It's almost the end of September, but we're finally ready to announce the winner of August's Guild of the Month contest. As you probably saw in the title of this post, August's winner is a guild that has become something of a household name for WoW players, being one of the longest standing, most accomplished raiding guilds in the world (of Warcraft). Rather than me telling you about who Stars is, I'll leave that up to Leonking, a member of Stars currently living right here in the United States. You can find what he wrote behind the cut below.

Stars was August's winner, but remember that September's Guild of the Month contest is still ongoing! We had a lot of great entries for August, and we would all love if everyone who entered last month gave it another try this time around. We're absolutely eager to her from new entrants, too! This is your chance to not only win a $100 gift certificate from Swagdog for some custom guild apparel, but also be featured right here on WoW.com. Good luck, and we can't wait to hear from you!

Leonking wrote...

Originating from EverQuest guild Ron, Stars was established on July 24th, 2004. Like many Asian guilds, we have have had many more members than most EU/US guilds from the beginning. In fact, during our time in the region of China playing the original game and The Burning Crusade, we had sub-guilds in both Horde and Alliance with more than 300 active members and 5 full 40 man raid groups in their prime time. Most top Chinese guilds have a similar size because we like the feeling of "big family", or you can call it collectivism, which is a well known cultural difference between China and other regions. It's something you can find in any social psych textbook.

At that time, we always got patches one week later than EU/US so didn't have too many chances to compete, except for one thing that we are really proud of even now. You may remember that when people still believed the Four Horsemen in Naxxramas were unkillable, a blue post said "We recorded that a Chinese guild has killed Highlord Mograine". Yes, it was us. Unfortunately, we lost out to Death and Taxes and only got world 4th on it at the end, but you can still get a sense of our attitude toward "impossible" from that event.

One month before WoTLK, we had a serious discussion among officers and key players because we heard that sometimes the patch is delayed for only one day on the region of Taiwan. Chances are slim that we can have a fair start there, but something is better than nothing. We don't have any other choices, really. Why not US/EU? 1.) Network connections between China and US/EU are unacceptable for end game raiding; 2.) We can't find enough Chinese speaking raiders there.

The decision was made soon after. We gave up accounts that have played for 3 years and began to level up from 1-80 all over again. Now we have to raid in the middle of the night (Algalon at 4:30am, 0-Yogg at 5:30am) just for better pings (still ~200-300ms) and less disconnections. Both Shadow Priests still disconnected for at least one minute in Phase 3 of our Yogg-0 kill, just check the video. But it's all worth it, because our friends playing on Chinese realms are just now coming close to being able to play Wrath of the Lich King.

Right after that came an Ulduar story you may remember. It's a simple one: A group of berserkers who were enraged by endless patch delay went directly for hard mode Mimiron with Naxxramas gear because it was one of the only unkilled things left for them to claim, the others being Algalon and the hard modes for Yogg-Saron and XT-002.

We rebirthed after the battle of Ulduar. Now we have 4 independent raid groups, two play for uber and two play for fun, all with different Raid Leads/strategy/progression. We know this is unusual for EU/US guilds. The trick here is: don't kick off your recruits and trials when they ruin your raid, but instead tell them "Sorry but apparently you are not capable of Yogg-0. How about practicing your skills with our 3 knock-on-wood groups first?" That's our culture. We actually also level up our own players rather than just grab the best players available.

To close this off, we want to thank our current 4th guild master 憂鬱的風 and our raid leaders: Crusher, Pennie, 血之火精靈, Longbefore, 光頭獵人, and Coocci, for leading us here. We also want to thank all of our fans around the world. We really appreciate your support. We won't let you down!

Most importantly, we would sincerely appreciate if Blizzard could bring the PTR to Asia. You know you have millions of loyal, grateful and skilled WoW players here waiting for it.

We are just Chinese WoW players, we work hard with heart and never give up.

We are the Stars!

Tags: algalon, alone-in-the-darkness, august, august-guild-of-the-month, chinese-wow, guild-of-the-month, mimiron, stars, swagdog, taiwan, taiwan-wow, taiwanese-wow, wow-china, wow-taiwan, yogg-0

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Contests, Raiding