4th Anniversary

So tonight our guild celebrated its fourth anniversary. (The actual date was Thursday but it is more fun to have a party on Saturday when people can stay up late.) The guild tradition is we can't just have a PARTY we have to have an EVENT. Past events have been held in places such as the Air Field over Ironforge, Old Ironforge, (Back when you could still get under it.) and the Dancing Troll Village. In those cases GETTING to the party site was most of the fun.

What makes finding a party site tricky is we want something that will allow us to have fun with out having to deal with others interrupting the party OR having our shenanigans disrupting them. Add to this that we TRY to keep it in the Old World so those FEW people in the guild who DO NOT have all the expansions or a high level toon can still participate. It usually takes us a few months to play each event and gather all our supplies. So this year we did something a LITTLE bit different.

We had a race. We called it the "Amazing Race" and what the guild members had to do was follow a trail of clues to the ultimate party site. The first team to make it to the site won a prize. (A Glacial Bag for each of them along with gold.) They just had to present all of the clues at the party site. So we didn't just have people looking at where the officers were (since we were all the clue givers) we created another guild and put some "unknown" alts in it.

Everyone was on vent to get the instructions and divided up into pairs. The officers then stayed in one channel while the teams each picked a separate channel to work in. Once the first team reached a clue giver the next clue giver would log on. That way even if some sneaky individual tried to look up our "event" guild they wouldn't be able to locate anyone other than the individuals they already knew of. If anyone got lost or stuck they had only to pop up into the channel with all the officers and ask for some direction. (That didn't mean we would give it to them but if after five minutes they STILL hadn't figured out where to go we would give them another clue to help them along.)

We started with dancing at the Temple of the Moon in Darnassus. From there everyone had to make their way to the top of Frostsaber Rock in Winterspring. Then it was on to the Kodo Graveyard in Desolace. Next a brief stop to see Jania Proudmore at her home in Theramore Isle before catching a boat to the Wetlands and trudging their way to Grim Batol. Then it was off to Uldaman in the Badlands before getting sent off to the Blasted Lands to see the Dark Portal. From there they had to make their way to the Jangolode Mine in Westfall to finally make their way down the coast to the Light House.

It was fascinating to watch the different methods people used to get from zone to zone. The officers, who were all closely monitoring what was going, on had a great deal of fun attempting to determine which path individuals would use and then discussing the success of various methods. Over all the majority of the group had little difficulty with the clues.

Daethy and Cassiah were the ultimate winners but it was VERY close. Once they arrived we announced the location in guild chat and started summoning all the participants (as well as others who were just logging in) to the party site. Since some people had to log off at that point, we had our traditional prayer. We then broke into a rousing game of Trivia (some guild, some game) with correct answers rewarding the players with various silly items as well as a pair of flasks of their choice. The evening was ended with a dueling competition.

Every time we have one of these events we invite the guild members to give us feedback. Tell us what they enjoyed, and what they didn't. Inviting them to give us suggestions for future events or how we could have made the event better has been helpful in making them enjoyable. This one was deemed a huge success by all and the ideas are already flowing for the next one. (We try to do something about every two months just to break up the monotony of raiding, build some guild spirit and remind us all that this game is suppose to be FUN!!)

So Happy Anniversary EM! It has been a great Four Years and I can't wait to see what else is in store!