The GM is dead, long live the GM!

I thought this deserved it’s own post as hey, how often do we have a new Guild Master in the house? As the guy who made the awful awful mistake of promoting Ctwin to GM in the first place, and as a guy who (excluding all the people who’ve known him longer) has known Yog the longest (we in fact met in Azeroth some 12 years ago) AND as a former Onineko GM myself, I’ve declared myself the only man fit to write a tribute to our former GM and an ominous warning rousing toast to our new leader.

I first met Ctwin early in 2013. He joined the guild via a mutual friend (who probably highly regrets introducing him), playing his warrior Arduous. We had taken a small break over Xmas/NYE and by the time we were ready to kick back into gear, Arduous had levelled to max and was ready to be my co-tank partner. Now, it’s hard to argue that Guardian Druids were in a weird place back in MoP and maybe it was that, maybe Arduous just wasn’t a very good warrior, but by the time Throne of Thunder came out, Arduous had levelled a new character – Ctwin, and laid the first brick in the foundation of his now infamous main-swapping reputation.

(Adolf Groffler eating a sundae made of 99% Jew)

Shenanigans aside, anyone who’s ever spoken to Ctwin for more than fifteen seconds will be painfully aware that the man is opinionated to say the least. Surprisingly, under all the bluster and anti-Semitic hate speech, the man genuinely knows his shit, and not just in-game how to play, but the far more difficult to handle out of game politics. It wasn’t long before Ctwin was part of the officer team and even less time before he became my number two (hehehe). I don’t mind admitting that Ctwin was exactly what Onineko needed, fresh, enthusiastic and unscarred by the pains of past expansions and some of my fondest memories of WoW come from this period in MoP when Ctwin and I would be furiously spamming messages back and forth on hangouts (pre-discord days) about all sorts of nonsense ranging from loot systems, to wtf do we do about Peggy, we were a solid team.

That all said, I never really wanted to be GM (I inherited the job from my predecessor purely cause nobody else was around who could take it), I’d also just begun a new relationship with my now wife and given the choice of chatting to Ctwin until 2am on a Tuesday or having sex, well let’s just say Ctwin is not very good at cyber. I passed leadership over sometime near the beginning of Siege of Orgrimmar but nothing could prepare me for what happened next… For the first few years of Ctwin’s reign, my guild note was X/many – where the value of X was the number of times I’d been kicked from the guild. Now unfortunately I can’t complain too much as kicking officers from the guild for insubordination was something started during my reign.

(This photo was not modified in any way)

But it wasn’t all kicks and jokes, Ctwin went on a recruitment drive that would impress a Jehovah’s Witness. Over a period of less than six months, Ctwin had merged something like four guilds into Onineko, setting up and establishing multiple raid teams, culminating in the guilds first 25-man raid team since probably BC. The guild reached epic heights during MoP and the foundations laid there have carried on until now, a feat I still respect.

Then WoD happened… I don’t particularly like talking about WoD, personally I’d just prefer to live in denial about it’s very existence, if you don’t know the story – you won’t read about it here, save to say, I could tell from pretty early on in WoD that Ctwin had reached the end of his rope and it would only be a matter of time before the torch was passed to the next sorry sap. To his credit, Ctwin kept that torch for the entirety of WoD and damn near most of Legion. And while I sit here on my rocking chair, shaking a stick at the new kids on my lawn about how they had it so much easier with flexible-sized raids, better and more interesting content and faster patches. I won’t deny Ctwin’s place in Onineko history as an exceptional GM and sometimes decent bloke.

But as they say, out with the old, in with the new!

Yogoth. I first met Yog sometime in 2005, we were young Australians playing WoW, so obviously we played Horde on Blackrock. If memory serves (and a recent dependency to marijuana has destroyed what little existed of my ability to recall past experiences) he merged into our guild from a guild called Terra Australis with his girlfriend of the time Josinator. Yog and I both played druids so that forced us to have to talk to each other, but while I was the proud top Druid healer of my guild, Yog thought he could bear tank in Vanilla (and to be fair he had a pretty damn good crack at it).

(Will Communism work better than Fascism? Joseph Yoglin seems to think so)

My best Yog story doesn’t actually take place in WoW. It was New Years Eve of somewhere between 2005 and 2007, I was (believe it or not) working as a security guard in a bar in Sydney, a bar that Yog happened to visit this evening with a few of his mates and after my shift, somewhere in the vicinity of 1-2am New Years Day, Yog in a most uncharacteristic way, suggested we go out drinking! I of course accepted. We found ourselves in a little known venue called Bar Ace, aka the shit house of Sydney, and as we waded through the sewerage of the previous nights vomit and various other bodily fluids to the bar, I knew this would be a night to remember. I was still a weaksauce pussy at the time, cutting my Russian Scotch (not joking) with some unknown brand of cola. Yog on the other hand, was mashing his double shot neat, to this day I can still remember the hissing sounds as the vile liquid seared through his oesophagus.

I don’t remember a word of what we talked about that night. What I do remember – apart from walking out at 7 in the morning to what was easily been the brightest day in Sydney, is that Yog and I were hungry, and the only way to satisfy our drunken hunger was of course, what every Aussie who’s ever been out on the piss for the night already knows – A goddamn kebab.

But this was the early 2000s, 9/11 and the Cronulla riots weren’t that long ago – if you looked like Turtle and sold a kebab (I assume this is what Turtle does for a living) nobody wanted anything to do with you. So we trekked up Oxford street in search of the only kebab shop we were positive would be open, but got tired and stopped at Hungry Jacks instead. We found a table down the back somewhere and began to eat, and as I sat there, watching Yog try to stuff a whopper in his mouth (hehehe) I knew right then and there, this man would be an excellent Guild Master.

To wrap this up cause it’s been dragging on for a while, Ctwin, Kupp – you guys did the bare minimum required in order to keep the guild running until you could pass it off to some other idiot – The highest honour any Onineko Guild Master can ever accomplish, for that and on behalf of the rest of the guild, thank you for your time and (minimal) effort.

Yog, Saj, hahahahahahahahahaha suckersssssssssss!!!!! No but seriously, you can’t possibly do any less or worse than your predecessors, that said, I put together some tips for a successful term in office.

• Start training your successor NOW. My pick would be Rushton. He looks stupid enough to take the job.
• Don’t take shit from anybody, especially Roak. This one should be self explanatory.
• Leverage the knowledge and experience from your predecessors. We’ve done it all, seen it all and already heard someone complain about it all.

Above all, this game is about having fun, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

Cheers!

– Roak