2007 Blog Facts, Numbers, and Wrap-Up

I know it's already January 4th, but I had a fel reaver filled party to recover from, and better late than never, right? Besides, this one post will take care of two topics: stats on this blog in 2007, and my New Year's resolution to shake off the mask of anonymity by adding in the names for my guild, my characters, and my server.

Let's get started, shall we?

About You
48,902 people visited Girl Meets WoW this year! That's
68,498 visits, for a total of
112,117 pageviews.

Much of the traffic came from posts about Brewfest, Hallow's End, and patch 2.3.

About Me
Since I started this blog on September 25th, I've made 85 posts and received all kinds of great feedback in comments and emails. (If I haven't replied to your email, fear not - I'm slowly but steadily going through my current backlog, but I'll get there.)

I've also finally been found out as a blogger by my guild just a few days ago, which means my New Year's resolution of telling my guild about my blog and my blog more about my guild is complete as of this post.

My Guild
I've been playing on Dark Iron with the fine folks of Annarchy since August 2005. We're a huge but close-knit group of mature players who span the spectrum from hardcore to casual (however you like to define those terms).

We rolled up as part of the larger Penny Arcade Alliance on DI, and are sworn rivals of the awesome but outnumbered horde of Panda Attack and Djork (the fine fellows who came out for our New Year's party the other night).

My Characters
Firkin is my mage, and has been my PvE raiding main since I rolled on Dark Iron. I'm starting to PvP with him a little bit (I need some more stam gear for Hyjal), but he's mostly a squishy carebear.
Inaara is a shadow priest I created to play when my boyfriend first joined the server on his warrior, Pyetr. I've been playing some 2v2 arena with her, and generally trying to become a more competent PvPer in battlegrounds and arena as well. I also take her to farm-status 25-man content on occasion, and flip between mage and shadow priest as my Zul'Aman group needs change from week to week.
Ramekin was my very first character, a hunter who I server transfered to Dark Iron and recently leveled to 70. I've written more about him here, but right now I'm not sure what my goals are for him besides grinding out quests for money.
Hooloovoo is my leveling alt, a level 39 enhancement shaman. He's a lot of fun to play.

For some reason none of them seem to be displaying correctly in Armory at the moment, which is fine with me since I think I logged Firkin out in his laughable PvP set last night.

So that's that. A little anti-climatic, perhaps, but I didn't actually intend my blog anonymity to last this long. I figured at least one of my 300+ guild mates would find me out within a month or so, but it ended up taking three and a half. Go figure.

Anyhow, it's been a blast so far. This blog's popularity has far exceeded my expectations, and I've had a lot of fun reading through the comments and talking to my guildmates about it over the past few days. I hope you'll all stick around in 2008!

Real Life Specs

Over dinner tonight (Thai food, yum), The Boy and I got to talking about the wide variety of people we have in our guild. Out of 300+ people, we have the usual smattering of students, soldiers, coders, young parents, and the self-employed, but offhand, I can also name:

• a professional jouster
• a military intelligence analyst
• an auto show model
• a full-time forum moderator
• a sex-ed researcher

At times like this, it really does blow me away that there are people who only play with folks they know in real life. And mind you, this is only from the small subset of guildies whose real lives I know about. WoW is fun like that, isn't it?

Your Guild Forums Need a Thanks Thread

When was the last time you publicly thanked a guild mate who helped you out?

If you're like me, you tend to thank your heroic run or crafter personally, then drop group and leave it at that. In a large guild such as ours, even the most helpful and all-around awesome new player can go unnoticed by most people for months this way.

Luckily for me, my guild has a way to combat this tendency. It's the second-oldest active thread on our forums (the oldest was a LOLcats thread that got so long it started eating itself), and it came about like this...

It Started Small
Back in February 2006, one of our paladins remarked on how our guild managed to fight a prevailing internet trend: many web forums are hives of drama and inanity, while our guild managed to stay largely above the interweb fray (aforementioned LOLcats thread aside). Despite having about 300 accounts and multiple threads dedicated to DKP values, on the whole we were already managing to keep a really positive, vibrant web community that made even ex-members want to keep tabs on our guild antics.

Having judged thusly, our paladin was then struck with a vision, a way to bring the power of the Light to our already-awesome forums.

He picked up his hammer and hit the Create New Post button, and wrote a short piece titled Post Your Gratitude, offering up the thread to everyone to thank fellow guild members for favors.

"Post Distinctly Positive Things"
As it happens, when you give our guild a dedicated place to thank each other, a lot more thanking goes on. The first page of our thread expresses gratitude for the following things:

• a Lightforge belt, given as a gift
• a guildmate who flew out to open up the Dire Maul library for unkeyed players
• Doomguard quest assistance
• epic mount loans
• free bags, offered spontaneously
• shenanigans
• raid leaders for organizing our very first forays into Molten Core
• midnight Stratholme runs
• boar intestines, sent by mail
• farming demons in Winterspring for Benediction
• free enchants
• the guild mount fund
• bailing people out of random PUGs
• the guild for being generally awesome
• SM graveyard speed runs
• help with the mage water quest

It takes 43 more pages to get to the current end of the thread, where I can read people's thanks for the following:

• a BFD alt run
• the members of a new Karazhan, for putting together a successful run even though they consider themselves latecomers to the raiding scene, and the veterans who've helped them out with alts, gear, and advice
• a Shattrath port
• a warrior who stopped to help with a pally alt's epic mount quest
• five folks who went out to go trounce the Horde on the Elemental Plateau
• a guildie who lead several hours of organized WSG that went 14-1 last weekend
• a gift of primal lifes
• a resident rogue, for being generally awesome
• two guildies who flew out to lay the smackdown on horde messing with one of our mage's alts
• a successful Ramparts run
• my 25-man raid, for giving an extra [Pattern: Boots of the Long Road] to a Karazhan-level healer
• nine people and a raid who helped support a hunter's push to 375 engineering

The Thread That Just Won't Die
In two years, Post Your Gratitude hasn't dried up. It hasn't even slowed down.

When our paladin created the thread, he said he hoped that it would strengthen the guild's sense of community, and make us more aware of the caliber of our members. I'd say it's done all that and then some: it's now an unstoppable juggernaut of altruism that encourages by example.

So if you've noticed your guild forums have gotten a bit negative lately, or if you're just looking for a way to build a stronger community within your guild, consider a thank-you thread. It just might end up one of the most popular posts on your forums.