Guild Spotlight: Anathema

Name: Anathema
Play Orientation: FFA PvP
Role Playing: None
Guild Size: Medium (40+ members) and growing
Time Zone: EU
Communication: Our Forums, and Ventrilo
Guild Hall Thread: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=20991%5b/url
Web Site: http://www.anguild.com

Who are Anathema, and what are the goals of the guild?
Anathema was formed in March 07 by 3 Senior Members of the US based guild Legend of Steel(LoS). By gaining a close friendship these members discovered they had the same high gaming standards and aspirations as each other and decided they could only achieve their objectives by forming their own European based guild.
Our vision and overall goal for the guild, is to establish ourselves as a dominant force on the server of our choice. We will strive to compete at the highest level in every aspect of the game, both PvP and PvE wise. We believe a guild is at it’s strongest, when it has a solid social core, which is also why we believe in the concept of pre-game guilds. It gives all our members a good chance to get to know each other very well, before the game launches. Since I hate repeating myself, I will mention more goals and ambitions further into this interview.

What is unique about Anathema?
The overall quality of our members is without a doubt, what I would consider the most unique thing about Anathema. We’ve got some really experienced people, a lot actually, who’ve been around since EQ1 and UO (Including the Council). Furthermore we’ve got very strict recruitment policies, and we enforce our rules with a no BS attitude. We require applicants to prove themselves (Again more on that later ;)).

Who are the people of Anathema?
The people of Anathema are first and foremost all friends. Whenever a new person registers with our forum, they are greeted and welcomed by everyone else. If/when they are accepted as members, they are treated like family. Other than that we emphasize on maturity, dedication, activity, humour, loyalty, respect and honour. We haven’t calculated it, but I believe our age average is somewhere in the mid 20s, which is also reflected in the general tone on our forums. While we are serious when we need to be, there is always, and will always be room for joking and fooling around. Our members have a wicked sense of humour, all in all they’re a great bunch and I love them all 😉

What is your current guild size?
Lately we’ve seen a dramatic increase in applications. The last week alone, we’ve received at least one or two every day.
Currently we’ve got around 40 active forum members, but when the current batch of applicants are promoted (provided they are all accepted), we will reach well above 50 members. We aim at being around 70 active forum members prior to launch. We figure the optimal size for our guild, is 50 members in the guild in-game at launch day. We expect that we will lose some members in the first couple of weeks. There can be many reasons for that, but it’s not realistic to assume that all forum members will actually be with us a couple of weeks into the game.

We will close recruitment at march 1st, to allow applicants to be accepted (or denied) prior to launch, so all our members start out on the same foot. Later on we will re-open recruitment, to tweak membership and to recruit underplayed classes.

What is your main time zone?
We are purely European, and since we’ve got people from both England, Scotland, Greece and Turkey, we will be scheduling raids at CET times.

What is your take on Role Playing?
As a guild we don’t encourage it. If people want to RP it’s perfectly fine, as long as they respect that all us normal people don’t understand them 😉 All guild chat etc. will be ooc, and rp’ing while on raids/sieges etc. will not be accepted. What people do on “their own time” is up to them.

What servers are you gunning on?
We will be playing on an FFA PvP server. We don’t think Mr. Howard intended for people to run around shouting at each other if they had problems, rather than just run over and chop their heads off.

How do you look at interacting with other guilds?
We’ll be interacting with other guilds during sieges 😉 Nah but seriously, we acknowledge that diplomacy and politics will most likely be a vital part of the ongoing struggle in the border Kingdoms, and personally I look very much forward to that. We will not ally with any guilds before the game is out. And more than likely, the game will have to hint to us that we can not manage on our own, before we go around making any friends. We will however treat other guilds, and other people in general, with respect (Which is also one of our rules). We will not be participating in any flaming of any sorts. We may get enemies, and we will deal with them accordingly. But it will be in game, and respectfully. A guilds reputation is very important, and we will strive to earn the respect of friends and foes alike.

How are you structured socially?
We do not believe in micromanaging. Therefore we will not have any officers of any kind, other than The Council. Currently there are four people in the council, namely Dufnial (Also Guild Leader), Grippo, Ravenheart and myself (sj0ver). We will of course tweak the Council as the Guild grows in size, and add more Council Members accordingly. So we’ve got three ranks: Guild Leader, Council Member and Guild Member. For some time now, The Council have been discussing about adding a Veteran rank to the guild once the game goes live. The Veteran Rank will not be an officer, but the Rank will be given to long time loyal and dedicated members. They may or may not get a few more rights than ordinary members, and the rank will not be handed out like candy. So it will be something for the members to strive for. It’s still a work in progress though, and as such I can’t be very precise about how it will turn out.

Other than that, we’re one big happy family. The Members of Anathema have a lot of say in what is going on within the guild. The Council is there for the Members, not the other way around! That is very important to us!”

