Knights of Stonewall Update - March 2012

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delay in posting this month’s "State of the Guild" announcement. I’m pleased to report that we have had no major issues since our last State of the Guild update, and we are seeing a stabilisation in member numbers, with a steady but not large, increase in new recruits.

Firstly, Star Wars: The Old Republic got a little bit of a PR boost on Thursday night due the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory. If you have not seen it yet, I urge you to, as it is hilarious and soo accurate, lol.

Anyway, back to Knights of Stonewall and this month’s announcements and updates:


Removal of unknown and inactive characters.

Now that the game has been live for nearly 3 months, it is time for us to introduce our “housekeeping” measures to ensure that the in-game guilds consist of active members of the guild only. This type of membership policy is common in other guilds and we have used it successfully before in Stonewall Fleet. The main reason for introducing this policy now is that we are expecting guild banks to be included in the next major update of the game, and it is important that we can safeguard the property of all our members. We don’t want anyone who is not a member to be able to steal from us.

I’d like to ask everyone to check that they have added their Username from KnightsofStonewall.com (or Stonewallfleet.com) as their “Member Note” for all their characters in all the in-game guilds. To do this all you need to do is click on “guild” at the top left of the screen to bring up the guild roster and then click “details” to see a more detailed version of the roster in a larger pop up window. If you have not added your username yet, just right click on your own character’s name and follow the guild options for that character to the “Member Note” option. A small window will pop up to allow you to type in your member note. If you have any questions or problems with this, please ask.

Characters which do not have a valid username in their member note are set to the rank of Recruit in-game, and from now on there is a 7 day limit to being at that rank. Any character that remains a Recruit after 7 days will be removed from the guild without further warning. Once we get guild banks in-game, we plan to deny access for anyone at Recruit rank. If that option is unavailable, we may need to expand the invite procedure to ensure we do not give access to non-members.

We will also be introducing a 3 month inactivity limit for characters in all the in-game guilds. This will allow us to remove abandoned characters from the guild to allow room for active ones. All we need to do is remember to log into all our characters at least once every 3 months to avoid removal, which I hope you all agree is not too much to ask.

I want to stress that any character which is removed is always able to be re-invited at any time!

The removal of the unknown and inactive characters will reduce the size of our in-game guilds and this brings up the issue of Soldiers of Stonewall. Although the urgent need for more space for characters was the reason we had to create Soldiers of Stonewall so quickly, the reasons for its existence are still very much relevant. We hope that the guilds will grow again to be full of active characters and the extra space will be needed then. The first update to guilds will be the introduction of guild banks, and so having twice the capacity on the most active (Republic) side of the guild will be a huge advantage to us and especially to the Crafting Crew who will need this capacity to help equip all of us with the best gear. Most importantly, we are still unaware of what Bioware’s future plans for guilds are. We, along with other guilds, are lobbying Bioware for an increase in guild capacity and function, and we hope that the Guild leader summit in Austin this month will prompt Bioware to make their long term plan for guild structure public very soon. We just need to be patient and hope that Bioware listen to the needs of the players.

I want to assure everyone that at the moment there is no practical downside to having two Republic guilds as we have the KoS channel, but that should any downside arise we will open this issue up again.


New rank of “Major”.

I would like to announce the creation of a new rank in Knights of Stonewall, that of Major. The rank of Major is roughly equivalent to that of Fleet Captain in Stonewall Fleet. Majors are part of the leadership team and are responsible for a specific task which is vital to the guild, such a raid organisation, event planning, guild maintenance, etc. They will be responsible for tasks associated with one department in the guild, but will also act on behalf of the officer of that department in their absence and help out in general with guild management. The officers are still responsible for the overall direction of their own departments and the direction of the guild in general so I would ask anyone who wants to complain about anything to do so directly to an officer.

The recruitment process for Majors is unlike those for the Officer and Captain rank. Members who wish to become Captains just need to ask and promise to help with invites and keeping the chat channels friendly when they are in-game. Officers need to apply in writing when a position becomes available and explain in detail why they would be the best choice for the role, that they have the relevant experience and that they promise to work tirelessly to help every single member of the guild at all times. Majors, however, are nominated by an Officer based on observations of their actions, knowledge and helpfulness in a specific area, the nominee then just needs to be approved by the Officers to be promoted. We will hopefully increase the number of Majors over the next few months to ensure that every aspect of the guild has someone paying personal attention to it on a daily basis.

