World of Warcraft®

Grats zen on our realm first achievement. We worked hard this week and pulled it off as a team. I'm proud to call you all guildmates. We were watching many of the other guild's progress in the last few hours and they gave us a good run for the finish line. Regardless of the outcome, they should be proud of their effort as well.

Thanks again Zen for pulling together.

/passes out

It was a hell of a grind. 25-68 people online around the clock during the leadup to the cap reset, till after we hit.

It was a great team effort.

nice use of guild rep standards

And that's where you're wrong. Those rep standards did NOTHING towards guild experience gained. It affects player experience, not guild experience.

Yup, we stopped using them when we saw they had no effect on guild exp gain.

not from what I heard

04/04/2011 10:45 PMPosted by Gelmarkk

not from what I heard

I hear a lot of things on the internet. They must all be true, right?

But look, even IF the banner provided a bonus to guild experience when dropped before a boss kill... what would the problem be with using it?

Wouldn't everyone be dropping them, and thus be on equal footing?

Not that the banner provides any benefit towards the guild experience gain- it doesn't, and if you believe people when they say it, and don't test it yourself... you are pretty gullible.

Oh well... I can't change your mind. All I can tell you is we killed a boss with the banners and we killed them without the banners. The guild exp was exactly the same. We did it by having 4 to 6 five man groups running constantly from the time we hit level 23 on. None of our teams used banners. They didn't give a bonus, regardless of what you "heard".

I just posted a compliment. You guys feel the need to defend it maybe there was something there to defend.

Gratz to ZEN...
Thanks for you compliment Gelmarkk!

Banner or no banner that's one heck of a grind! .... Sides... isn't the banner just a boost to the rep you get per kill? Not the actual xp?

Either grats on the feat.

Yeah, the banner did nothing to increase guild experience.

Congratulations guys.

Grats!

I have a special surprise for all of you but well get back to that latter. :)

For those that don't know or have not heard....

Early Sunday morning at 3am realm time when the guild XP unlocked. People began handing in there quest logs that they had previously saved up 25 completed quests, ready for turning in. A number of people also had multiple alts also ready to do the same. Myself I had 7 toons in total.

Within 11 minutes we pushed over into level 23. Within about 12 hours latter we made level 24, and at precisely 10:29pm realm time on April 4, 2011 (19hrs of grinding) Zen earned the realm first level 25 guild achievement.

The guild kept pushing it through to the very end, and was never completely sure weather or not some sleeper guild that no one knew about would steal the lead and rob us of realm first.

We kept open tabs in our web browsers and refreshed wow armory pages for other guilds that we thought would give us a run for our money. As it turns out the one guild that we knew of "Night Sirens" on horde side had planned on making a push for guild level 25 but there members failed to come together and make it happen.

Frustratingly the wow armory pages went down for maintenance for about an hour leaving us not knowing if we were still ahead of other guilds.

A member of Night Sirens had previously joined the zen guild and a few hours before we earned the realm first logged in to tip there hat and give us a "gg".

Towards the end we had upwards of 68 members online and participating in various ways. Our primary means of guild XP gains came in the form of chain running Halls of Origination regular with multiple groups consisting of all 5 guild members.

And now for that special surprise I mentioned earlier. I managed to remember to do it this time, and used fraps to record the moments leading up to the level 25 achievement as well as the celebration afterwards. The video is 45 mins long and key parts are being edited, encoded, and uploaded as I am making this post. Short clips of the event will be posted on youtube and links provided as they become available.

It is pretty amazing considering that we managed to reach our daily guild xp cap every single day since cata dropped.

It was a huge effort on the part of zen to pull it off, and it was a hell of an experience. Congratulations Zen, you earned it.

Dang, Leep, wish I'd known you were fraps'ing it. I'd have invited you to the group that did CoC late in the day.

A group from Apples decided to flag up and jump around the bosses, trying to get us to open up on em. Unfortunately, they did succeed in getting one of our hunters flagged, and he went down like Pam Anderson backstage at a Crue concert.

Apple - 1
Zen - 0

We got him back into the fray shortly after washing off his flag, and we proceeded to rip through the rest of the encounters (for a staggeringly HUGE amount of guild experience, I might add)

We proceeded to collect our rewards, and debated breaking up afterward, but someone decided they wanted to play with the Apples, who'd by now gone on to trigger their own boss.

Next I knew, their healer was dead. Then we proceeded to take the rest out.

Apples -1
Zen - 5

Quite an entertaining break from the grind.

Thanks for playing, Apples!

It was one of many stories we could all tell about that bleary eyed, fingers hurting, back and rear hurting grind that we did.

All in all, it was an awesome achievement, and the people who participated (up to 68 members at one point, encompassing upwards of 100 different players contributing at various points) all put in a heck of a lot of effort.

Grats guys My guild tried hard but didn't even come close to you guys you guys farmed hard i'm impressed although down that we didn't get it i'm excited for you guys Nice Job "Zen" you guys are a great guild i've heard and by the looks of it you guys are CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!