Memoires (Part 8 - An Alliance is Born)

The next two months went by very quickly. Embroiled as I was in my GCSE exams, I did not manage to take part in every single raid, but I still went to as many as I could and we made kill after kill.

Kindred and Co swept relentlessly through the core, making consistent and steady progress and in early June, had managed to take down the following bosses:

Magmadar

Gehennas

Garr

Baron Geddon

Shazzrah

Golemagg

Sulfuron

Majordomo Executus

Each boss was challenging in it's own way, but the standout encounter amongst them for me was Baron Geddon, purely for one of his abilities where he would make a player "The Bomb". That player would then have a few seconds to run away from all of their friends before they blew up, lest they blow the raid up with them.

Naturally, this was a source of both hilarity and frustration, and I will long remember the feeling of: "SHIT, I'M THE BOMB. RUN!"

Another fun encounter was Majordomo Executus, the penultimate boss in Molten Core. It was a challenging encounter as the boss came with eight adds. Majordomo himself was also very hard to keep control of, as he would frequently dump the tank into a fire pit and then wander off towards the rest of the raid in search of squishy victims. This meant that everyone had to be alert and so the encounter was a very dynamic one, with tanks running left and right and it was just a lot of fun to finally pin down the execution of it.

Defeating Majordomo meant that we now only had Ragnaros left before we would officially complete The Molten Core, and also all the raiding content that was currently available within the game.

Ragnaros

In the month and a half that the raid had been together, the social dynamics within the mostly static group of people had evolved greatly. As you can imagine, if you bunged 40 unfamiliar people into a room and set them a task, there would be a lot of awkwardness at first. This was exactly what it was like at the start. Everyone was polite and accomodating, and I think everyone had the feeling that they were part of something momentous, so a lot of compromises were made in order to make the raid succesful.

As time passed however and everyone became more comfortable with each other, people began to relax back into their natural states, and a variety of cliques and personalities came out. There was the Kindred elite, as I liked to refer to them as. This included Gigamo, as well the main tank Pyrolobus and his priest, Ellen, along with several other characters. To my eyes, they kept themselves fairly aloof from the rest of the raid and socialised amongst themselves. Then, there was the friendly Kindred bunch, who were, well, friendly, and also completely bonkers. They were great fun to play with. Finally, there was "the rest", which comprised of most of the non-Kindred people.

As the weeks went by, more and more of the raid became Kindred, either through replacement of outsiders, or by people joining Kindred after feeling the rush of success and wanting more. The officers from The Revenants who were involved with Kindred (Chaspal, Zacker and myself) knew that the arrangement we had would soon become untenable, especially as now The Revenants itself had quite a few level 60's who were looking to make the jump to raiding. I flirted briefly with the idea of joining Kindred, but then I realised that although I wanted success, I wanted that success to be with The Revenants, a guild that had now come to feel like a bunch of friends, rather than a mass of strangers.

So, whilst we attended raids with Kindred and made attempts at Ragnaros. The other guild officers and I began to work towards securing the raiding future for us. Our first attempt at making an alliance didn't go particularly well - it was with a guild called Vikings of Midgard, and it wasn't that they were bad players, but their guild as a whole was too far behind The Revenants in the progression curve. This was made abundantly clear to us as we went on our first joint dungeon run. What should have been a routine run that took 2 hours actually ended up taking twice that long, and after that the alliance fizzled out.

We were then at a loss for a while as to what to do, but then, by a series of coincidences, things began to come together. During my time raiding with Kindred, I had often been put with a warrior from SWE (pronounced swee), and had become very good friends with him, along with other people from a guild called Blue Moon. As it turned out, Blue Moon and SWE were two guilds that were fairly tight, being as they were comprised of a lot of scandinavians, and players from continental Europe.

Chaspal and the leader of Blue Moon, a mage called Animagi, began talking and they got on like a house on fire. We then began joint runs to the lesser level 60 dungeons to test the waters. Given that most of the top players in the respective guilds were already fairly familiar with each other from raiding with Kindred, the runs went as smooth as honey. It also seemed to me that the ethos and goals and atmosphere within the three guilds seemed to gel pretty well and so the decision was made to strike an alliance, with the goal being to field a 40-man raid of our own separately from Kindred.

Then, we had to decide on a name. Nobody really had any good ideas, so we decided to just amalgamate the guild names.

"It should be ordered BM SWE REV," said the members of Blue Moon.
"No, it should be SWE BM REV," said SWE.
"REVBMSWE," said Chaspal.

I rolled my eyes and suggested we order them alphabetically.

And so, BMREVSWE was born. An alliance with a lot of promise, a lot of heart, but not a particularly good name.