Our first four Majors are:
Ltervlet – Major for membership and rosters
Attitude – Major for Crafting
Woobies – Major for Republic PvE
CJUK – Major for Republic PvE

I’d like to thank our current and future Majors for their dedication to the guild and for helping everyone here enjoy playing SW:TOR that little bit better!


Events

The Officer and Majors have now gathered enough information on the high end content and desires of the members to begin hosting guild wide events. We have already organised a few to also test the attendance so we can better tailor our event planning to suit everyone. We will be hosting more events in the future based on what all the members need and we are relying on everyone to keep us informed if they are failing to get the help they need from the guild for this reason. In particular we have noticed a larger uptake of events on the Republic side of the game and so we aim to match that need. On the Empire side we have had lower attendance for events and so we will keep hosting events but will take into account that players are quite happy to play in smaller groups or alone there.

Don't forget, the Events section of the website is for all members to use to create their own events or to help get a team together for raids, heroics or flashpoints.

We had our first Social Event last weekend where we took screenshots of the guild and of characters for our Hottest Character competitions. I’d like to thank everyone who attended and especially Attitude and KiddKasper for taking the screenshots at each timeslot. If you missed this event we will be running them on a monthly basis for the foreseeable future to allow everyone a chance to attend at least once and get to know your guildmates.

I have added four screenshots to the end of this post of the guild. Two of the Republic guilds at the two different timeslots, and two of Empire guild. I think you will all agree that we make a good looking bunch, lol.


...and finally

I’d once again like to thank all of you for your continued support for Knights of Stonewall, and remind everyone that if they have any questions comments or complaints, they can contact me or any of the Officers at any time!

Zepari
Operations Officer


[attachment=824]KoS1.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=825]KoS2.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=826]LoS1.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment=827]LoS2.jpg[/attachment]

You can also just press "g" to bring up the guild roster interface. :)

Quote by ltervlet

You can also just press "g" to bring up the guild roster interface. :)

...and no-one thought to mention that to me before? lol.

Thats good news. I know it's very hard to remove someone from the guild. Every guild has to at some point to make room for active members. Hopefully at some point we can get rid of the KoS chat channel.

Good plan to use SoS as the crafting guild bank. I know it's not set in stone but once KoS is cleared out of stale toons SoS would be the perfect crafting guild bank.

Aw, looks like I was cut out of the guild picture. anyways it was fun and glad so many showed up.

OMG, I didn't think I'd cut anyone out of the picture. What time were you on and I'll go back and see if I can find a screenshot with you in it Van?

P.S. the Soldiers of Stonewall guild is still the active guild for all Trooper and Smuggler characters until we are given a good reason by Bioware for remerging the guilds. We also need to ensure we have the capacity in KoS as well. My comment on the Crafting benefits for two guilds is that we can have rare gear in each bank that is specific to the classes that use that bank.

Personally I do not see why we should wait for "a good reason by Bioware for remerging the guilds". Once the housekeeping on the membership has been completed the population of a merged KoS and SoS will be will be still be under 400 like it is now.

This leaves more than enough room to grow. Also keep in mind the housekeeping will keep the population dropping even as we get new members each week.

We have at most 10-15 players on at peak times and it is mostly the same people. There is no need for a split, all it does is make the game harder to play as a community.

Lets start doing what our community needs instead of working around things or waiting on Bioware. Myself and and others on the republic side who play most often see this as an important step to build and strengthen our community in game.

I volunteered to help improve things on the republic side and I think this is one of the priorities.

P.S. I think Theodin was standing on the left of the picture.

Cheers,
CJ

Quote by CJUK

Personally I do not see why we should wait for "a good reason by Bioware for remerging the guilds". Once the housekeeping on the membership has been completed the population of a merged KoS and SoS will be will be still be under 400 like it is now.

This leaves more than enough room to grow. Also keep in mind the housekeeping will keep the population dropping even as we get new members each week.

We have at most 10-15 players on at peak times and it is mostly the same people. There is no need for a split, all it does is make the game harder to play as a community.

Lets start doing what our community needs instead of working around things or waiting on Bioware. Myself and and others on the republic side who play most often see this as an important step to build and strengthen our community in game.

I volunteered to help improve things on the republic side and I think this is one of the priorities.

P.S. I think Theodin was standing on the left of the picture.

Cheers,
CJ

I agree 100% with this as do most of the regular players on the republic side. We want to strength our community not keep it divided.
Yes I will lend a hand in what is needed to get this cleaned up. There is great potetntal for the guild.

