Congratulations to The Earthbound, February's WoW Insider Guild of the Month! Here is an excerpt from the winning entry from Genk, the guild founder:

When someone joins The Earthbound (US-Dragonmaw), they're welcomed with a cry of "blu nu!" For those who were invited by friends to the guild, this is the point where they find out that we're not like other guilds.

More details about The Earthbound, in Genk's words, are after the break.

Biggest achievement

"I think at the moment our biggest achievement is the opening of another game branch of The Earthbound. None of the people involved in the old branch are officers in the WoW branch, and I don't know any of them from former guilds or anything. They're all transfer members who came over for fun, and now they're helping build the guild in another game and supporting the WoW guild (which, in the same week as the game's release, is drastically increasing perform in WoW's RBGs. We were able to take 2 of our recruits with under 1.5k resil into RBGs and still win 3-0 and 2-0 in flag captures). Oh, and still having raid stuff to offer."

The beginning

"The guild's beginning is quite complex, in terms of plans, timing, execution, and community, and this article won't be able to contain them. The short story that, after nearly a decade of online gaming in various games, genres, and clans/guilds, I felt that I'd experienced enough to make a sort of guild that could last and still be practical. I created a the guild structure, explicitly outlining how the guild would function so that socialization would rule while maintaining enough flexibility to make game specific rules and ranks without endangering the guild as a whole. A few friends pitied me and signed the charter on a bank char, but I found and recruited the others through personal observations and chats (largely in Wintergrasp so I could see people's performance). We started in a time that was just plain wrong for what I wanted to do, feeling like if the guild couldn't start then, it would never be able to last. However, the guild Dirty, whose GM was a close friend of my brother's, helped watch monitor recruits in WG when I was away, and the guild PK gave us a vote of confidence when we finally hit the server forums with our recruitment post. From there, members poked around our site and found out how to earn ranks and get officers in place. We were not founded by a group of friends, raiders, elite PvPers, or the remains of former guilds, but it did attract them. We've grown without spamming or offering progression, just a good time. I'm largely more of a monitor than a guild leader, since guildies seem to mainly take care of each other."

Current activities

"Activities vary greatly. While I personally founded the guild for world pvp and RBGs, we've also got raiders and folks running old content for kicks, but that's just the boring stuff. We've helped revive the Dragonmaw server's Friday Night Fights event to help keep world pvp alive, thrown parties (such as a Farewell to Dalaran party the night before the shattering), and do team building pvp events, such as inter-guild 3v3v3s in the Gurabashi arena. If you BG with us, don't be surprised if you suddenly have bunny ears on. If you charge us 1 versus 10, we'll cheer at you and maybe dance until some of your friends arrive. We'll go naked in your capital city's bank once we think the guards aren't looking (though some of us still get caught with our pants down). We like to play the game in ways others just might not get, while still jumping through the hoops that devs set up each patch."

Future plans

"Our plans for the future are to keep going! Our server's having trouble with world pvp again after the alliance we were coordinating with chose to play another game, so we're working on something new to hopefully get people into World PvP again. Our raid and RBG teams are doing much better (RBGs team has brought undergeared players and shut out the other team in capture the flag, so skill's really doing well), but we're still on the lookout for people (not characters) that catch our interest. Finally, we've started a new guild branch in Rift on the Reclaimer server (Defiant), mainly made up of our transfer members, who still play WoW and help with RBGs. While we've seen other guilds get killed off by a new game, we're still able to raid and get RBG wins in WoW, so I think we've attracted a good amount of social, team oriented players who want to make sure this guild's around for a long time."

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Tags: community, february, guild-of-the-month, swagdog, the-earthbound

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