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More than once, I’ve made my views on organized units in the MWO community known. To avoid a lengthy diatribe of a recap here, let us simply say that I am too casual for any of the units in this forum to tolerate. Nevertheless, I have been approached a few times now by folks with a message to the general effect of “I’m sorry for whatever experiences you’ve had before, but my unit is nothing like that. We’re totally chill and the very coolest of cats, and we welcome casual players like you with open arms.”
They mean well, and despite what a couple of them have said to me after I turned them down with a tale of why, I still appreciate the offer. But the whole affair has gotten me curious. See, I have a different standard of ‘casual’ from everyone else on the MWO forum, induced in me by the only guild/clan/unit/organization I’ve ever enjoyed being a part of/stuck with for more than a couple of months. That would be the Guild of the Free Companies, over in Guild Wars 2. I wish to see how many people think their unit stands up (or sits down) to the glorious level of no-hassle casualism that GTFC embodies, and which of the units around here think they really, truly have no rules. I will do this by laying out the tenets to which GTFC adheres as an organization(*), and seeing how many of you folks are willing to cop to all of them. Not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. Because these are the things that make a casual, fun-time group a casual fun-time group to me, and not a single MWO unit I’ve ever seen conforms to even half of them, let alone all of them.
So. You stand challenged, units of the Inner Sphere! How shall you respond?
Tenet One: Organization is No Such Thing
GTFC does dungeons, guild missions, the occasional Living Story run and other such events fairly regularly. Closest MWO equivalent is premade drops. Thing is…when most guilds/groups/units do these things, there’s some actual organization involved. They try and match compatible players and playstyles together, they try and figure out who is doing what role, they have a few rules and guidelines in place to ease the drop, and they generally get everybody lined up and out the door in ten minutes or less.
GTFC? Simply getting the event started almost always lasts longer than the event itself.
One player once described a GTFC guild event, and specifically trying to organize the multiple player parties needed for it, as follows: “It’s like trying to herd cats, except all the cats think they’re the herdsman and everyone else is a cat, so it’s more like a bunch of frantic cats trying to herd themselves.” 45 minutes is not an unreasonable or even remotely unheard of time for organizing even such a simple thing as a guild bounty. Which is a thing we’ve done dozens of times before. Sure, there’s some old-hand types in the guild who’re used to bounties and can fall into line for them quick-quick, but we’ve also always got new players who need The Official FiresShadow Verbal Explanation Of Bounties (which the rest of the guild does their absolute best to heckle and talk over and generally just Statler and Waldorf to death), as well as the actual explanation of what we’re doing, and all the usual musical-chairs shenanery of getting players sorted into parties for the hunt.
We all just look at the chaos and laugh. Doesn’t frustrate us a bit, and is in fact sort of a bass-ackwards source of pride. After all, it just wouldn’t be a GTFC event without all the bullcrap, eh?
Tenet Two: To Gehenna with Optimization
One of GTFC’s notable/favorite informal events is called ‘Go Go Dungeon Rangers’, wherein a group of players does a dungeon with as close as they can get to five Ranger-profession characters. Warriors, Mesmers, and Guardians are flat disallowed from a GGDR run, Elementalists are frowned upon, and one can only bring a Thief, Engineer, or Necromancer if they don’t actually have a Ranger of the appropriate level for the dungeon in question.
This is somewhat analogous to a MWO drop wherein the players bring as close to exclusively Dragons as possible, and in which Highlanders, Cataphracts, JagerMechs, and other such are completely disallowed for the drop. Not only is it a “no top-tier stuff” drop, it is specifically and intentionally a “bring your absolute worst chassis” drop.
Go Go Dungeon Rangers grew out of two things. First, the fact that at least half our members seem to be Ranger players or have Ranger alts. Secondly, the fact that GTFC, as a group, cares so incredibly little for optimal group composition, maximizing performance/minimizing run times, keeping track of DPS charts and all the other usual MMO number crunching that one of our more popular events is pretty much just spitting in its face. We run dungeons and other events how we want to, not how the Good Players tell us we should in order to maximize our earnings/performance, and runs that go terribly and take us three hours of torture to finally wrap up? Those are the ones we talk about for weeks afterwards, because those are the runs where people truly get a chance to shine.