Yeppers I was on the left hand side of the picture right next to the lightsaber. I was there when you gave out the 5min warning for folks to show up. Sorry I wasn't there when the grp formed as folks said we where waiting 30min.

Not that I ever say much anywhere here or in-game, but... I'd like to chime in now. I tend to agree with CJ. I've leveled my trooper to 50 in SoS and have been on nearly every day and there is usually no more than 2 to 3 people on with me. Many times I am on SoS by myself. There's something disheartening about seeing a '1' after the Guild count in the UI. Makes you feel really detached.

Now I know there is the KoS channel which is great, and I understand the thinking behind the guild banks. However, it is more difficult to see who is online in the other guild and you are not able to view the member notes or rank. It's much easier to just hit 'g' and see everyone and who they are. And I think the guild bank tabs are going to be very expensive so we may have to find resources for two banks. I saw 5M in one early screenshot and I'm assuming that means million, but we'll see with the upcoming economy tuning.

I'm sure re-merging would be a major pain, but I believe that option should be considered after the roster clean up is done and see what the numbers are. Unless KoS is expecting a large infusion of players it seems that we can all live under one roof. And SoS doesn't have to go anywhere, just put some non playing alts in there and keep it around in the event it's needed again in the future.

Thanks for the read

Bump with a request for updates on the 2 guilds. Especially i would like to see the leadership thread updated.

Currently i am the most common LOS player, i.e. normally im the ONLY LOS player.

I just took thurs and Friday off after the 4th holiday (usa) and i was in SWTOR most of the time i was playing games online. A good portion of Sunday i was starting a new Trooper character and the max number of guildies was 5 (thats inclusive for those that dont play the game), which is 2-4 more than the common number i see in LOS. While i was on LOS part of the time at least one person asked for an invite when i was the only one from the guild on.

To try and answer your questions, Seannewboy. Each time I log on, I will check both rosters to see if there is anyone that's been invited in my absence. The majority of the time, I am the only one on in LOS. I think we are missing each other just because of the different times we log on. Right now, I am currently the one on the most with invite capabilities. I am currently working on trying to get in touch with the remainder of the members that have yet to transfer to The Harbinger. While there are several Captains when you look at the roster, most of those belong to the same people so in reality we don't have a whole lot of people that can invite. Would you be interested in joining their ranks? I tried to get as many as possible so we wouldn't have any invite issues and for the most part we haven't. I have always told anyone that finds they are having difficulty getting an invite, they are more than welcome to send me a PM via the website and I will log on when they do to extend them an invite. So far, only one person has had to use that. (Unfortunately, that even "runs into a wall" because many of our members have never been back to the website since they registered and I have no other way to reach people :( ) It's quite possible when you saw that invite request it was me, because I transferred my last 2 characters over during the time you mentioned and they were carrying the contents of the guild banks which have been returned to each of our tabs.

I am not trying to "offer" any of this as an excuse in any way shape or form, but am trying to answer the topics you have brought up. As much as I might like to, I can't do everything and I can only play one side or another at any particular time. My biggest wish has always been that there would be some way I could "monitor" both sides at the same time, but developers have never allowed that in any game, so we have to use the current arrangement. :S ) Our membership is still international, all of our members log on at different times of the day and time differences are always going to be an issue. We are basically having to rework everything as if the guilds are brand new, so if you have ANY suggestions, I am all ears. :) The next item I am going to be trying to work on is getting Officers appointed but that means we have to have members who are willing to take on more responsibility and that too has always been an issue. Real life takes precedent. Another thing that causes some issues is many of our members are playing more than one game at a time. Look at the "Other gaming" category in the forums for evidence to that. If people are playing other games, they're not logging into SWTOR so where does that leave us? Unfortunately, until the developers figure out they need to release new content more often than they do (and not in dribs and drabs like they have been), people aren't going to want to focus on just this game and that alone is going to keep our numbers way down. :(

But again, I eagerly await any suggestions anyone may have that are workable. I'd rather not be the only one responsible for everything because that never ends well..... :blink:

No apologies or excuses needed, people play or do not, and it can be sporadic in some games. I should know i have STO,SWTOR, and diablo3 now. Soon i hope to be beta'ing mechwarrior online and planetside 2, not to mention i may play phantasy online 2 next year.

I was mostly just wondering if the officers other than yourself were still playing at all, especially on the empire side.

Aah, no problem. Sorry for the lengthy response before. Right now, I am the only Officer that is playing regularly. Halish did transfer 2 of his characters but they are both Republic and he is not on very often mostly due to being very busy in real life, I believe.