Guild Geekery

Funny story about the new game I'm playing. Everyone in there is one of the clones, of course, so you don't know anything about the people behind those clones. We got into a discussion tonight after Guild Battle (which we won, hallah!) and one of the guys mentioned he was old. Now, this guy . . . I honestly assumed he was like 17 or something. Nope. He's in his 60s. This opened up a whole discussion about our various ages. The youngest person in our group is 27, most of us are in our 40s/50s.

To me, this adds a whole other dynamic to how we play the game, especially the Guild Battle. Guild Battle is actually my favorite time of the day for the game. When I first started, I just randomly joined a guild (not the one I'm in now) and stumbled along to the various events. One night I was the only person in my guild who went to guild battle. It was there that a guy I'd talked to on occasion noticed what I was doing and invited me to join a more competitive guild.

I like the battle event because it's the one thing about the game that can't be predicted. Where everything else is based on how well you're building your characters (with some minor changes thrown in there for critical hits and stuff like that), Guild Battle relies on the humans behind the players. How many people show up? Who can get in fast hits? What kind of plans do you have?

There used to be quite a few guilds involved in the battles, but the two strongest ones are my current guild (that I happen to somehow be in charge of now) and our rivals. For a long time, we couldn't beat them. Then we started beating them every other day. But one of the smaller guilds decided to disband and join theirs. Well, actually, they wanted to join our guild, but we're on different alignment sides so they couldn't. Anyway, they joined that guild and suddenly they had the numbers. When we lost two days in a row, a lot of people were discouraged.

I really wasn't. It thrilled me because suddenly our typical back and forth wasn't a given. I thought about why they won and realized it had to be due to how they situated their attacks. We talked about this and one of the guys in the guild came up with a battle plan for us. We tried it and it worked quite well. So now we have an evolving rivalry, and that's just awesome.

I can't wait to see what they come up with next.