace, run Loot Scenario. Elapsed time, 10-15 minutes. Earn 300-400 gold. Earn 20 Elder Charms usable as bonus rolls in first 5 LFR wings: Mogu'shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, Terrace of Endless Spring.
• Run those 5 LFRs, bonus roll on all 16 bosses. Average drop rate for both the bosses and charms is 75% - roughly 24 pieces of gear in a few hours. Sell gear for 35 gold each, earn an additional 850 gold. Disenchant gear for about 24 Sha Crystals to make epic weapon enchants or sell for 200-300 gold each.
• Great for earning lots of gold for little effort. Easy Valor at the end of the week for capping running older content.

Guild Challenges

• Introduced last meeting as a way to raise gold for the guild.
• Resounding success with a 27k gold increase in the guild's coffers, doubling our cash flow.
• We can readily afford our soon-to-be-unlocked 8th bank tab.
• As a thank you to all our members for their hard work, we will be increasing all gold and bank withdrawal access by roughly 50% for all members.
• Please note we can only afford to maintain such opulent bank use if this trend continues, so keep up the good work everyone.

Demotions

• We are introducing this ugly concept into the guild regretfully. While the Guild Challenges have been very successful, it has come at the expense of a handful of members carrying the brunt of the effort with most members refusing to help.
• We are a community-driven guild with participation and generosity being highly valued. In fact, these attributes are how one earns rank.
• We worry there is an issue with some members declining to continue the habits that earned them their rank. The small range of ranks available in the guild means each one is precious and needs to be continually earned.
• For members that stop acting as members of the community we are introducing this checks and balance:           

1. Members and Veterans must show a persistent pattern of negligence over a few months before this is deemed a problem.
2. Any member in danger of this will be given a warning first.
3. Final decision regarding demotions will be made by the officers by vote, the way all guild decisions are made.
4. Members or Veterans who become inactive for 4 or more months become eligible for demotion. This does not include their alts, we gauge by whether or not the the player is active, not each toon individually. You will not need to struggle to use all of your toons to prevent problems. This issue can be circumvented by informing of us of a leave of absence from game in advance. Real life problems do arise or at times we just get burned out from the game. Letting us know in advance tells us you care enough to be a part of the community and your time away will not count against you.

Lifting Recruitment Ban

• At last month's meeting we instituted a recruitment ban to halt the growth of the guild until the community could acclimate to our explosive growth.
• While we still feel this is not a fully resolved issue, we are satisfied with the progress made by the Buddy System so far in addressing this and are taking steps to refine its execution, and we feel the community has had time to get used to our newest members.
• We hope to keep better on top of this issue going forward but we may re-implement the ban periodically if we grow too fast.
• Additionally, we are introducing a new policy to balance our rapid growth:

Removing Inactive Initiates

• Guilds always attract large numbers of members who join but never show up again. This can happen for a variety of reasons, often because the person is managing other alts and obligations to other guilds. It is beneficial to be guilded with no drawbacks, so people are always look to find a guild to be in even if they're not around which is an opportunistic approach.
• This guild is not about accumulating high member counts as an explicit goal but rather in maintaining a tight knit community, which puts these newly joining members at odds with our goals.
• Going forward we will be removing inactive initiates from the guild based on the following criteria:

1. Must be of Initiate Rank. This does not apply to Members or Veterans.
2. Last login was 2 months ago or longer.

The Happy News

Promotions

• Initiates to Members - Devesh, Manila, Hemer, Verreck   <- you've all more then earned it
• Member to Veteran - Nohwon      <- our first person to reach that rank without being grandfathered in

Transmog Contest

• Congratulations to Lianadra for winning. Enjoy your Vial of the Sands

New Contest

• As per August's Design a Contest, Marcii's winning entry is the basis for our current contest, a Scavenger Hunt. Details are in the Contests area of the forums.