We have a member – Thirsty, known as the Wipemancer to some – who has earned his nickname time and time again in situations we’ve cleared fifty times before. The man attracts bad luck (and boss aggro) like a cheap bar attracts drunks. We have never once told the Wipemancer to take himself elsewhere, and most of the time, when he goes down and takes half the group with him? We just point and laugh, then get to the business of kiting for twenty minutes while we get everyone back up.
That’s just how we do things.
Tenet Three: Life Comes First. Pretty Much No Matter What
In GTFC, you come and go as you please. There are absolutely no attendance or time-per-week requirements. Life intervenes in even the strictest gaming schedule, and we also realize that sometimes you just don’t frogging feel like playing any Guild Wars 2 for a while. Sometimes that while is a week, maybe two. Sometimes that while is three or four months. You know what? Doesn’t matter.
Yes, we do ask that if someone knows they’re going to be gone for a while, they leave a message on the forums saying as much, but we also don’t enforce any penalties for people who don’t, and we do not kick for inactivity or failure to adhere to a gaming schedule we don’t even have anyways. We just completed our first-year roster clean-up (a process which itself took some three, four months), and the only people we tossed were folks who’d been gone for so long we didn’t remember who they were anymore.
And each and every one of those people, right before the guild leader kicked them, received an in-game e-mail letting them know why they were kicked and inviting them to come right on back to GTFC whenever they turn up again. No muss, no fuss, no questions asked – if they come back and want back in, we’ll hold the door open for them. I’ll do it myself if no one else is on.
Tenet Four: Having Fun is How We Have Fun
Among the things we’ve done, beyond the Go Go Dungeon Rangers thing: poetry contests, Run The Brand-New Character to Max-Level Content Areas events, a guild-wide naked base jump off the lip of a giant volcano (I hit the lava so hard it crashed my game. Not kidding. It was awesome), a twenty-man rampage through endzone area so incredibly (virtually) drunk that the only way we could hit the enemies was by having the handful of Rangers’ pets attack them. We have a player running a Where’s Waldo-style hunt where he takes a screenshot of his character in an obscure place, then challenges the guild to take the same screenshot in the same place with their character. First one to do it wins a little prize. We have a player with a six-plus page thread on the forums devoted to chickens – his love of them, and our love of eating them.
Many player groups around the forums here seem to run by the motto “Winning is Our Fun.” They are ruthless, cutthroat men and occasionally women who discipline themselves harshly, following rigorous schedules of training and practice and utilizing only the verymost brutal of meta-chasing ‘Mechsmashers in their matches. Great, awesome. Enjoy that. MWO is obviously not as flexible as a game like Guild Wars 2 and does not allow for random, nonsensical off-game activities the same way a more conventional MMO does, but frankly? The same rule totally still applies. If one cannot accuse the enemy team's mothers of being hamsters and their fathers of smelling of elderberries when one has been totally disarmed and is limping back to base to await their execution because "it would tarnish our image", what the hell is your unit doing wrong?
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This is my guild. These are the only folks I’ve ever found who’re truly chill and relaxed and don’t care about Getting Somewhere in the game. All they want to do – all I want to do – is play what we want, when we want to play it, and with whoever we want to play it with. The only rules in GTFC are DBaD and our policy on speedrunning. Which only goes so far as to say that GTFC, as a general thing, does not actively pursue or condone speedruns and players in GTFC should not expect to speedrun with other guildies or, in any circumstance, get mad at their guildmates or give them a hassle for “doing the dungeon wrong”.
Yeah, that’s right. Our only real rule-shaped rule is specifically set up to avoid high-efficiency play.
So. People keep telling me how chill their units are, how awesome a group of guys they are to hang out with. Heh…satisfy my curiosity – are your units actually, truly chill, or are they simply more chill than the astoundingly uptight folks who do things like Run Hot or Die? Not that such is even remotely a bad thing – I’m always in favor of increased levels of chill in gaming groups. Just curious as to whether anyone out there figures they’ve achieved the same level of completely unmotivated hassle-free casual Nirvana that GTFC has shown me.
Let’s see what you don’t got, mercenary units of MechWarrior Online!
Edited by 1453 R, 09 January 2014 - 08:40 PM.
