Introduction from Triv

Well I suppose I should let everyone know a little about myself and what this blog is all about. My name is Jason; I play an alliance toon on Icecrown(US) named Triv. I am the founder of Raid Naked though I am no longer the guild leader. I passed that role to a good friend of mine Shawtylock.

It's kind of funny how the guild came to be and how it has changed over time. Originally, I created the guild because I had a lot of ideas of my own that I wanted to implement. I had not had much success with previous guilds as an officer; I have found that strong personalities don't always == strong leaders because often they tend to have strong opinions and are slow to accept change or alternative ways of doing things. So, WOTLK came out and I was sitting there on my horde toon preparing for the levelling dash to 80 when I find out that everyone I know is switching over to alliance.... Are you kidding me? To be honest though, I wasn't really concerned about it much because my main (a rogue) officially sucked IMO in WOTLK and I didn't have a lot of motivation to continue with her. I bit the bullet and rolled a mage, Glaciator. Yeah I know.. cheesy name but I liked it. I joined with my friends guild and started to level. They all had 70+ toons so I was pretty much leveling on my own. While leveling I sat in vent and listend while they raided and chatted. Soon, I realized that I really didn't fit in well and thought maybe it was time to roll my own guild so I left and started Raid Naked.

The name came about because of a running joke with Shawty. The raid leader in one of his former guilds used to always ask "Everybody ready?", and of course Shawty would reply "Yep, pants are off. Pull!!". The funny thing about it was that some people seriously thought he was raiding without pants. I cackle to this day when people ask me if I am actually raiding NAKED.

For the first month I was by myself in Raid Naked. I was fine with that since I had no desire to run a leveling guild and really didn't have a game plan for running the guild. Well that's not true either, I did have a game plan I just didn't have the hard drive to implement it with strangers. A little more back history would probably be useful here. Saying I made a guild and poof here we are doesn't really tell the entire story. I have been through the process a few times now. The first time I really worked with guild creation and building was when I was on the ground floor of launching Microsofts' Horde guild Nullref on Nordrassil(US). There was a lot of discussion and feedback that went into launching that guild. It originally started in a mailing list at Microsoft dedicated to WoW as a thread about Microsofts alliance guild (the name escapes me at the moment) and hw this person wished there were a horde side guild for the regular horde reasons, noobs, kids, alliance toons are teh suk, etc. The thread took off like fire on a dry hillside and soon people were throwing out ideas for a new guild. There were a few people, myself included that kind of took control of the thread and began taking the ideas and putting them into polls and other discussions that the members of the thread then voted on. We took most of the voted on suggestions and began to write a guild charter around them. When I say most, I mean exactly that. People IME generally look at things from a personal benefit standpoint, that does not always work for the group as a whole. Eventually we voted on what server we wanted to make the guild on and someone created a toon and .. well the rest is history. I must say I feel it is still one of the most successful guilds of it's kind anywhere. They have somehow managed to run a guild that does progression, supports casual players, has an active PVP base, and to top it all off they all work together. Granted Microsofts campus is larger than most mid sized cities so working together isn't as rough to manage as say having the entire guild in a building of cubicle bays stacked on top of each other. Through that mailing list they came up with a guild charter and it's the base model I used when launching Raid Naked.

I am no longer the GM, just an honorary officer and I am happy with that. I don't deal well with the rigors of leading non stop. I have a fix it type of attitude that doesn't always mesh well with being the guild leader, it does however work well in the background and on the side where I don't bring a lot of focus on myself and the issue gets handled quietly.

So now we are in the present, or near present anyway. Eventually my friends came over to Raid Naked and brought their friends with them, and them theirs and so on. I passed leadership to Shawty because I like his laid back attitude in the game, he seems pretty popular as a leader. We've had the usual guild ups and downs, people coming, people going, drama queens, instigators, etc.. Lately however with the guilds stability we have begun to steadilly attract strong players. I hope this continues.

As for me, I am pretty casual in my playing and will never claim to be good or great at this game or any aspect of it. I simply enjoy the game for what it is. I also enjoy the company of the friends I have in this guild. Grettir and Shawty are my two closest friends and I get to hang out with them online in the game. Grettir lives in another state so it's not very often we get to see each other and hang out so this is the next best thing.

The toons Grettir and Triv are our new alts, soon to be mains. We decided that we wanted to have more flexibility and options to run content. We didn't want to rely on others picking us up for DPS in PUG's and in all honesty our mains lacked a lot of appeal in general, call it familiarity breeding contempt. We rolled a Druid (Triv), and a Paladin (Grettir). We chose these classes because they compliment each other well and are extremely versatile. They pretty much run the hybrid role gambit. I have always wanted to heal and he's found tanking to be to his liking. We are still leveling these toons as life and mains come at us.

Please feel free to say hi anytime in game and don't be afraid to comment here as well.