Changes to the Stormrage Guild system

[MongoJerry]

While Mongo did state that we could do as we will with the Guilds in game I still run these kinds of things past him not because "him big chief" but because I respect his opinion.

Thanks, Tal. You're awesome. I want you to know that, and I want to publicly acknowledge how great your help has been. However, I would like to clarify this point by quoting from the "Vision for the Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft" post:

The Lurker Lounge "Guild": The Lurker Lounge is not a guild. Lurkers are free to and even encouraged to find and join guilds on the servers they happen to play on. However, there are many players who come to this site who do not have any affiliation with a guild and would like to play with fellow Lurkers. For these cases, we will provide a list of servers that have a higher than usual number of Lurkers playing on them. If a server has enough Lurkers playing on it, the players on that server are welcome to form a Lurker Lounge guild in order to enable better communication between the those players. The administration of these "guilds," including minutia like tabard design, are up to the players on the individual server.

Generally, I prefer a "hands-off" policy on guild issues. However, since characters in a Lurker Lounge guild will be walking advertisements for the Lurker Lounge, I would expect gameplay from anyone creating or participating in such a guild to reflect the higher standards of the Lurker Lounge community. I will provide a separate small list of Lurker Lounge behavior guidelines later, but that'll be about it for the Lurker Lounge "guild." If you would like something with more stringent behavior guidelines and more built-in safeguards, then I suggest looking into joining the Amazon Basin guild. The AB already has a history of organizing and maintaining fun and safe guilds to play in, and it seems silly to duplicate their efforts.

This is not the same as letting people do whatever they will with the in-game Lurker guilds. If someone were to start a kill-on-sight or hacker guild called the Lurker Lounge, I'd certainly be upset. And in this less extreme case, while I would prefer a "hands-off" policy on minutia like tabbard design and the discipline of individual players, I feel that it is important that I weigh in on this overall policy discussion on the recruitment of new players, since it does impact the way that other players will perceive the site.