What is your take on player cities?
Personally, I love it, as do the rest of Anathema. We are having very long debates about what to do, how to do it, when to do it, why to do it, where to do it etc. We find it very exciting.
One of the primary Guild goals, is to acquire, maintain and hold BOTH a City and a Battlekeep. We look very much forward to siege battles, and the PvP system in general. However we are also excited about the City aspect, and look forward to chopping off the heads of rampaging picts who have got the wrong idea about what’s ours and theirs.
We’ve also got a healthy amount of crafters in the guild (yours truly included), who look very much forward to the crafting part of the game. We speculate that some guild Cities will be centres of commerce, because of the high end craftable gear requiring high end PvE drops. Therefore we will of course also be aiming at crafting and distributing rare craftables to the rest of the server (Once we’re all kitted up of course ;))

What is your take on in-game taxes and loot distribution?
We actually had a poll on our forum recently, where our members voted on how heavy a taxation they would allow. It’s all speculation right now though, since we really have no clue about how maintenance heavy a City and a BattleKeep will be. Of course we’ve seen screendumps of a guild interface, showing the maintenance cost, but we don’t know how hard it will be to come up with 1k gold, or 5k for that matter. If it is needed we will tax our members to maintain both a City and a BattleKeep, but the lower the tax can be, the better. Hopefully raiding and pillaging NPC cities and player BattleKeeps will give us plenty of resources, and in that case we can fund our City and BattleKeep from that, and let our members keep the coin they earn by themselves (Or use tax revenues to expand and grow bigger).

We have not decided on any loot system yet. This is also one of the very big issues, that can spawn hot debates and angry minds. This of course is also an aspect that our members will get to voice their opinion on. There has to be a fine balance between kitting up the most active members first, and still give the less active players the feeling that they’re getting something from raiding. With the help from our members, we will decide on what the majority deems the most fair.

What excites you most about Age of Conan?
Everything! Sieges, PvP, combat, crafting, Cities, BattleKeeps, the lore, drunken brawling, mounted combat, formations, spell weaving, etc. Everything pertaining to this game just appeals to me on a higher level. I’ve been following the game since 2005, and I’m still hyped as a 10 year old with ADD who just ate a pound of sugar because it’s Christmas. I can not emphasize enough how much I look forward to this game. I don’t even get bummed when they postpone launch, because then I just know the finished product will be even better 😉

Ohh … you meant the Guild as a whole? Yeah, we’re pretty excited!

How are you planning on communicating in-game?
We have a ventrilo server up and running already, and we will require everyone to be on ventrilo during raids. We will encourage people to use ventrilo also when not in raids, but that is not mandatory. We will not require anyone to speak on ventrilo while on raids, but as a minimum they should be able to listen to directions given by the raid leader.

What are you looking for in a potential member?
As mentioned earlier in this interview, we’ve got pretty strict recruitment policies. We have a minimum age requirement of 17 years. We do appreciate that there are some incredibly talented younger people out there though, so everyone is encouraged to apply. They just have to work harder to prove themselves though. If they are under 17, they will really have to prove they are very unique.
We’ve got a two week minimum review period of applicants, in which we size and weigh them on a number of parameters. We require all of our members to be very active on the forum, as they themselves have an interest in helping building the Guild. We require all our Members to be mature and respectful towards other people, inside and outside the Guild. We will require our members to have a weekly playtime well above 20 hours a week once game goes live. We will require our members to be helpful towards their guildmates, we don’t tolerate lone wolves. Basically we require our members to have and to apply common sense. Everyone who’s been on the mmo scene for more than a week, can testify that some people actually find that hard as well 😉

How to apply?
A good start would be to read up on what Anathema is about. We will never recruit someone, who just passed by and threw in an application. The more you know about the guild you apply for, the better your chances are of getting in! (And for you to have made the right decision when choosing the Guild)

A good place to start, would be our AoC Guild hall Thread

After that, it would be wise to read up on Our Rules

You still want to join? Well then head on over to This Place that will get you even closer to joining our ranks

Finally go to our Enrollment office, read the Sticky, copy and fill out the template, and post your application. Then stay active, and basicly be yourself 🙂

Final words from sjOver:
Contrary to popular belief, our Guild name (Anathema for the slow people) is NOT derived from a certain item in The-Game-we-don’t-speak-about. For reader convenience, I’ve added a link to Wikipedia’s explanation of the word. In short, Anathema can mean different things, for instance One that is cursed or damned. As a guild we are certainly neither, but any guild that gets in our way on our path to glory, will certainly know what it means to be cursed.

Our very own Raistlin elaborates (since he’s greek)

Raistlin:
Anathema throughout the history esp in the Medieval ages had a religious color since it was used to characterize ppl who were supposed to go to Hell and were not anymore members of the Church for several reasons.In most cases though the Holly Inquisition and/or the Pope where Anathematizing ppl who had modern-revolutionary ideas

It is a historical fact that most of Medieval (and up to 18-19th Century) ingeniouses had been anathematized

Hence it has got the meaning u read in Wiki BUT it is also very relevant to every revolutionary idea in a very conservative world where everything was filtered and planned according to Romeo-Catholic church’s will.

Other than that I think we’ve covered almost everything about Anathema. We’re a small guild compared to many other guilds out there, but as I’ve already mentioned, we only recruit real quality. So basically this is a choice we’ve made. We’d rather do it right the first time, than have to weed out people who can not meet our requirements/expectations.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. Drop by our site, forums or IRC channel for a chat

Site: www.ANGuild.com

Forum: www.ANGuild.com/forum

IRC: #Anathemaaoc @ Quakenet”

If you have any questions, or you want to have your guild spotlighted, contact Mr.Ixolite at his very own E-MAIL! INDEED! an E-MAIL address.
Found here: [email protected] (BRILLIANT!) 😀