Posts with tag syndicate

You know your adults-only guild has built up a serious steamhead of history when you begin seeing an entirely new generation of applicants from within your own ranks. That's right, WoW players, you really are that old. This month marks the 17th anniversary of The Syndicate, the current Guinness world record holders for the longest continuously operating online gaming community.

"As our move into our 18th year as a community, internally we are starting to see the children of our members applying to join," writes Sean "Dragons" Stalzer, president and CEO of The Syndicate. "Said a different way, that means people who have only known MMORPGs similar to WoW or EQ or UO or Rift are heading off to college."

When we interviewed Dragons three years ago, we examined the group's massive size across multiple games, its unrivaled retention rate (an average loss of one to two people per year, for a 99.92% retention rate), and its own studio that turns out strategy guides for casual players and handles game and hardware consulting and testing for various game companies. That's a heady bouquet of achievements for a hardworking guild. Still, the group's anniversary this month makes waves in a much larger context -- a new era for MMO designers and fans alike.

"It matters because the MMOs of the past 17 years were created, in large part, by a community of developers who knew the world of BBS gaming via a modem... who played MUDs and MOOs... who, in the more senior levels, knew gaming before there were computers," Dragons writes. "We are just now reaching the point where the future programmers, designers, producers etc.. are heading off to college having never known a world without MMORPGS. Some of the core mechanics and concepts that shaped what 'success' is in the MMORPG world are things they have never experienced, and that isn't a bad thing. It means there is change coming to the MMO space."

15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft personalities of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, from the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

The Syndicate first came to our attention a couple of weeks ago, when we noted the meta-guild's 14th anniversary in The Classifieds. Its 600+ members (across both World of Warcraft and Ultima Online) enjoy ties to all sorts of intriguing gaming and charitable projects: writing strategy guides, beta testing, games consulting, raising support for military troops through gaming. A visit to their web site yields pages and pages on the group's history and projects.

Considering such massive numbers inside such a sprawling organization, you might be tempted to conclude that these gamers must be very, very "hardcore." Not so fast. In fact, The Syndicate's in-game philosophy uplifts long-standing, person-to-person relationships and group fun above all else. Outside projects such as games consulting and strategy guides focus on material for the typical gamer – that's right, not the bleeding edge. We dug up what's going on inside this gargantuan guild in an interview with Dragons, its founding GM, president and CEO.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-fourth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

Many of the most famous rogues outside of the Warcraft setting have been nuanced and exciting characters. Bilbo Baggins, the Prince of Persia, and James Bond, could all be reimagined as rogues if they had existed in Azeroth instead of their own settings.

As an Alliance rogue, you have a certain amount of freedom to borrow from other settings, or from the real world, since the Alliance races tend to be more similar to heroes of other stories we've heard before. To a certain extent, Blizzard has already based its Alliance rogue guilds on stories from other settings, and left some aspects of these institutions rather vague. There is certainly enough room for roleplayers to fill in a bit of the blanks with their own creative inspiration. The only danger is that it could be easy to overdo it and descending into Mary-Sueism: one ought to feel free to reach for a bit of the flavor of James Bond, for instance, without ever believing your character is the single best secret agent Stormwind could ever have.

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, the column that answers your questions about the story and lore of the Warcraft universe. Click the Comments link below, ask your question, and blogger/columnist Alex Ziebart will answer you in a future installment!

skoll asks...

Whats your speculation about the Burning Legion in the new expansion, since Kil'jaeden has been killed/defeated? IF he is dead.. will it that be the end of Burning Legion? If not, what you think their role will be?

Answer: Well, Kil'jaeden isn't dead. Not at all. In the Sunwell Plateau, Kil'jaeden is being summoned but never fully makes it through the portal. We bop him on the head and he just falls back in. What presence will they have in Wrath? Well, it will probably be minimal. I am sure they'll have some presence, the Legion doesn't really have any love for the Scourge, but it won't be anything like what we've seen in The Burning Crusade. Kil'jaeden is alive and well, but I think they'll scale way back on demons just because we've seen so many lately. They will probably want to step away from thrusting the same thing on us for another entire expansion.