Mend Pet

Cow Darts

This is a pretty easy one to set up, and quick to run.  You need to roll a Tauren and head to Thunder Bluff.  Find a good place to jump off, and just die.  Do no res, just run back to your corpse as a ghost and stand over your poor mangled body.

Now, have everyone else bring Taurens to Thunder Bluff.  I’d recommend giving a general hint about where you fell off (i.e. northern side of Hunter Rise), so they can find your corpse.  They should be able to see and target the corpse from the top of the Bluff.  Their task is to jump off and land exactly where your corpse is.

Everyone gets up to 3 tries.  If they are unsatisfied with their first attempt, they can release, res, and try again.  All that will be left are a pile of bones.  When they are satisfied with their attempt, or when they hit their 3rd try, they should not res, and should leave their body so their corpse remains for judging.

After everyone is finished, winner is the corpse closest to the “target”.  It can be hard to judge, because if there are some really good darts players, it will seem like some of the corpses have conflated into one dead Tauren.   Feel free to declare a tie or pick your favourite person to win.

Example: Unemployed’s Tauren Appreciation Month

This was the first event in our Tauren celebration.  Everyone had to name their characters with either “Moo” or “Cow” in their name, and also part of their main’s name (i.e. Moojana for Brajana, Cowfeet for Tigerfeet, Moumou for Koukou, etc).

After a few attempts, I found a good place to leave my corpse (character named “Cowtarget” or something).  Everyone did really well, and in the end it was really close.

This one requires quite a bit of preparation, generally.  The idea is to come up with a list of items you want your participants to locate throughout the world, and see who can bring them back fastest.  It’s up to you whether you want to involve any roleplaying, it can be neat to have a reason why they are looking for these items.

I would recommend using grey items, since they will be much less likely to be able to just hit the Auction House and buy them.  Wowhead is a great resource, you can search through the junk items and pick out anything you find interesting.

If not all your participants are above level 70 or 77, you may want to restrict your search to Azeroth only, so flying mounts aren’t an issue.

Try to include multiple areas in your hunt, so people have to try to figure out the best way to get around.  Both continents, and possibly a required order will get people running around quite a bit.

Be sure to test run your hunt in advance.  Wowhead can be wrong about drop rates, and you want to make sure it’s possible to finish without taking forever.  This will also give you an estimate in time, so people can know how long to expect to be involved.

Example:  Unemployed’s Feast for Thrall

Pilsner and I ran this as our first major guild event.  I wrote up a story, we had NPC-ish characters, a script and everything.  It started with an in-game mail to all guild members, a job posting from Thrall’s HR Department, looking for lackeys to help set up for a Feast to celebrate Thrall’s glorious reign as Warchief.

At the start of the contest, everyone conflates at the front gates of Orgrimmar and get a letter listing necessities required for the Feast, and hints as to where they could be found throughout Azeroth.  They were asked to bring them to a Troll in Ratchet when finished.

When they brought all required items to the Troll (played by me), they would be sent to the Chef, located in the Apothecarium of the Undercity.  He asked them to visit all of the Horde leaders (Cairne, Sylvanas, Lor’themar) and then return with proof that they’d been visited.  (Proof was writing down the first line of text the leader says when you talk to them).  After this, it was a straight race back to the first “NPC”.

It went pretty smoothly, and I was pretty happy with it.  All the scripts had been macro’d, so we could do things easier.

conflate

\kuhn-FLAYT\, transitive verb:

1. To bring together; to fuse together; to join or meld.
2. To combine (as two readings of a text) into one whole.

Example: Holding guild events and doing things other than raiding is a great way to conflate the members of your guild into one happy group.

Tuesday was the start of week 2 of Heroic Naxxramas.

We pulled together, and in spite of the incredible amount of lag and disconnects, managed to clear 2 and 2/3 quarters of the raid in one night.  We got Plague, Spider and the first 2 bosses of the Military Quarter finished of.

Not necessarily all with my help, either.

Alright, so I once again was top 3 on DPS for almost the entire raid.  But once we got to the Military Quater and the clock started inching past 10PM, Brajana got sleepy.  I’m a big fan of sleep, and I like to get 7 to 8 hours of it each night.  But since I get up at 5:45 AM, that pegs my internal bedtime around 10PM.  Which is not good when we raid ’til 11PM.

I managed to squeeze through, but I must admit, when I died on Razuvious, I took a little bitty nap.

And when we started Gothik, I didn’t wait til I was dead.  I just… fell asleep.  Vent blasting from my speakers, my eyes shut and I was out.

After a few seconds of naptime, I woke to find myself Volleying the doorway of the room in my sleep (Yes, apparently I can hit ’4′ and select a target area in my sleep, repeatedly), no where near the mobs… but no one seemed to notice   No one except the evil WWS:

Well, when we made a second attempt I was much more awake, after giving myself a good shake.

I’ll do my best not to let it happen again!

Wednesday night… I got home from work, finished up all my chores and housework and sat down to play about about an hour before raid time, like usual.  But in a few minutes, I lost my connection.  I tried rebooting the router/modem. I tried rebooting my computer.  I tried connecting to Xbox Live with my 360.  It wasn’t a problem on my end, that was clear.  So I spent half an hour on the phone with a tech support guy, and he says my internet will continue to be intermittent until I have a tech come fix it (not til Saturday).  There goes raid night!  So, I took a nap instead.  Like I said, I like my sleep!

Thursday started off very well.  My connection had been stable all day, so I went on the raid.  We started at Gluth, because Wednesday night that’s where they gave up after the lagasaurus ate the raid.  And even though I’ve only done Gluth a couple of times before, it went beautifully.  Those who were kiting the Zombie Chow did a great job of keeping them together and away from everyone else, and we AoE’d them down like nobody’s business!  It was so smooth!

We tried to hurry to get to Thaddius before the 8PM raid crowd started and brought all the lag in with them, but it just wasn’t to be.  Our first attempted went pretty well, and we got him down to 21% before he enraged (better than our previous >50% attempts), but the lag started to become too much to handle, and every time we started a fight, we’d loose about 9 people to disconnects.

So we called it early, some people salvaged a 10-man group from the raid and the rest of us either went off to do something else or went to sleep.  I’m sure you have an intimation about which one of those I did.

Can’t believe I haven’t done a post on this before.

So, my Officer role in Unemployed is to be Events Officer.  I organize all guild events that have nothing to do with raiding/pvp/instances, so basically everything that doesn’t really involve game play.

It’s been a while since I’ve held any events, since everyone is pretty caught up and busy with Wrath of the Lich King, but I’ve had a good number in the past.  If you are in a guild who likes to do stuff together other than raiding, I’d recommend some of these ideas to try to bring people together.  Most of these have been held by Unemployed already, but a few of them are ideas I’ve had in the works for some time now, just waiting for the right time.

Events like these are a great way to get people together in a fun situation – since raiding can get pretty stressful and full of tension, doing some just for fun activities can be a great way to get everyone playing nice and remembering that everyone is on the same side.

So starting next week, I plan to have a series on guild event ideas that I’ve tried or hope to try someday.  I hope this can find it’s way to other Guild Event Co-ordinators out there!

1. Scavenger Hunt
2. Cow Darts
3. Level 1 Race
4. Costume Contest
5. Bake Off/Cooking Contest
6. Guild Meetup
7. Themed Screenshot Contests
   

Author’s note:  I’ve read over this post several times, but there is not even an intimation of where I can squeeze in the WoW Word of the Week… Oh, there, that did it.