Guild Relations Program Post from Karin
From my brain
As the news page details, the Sleeper Cartel has been invited to participate in Blizzard's Guild Relations program. I'm sure you all have lots of questions, so I'll do my best to answer them here :)
To start, here are some FAQs I'd anticipate:
What is the Guild Relations program?
This is a program developed by Blizzard to carefully select a handful of exemplary community-minded guilds to use as a future resource. It also serves as some recognition and validation for us, and takes us into a slightly higher profile.
What are the benefits of participating in the Guild Relations program?
We'll be linked to from the World of Warcraft website, with our name and a description about our guild. This will likely mean large numbers of people will visit us and see what we're up to, and possibly many applications to join our guild. As we are no longer actively recruiting, we will only be accepting the best of the best, meaning the friendliest, most helpful and community-minded players.
We may also be allowed the occasional live chat session with Blizzard game designers, although I think (based on bits of info here and there) that we come up with questions as a guild, and then I would be asking them myself, on behalf of all of us.
We're also eligible to participate in upcoming and current beta tests! Yes, this includes the Burning Crusade (look for additional FAQs lower down regarding this). This shouldn't be seen just as a reward, but also as an opportunity to be good beta testers, to build constructive feedbank and to help Blizzard make sure the Burning Crusade is as bug-free as possible.
They have also planned an Q&A for the guild relations forum that our feedback would be sought for.
There are other features and benefits planned as well, but they haven't been announced yet.</div>
How many guilds are in the Guild Relations program?
I'm not sure, I really have no idea yet.
How long have you known about it?
I was contacted about a month ago seeing if we were interested. Sometime between then and now our website, policies and public areas were reviewed to see if they would be in-line with what Blizzard was looking for. This week I received final confirmation that we were accepted.</div>
Is it official? Are we really in?
Yes, however Blizzard hasn't yet posted their related work. When it's ready, their guild relations page will be where to look.
When it's been posted on Blizzard's site, we'll make some general announcements to the Perenolde server (via the forums) and the SGA forums.
What do we have to do?
We must continue being positive and productive members of the World of Warcraft community, to uphold our reputation as a friendly guild. This also means strict adherence to the following Blizzard policies, which from now on are an official addition to our own guidelines:
This has a few implications, which I'll detail in subsequent posts over the next day or two.</div>
Wait, did you say beta??
Yes! I'm expecting the details behind our participation in the closed beta test of the expansion pack to come over the next few days.
Our job will be to test the new expansion pack, find bugs, make suggestions, and report back to Blizzard using the tools they give us.
I should mention however, that there may be a limited number of beta keys assigned to us. They could be anywhere from 25 keys to 200 keys, at this point I really don't know.</div>
So if there aren't enough keys, who gets one?
That's a good question, and one that we're approaching carefully. I'm not going to list too many details as I don't want to bait any arguments for semantics if one person gets a key and another one doesn't. My word will be final.
I have always strived to be as fair as possible, and this situation will be no different. Those who have proven themselves to be great guildies will be strongly considered, as well as those who volunteer and assist with our upcoming hallowe'en party (to some extent).
But, there will be lots of ways to get keys and just about anyone could get one. I won't give away all the fun yet, so keep an eye on our website :)
I want to start downloading the beta...
You're welcome to download the almost two-gigabyte file here, but keep in mind that if we do not get enough keys for everyone, there's no guarantee that you didn't just download 2 gigs for nothing.
