Dogma - An European Darkfall Guild

Greetings there, fellow future Darkfall players,

this is a recruitment post issued by the guild administration of the European Darkfall guild “Dogma”. The post will most likely be a relatively long read, since our concepts, philosophy and way-of-play can not be described with just a few words. You can find a link pointing to our website at the bottom of this post, the website is considered a “beta website” and will undergo further changes before game is released.

Background Information:

The guild “Dogma” is the latest guild, formed under the concept of “The Guild Project”. The first guild driven by its ideas was formed in 2002 for the game “Horizons - Empires of Istaria”. This guild was highly successful on the “Wind” server, but unfortunately the game was not bearable and the whole guild quit along with 90% of the other players of this poor MMORPG.

In 2004 we founded “The League” in EverQuest II, a guild on the Befallen server. Again we used the same concept of getting everyone involved in the planning and executing of the guild. We managed to create a good guild, yet we made one mistake: we chose to play on an US-based server. Sooner or later we realized, there were no Europeans left to recruit, so we "absorbed" another guild and went on by the name of "Intimidation”, which again became a successful guild in raiding and a strong community. At some point we realized the flaws in EQ2s "sandbox design" and finally gave up.

Ever since the game “Vanguard – Saga of Heroes” was first announced by BradMcQuaid and the Sigil team back in 2003 we have been closely following this game to the best of our abilities, since we have regarded it as “the saviour” of the genre at this time.

The guild "Dogma" was formed as the first guild on Gelenia (later: Halgar) server and was absolutely unmatched in terms of structure, organization and success. Within four weeks we had GMs investigating how our guild bank could be this well filled already; our Guild Master "Myth" holding the guild bank being twice as rich as anyone else on this planet playing Vanguard. We had the best crafter setup ever seen, we were in control of the market and our guildies were clad in only the finest of craftable gear.

Unfortunately all this organization turned out to be null and void; all the sacrifices and all the team play was forfeit when we realized the game simply was not nearly ready. We stepped onward to face all challenges the game and its developers put us through - but eventually left the stage in March 2008.

We first read about Darkfall about 7 years ago I think. We were excited, the concept of EVE in a medieval fantasy world, focusing on the right ideals... game play, not graphics. A creative approach... well, as most of you readers will know, we could not be too sure the game would actually be released at some point. Our past experience with the MMORPG industry had taught us not to trust anyone, so we kept waiting.

Darkfall actually becoming a reality now is the driving force behind this post.

The People behind “The Guild Project”:

Most of us have been playing since Ultima Online and Meridian and are very experienced in the genre, you could also say we’re “MMORPG Veterans”. We are mostly Europeans, with usually a few US and Asian people thrown into our mix for the final releases, which makes this an “European Based” guild and leads to the fact that our main playtime is between 6pm GMT+1 and around 1am GMT+1 (Berlin, Stockholm, Central European Time). However, we do not restrict our guild to only inviting European people, since this would be against what we think is a major part of playing a MMORPG in the first place, diversity of people and muti-cultural and national setup of communities. The only important thing for us is that our members can be active in our peak playtimes.

The concept of “Dogma”, how is it different from other guilds?

The whole concept behind our guild is very different from many other guilds out there. “The Guild Project”, which continued to all of our guilds and eventually led to the forming of “Dogma” for Darkfall is a project to build up a strong, friendly and very efficient community of people who consider each other friends and value loyalty, friendship and honor above all else. A major part of this concept is that we want all of our members to take an active part in the ongoing development of the guild, especially in the initial “pre-release” phase. This could be considered an “open source” project, where input is valued and asked for, where everyone can take on an useful role and help to actively “shape the end product”, which is planned to be a rather small close knit guild community, that is successful in the game and will exist for the years to come.

Continuity is something we deem to be very important, we've built this guild to last for years to come, not for guild hoppers, nor for people who tend to quit the games they play after 6 months or take a break and never come back.

We strive to give this installment of "Dogma" a structure that allows for us to manage a small circle of guild members, yet flexible enough to allow us to manage a very large guild, should game mechanics of Darkfall require a guild to be rather large, that is. We achieve that by using a "guild constitution" with administrative organs that are connected via a system of checks and balances. Basically we take a good constitutional law system as the basis, modify it to fit a way smaller scale and tune it down to be simply and easy to understand and then we run the guild within this given frame.

For further information about who we are, our goals and what we are looking for in our members, please refer to our Information Database and this Guild Philosophy article.

Current state of the project and how to go about acquiring more information

At the moment we are in the “initial phase”. This means that our recruitment procedure is not in place yet and that we are currently establishing our “player core” for the final release. At this time, to join our guild, you will have to post on the recruitment board on our website and get involved with the people there, get to know them a bit and then you may be taken in and get the opportunity to help in building up this guild, shape its way and develop various parts of its structure over the next months.

Since this is a kind of “open source” project, during the initial phase we expect even more participation than we would during later phases. “Player core” means that we are also looking for people to volunteer for certain administrative positions within the guild, for experienced players mostly, best with leadership or officer background from previous guilds.

However, we are open to “genre newcomers” at all times and we will do our best to help them where we can, since helping out is part of our philosophy.

Thank you for taking the time and reading this lengthy post, thank you for your interest in “Dogma”!

With best regards,

Myth and Ardenya

Initiators of “The Guild Project”

Contacts:

Emails: scorlock@gmx.de (Myth) / asmh9000@gmx.net (Ardenya)

Web: http://www.dogmaguild.eu