Sparkling Pwnies - Dead for now? For good? Only time will tell.

[morfic]

Hello friends, enemies, and randoms!

Due to some unfortunate events and a massive chain reaction that stemmed from a few bad apples, the Pwnies are facing their biggest injury yet. As it stands, the guild is dead. I have taken over the reigns as guild master and have ceased all recruitment for the guild. Currently, we simply do not have the active member base for me to justify welcoming a new person into the guild. I would feel wrong about inviting someone into a guild where they would be alone and bored.

A huge part of me is wanting to just retire the guild for good, and call it a good run. However, I have seen too many good times, and made too many friends under the pwny name to just let it die. Being one of the few beta guilds still standing, I feel I would be doing it a injustice by just giving up. Instead, I am just working on a long term plan to rebuild. For all intents and purposes, the guild and presence as you know it, will probably be gone. I doubt you will see many of us running around at all even. However, since day 1 of the guild we have always went through a similar cycle. Our guild has thrived on one key fact. We have about the best core group of players anyone could ask for. Our core group is dedicated, knowledgeable, hilarious, and about the best I could ask for. This core group is still in the guild, as they always will be. Many of them, like myself, could not even fathom leaving the guild because of bad times. We are a family, and even though our core group are split between a few different games already (each flying the Sparkling Pwny banner), we remain strong on our forums, on team speak, and in spirit.

Normally, what happens is: Our core group gets bored of content and begins to dwindle away to different projects or games while waiting for the next update. The guild slightly suffers, but is held together by our die hard SL members until we return. Then, when a new update comes around, all of our core members come flooding back, and through our massive teamwork to dominate endgame content, we experience a recruiting craze. This has been the cycle since the guild was formed. The problem we are facing now is different. While our core group was away, an atom bomb of drama tore our guild to pieces. And as the activity in the guild dwindled because of this, people slowly began to drift away. My plan to revive the guild is simple:

- Clean up the ranks. Meaning, I will cut the fat of any diehard or wishywashy member. Only true Pwnies will remain.
- Get rid of recruiter status. The Pwnies have no need for recruiters at the moment... if ever.
- Maintain a presence in SL as guild master, and try to bring back a few of my core group to help me maintain this presence.
- Keep an eye out for anyone who would be excited about helping reform the guild to it's past glory and possibly joining the ranks of our core group as a family.
- Once DL releases, we of course will make an appearance there to test the waters. maybe use that burst in activity to feed SL's activity.
- Once SL has another update, wait for all of the old players to come flooding back. Once that happens, I will open up recruitment once more and use that momentum and activity to rebuild the guild.
- Once I have an active member base again, I will strive to continually maintain it, even if I have to do it myself. Hopefully, after spending the extra time to find quality recruits, and well placing officers, this will not be an issue.
- The main thing I will stress is quality recruitment. No longer will Pwnies be a simple place to join as long as you meet level cap. Recruitment will be stricter, expectations will be higher. We set out to be an elite endgame guild that dominated every aspect of the game, and we succeeded for a long time. I am not going to sacrifice these values just to try and get a bunch of members. If it takes months, fine. If it takes a year, fine.


I am writing this because I feel it is needed. I feel that, like us or hate us, the Pwnies have been sewn into the fabric of Star Legends, and it should not simply die off without a word.

If I fail at rebuilding this guild from scratch, then I want to thank each and every one of you for the fun times, debates, flames, any experience at all that we had related to our guild. The guild started as a joke, and ended up succeeding and surpassing all of my expectations of it. I am proud of it and will remain a Pwny for the rest of my days. Whether it be in SL, DL, WoM, Aika, SWToR, Rift, wherever I may be, you are sure to find this guild.

To the future!