Hey Everyone,
I've heard the rumor mill is kicking up again and talking all kinds of fantasy tales and felt that it's time to put these issues to bed.
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We are not Leaving Sanctum of Rall.
This branch, this server, this community we have built is a living tribute to our own Roger "Oldroar" Rall's legacy. I said this once before shortly after launch when the rumor that we were leaving Sanctum of Rall because we were losing too much came to pass. GAISCIOCH WILL NOT LEAVE SANCTUM OF RALL UNTIL THERE IS NO SANCTUM OF RALL. Period. End of Story. To do so would be a huge injustice to Roger's memory and be very damaging to our reputation with the community and game developers.
Win, Lose, Rise, or Fall Gaiscioch will always be home on Sanctum of Rall. -
We are not Leaving Guild Wars 2.
Again, a lot of people are making assumptions that just because we left RIFT after transitioning to Guild Wars 2 we are going to do the same with Guild Wars 2. That is not the case. Guild Wars 2 is a Tribute to Roger's legacy and I will not be taking Gaiscioch na Rall away from there until there is no more Sanctum of Rall. (See #1). Guild Wars 2 will remain our Free-2-Play home until the day comes that Sanctum of Rall closes. You are welcome to pick up the game and play with family as long as you like. -
We are not Removing Guild Wars 2 from the Website.
Again see #1 & #2. We will be supporting this game as a family through thick and thin until the day Sanctum of Rall ceases to exist. I will be continuing to play it on a weekly basis even after Elder Scrolls is launched and will be handling the management side of things.
That said we have a few challenges that prevent our growth:
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No Last Login Timestamp
In the guild management tools there is no way to tell when a player last played. Until we have such a feature we will continue using the Website's last login and require players to check in every 7 days to maintain their spot in the in Game Roster. -
Small Guild Sizes (500 People Per Guild)
Due to size restrictions we can only fit up to 495 people in the Guild at a time. The way guild systems in GW2 work is that once a guild fills up entirely it clears out all the invites you sent that have not accepted. Due to this we have to make sure that there are 5 slots available at all times to ensure that those invites we send out every day don't get cleared because the guild capped. We currently have over 700 active players trying to fight for those 500 seats. -
No Alliance Chat or Custom Chat Channels
We originally tried to bridge #1 and #2 by using multiple guilds. We thought an Alliance system was coming in the first couple patches. Well it never came and not being able to communicate across multiple guilds took it's toll. We tried many different configurations trying to group people by timezone or playstyle but that didn't have the desired effect. We continued to bleedout as people perceived us being "a dead guild" even though we had more than 1500 people playing. Alas we decided to rotate people into Gaiscioch na Rall on a 7 day window to try to keep everyone who's playing this week together in one big happy channel.
Now to give you an idea of how our guild system works take a look at this info graphic.
Every time we invite someone, someone else get's AFKed. At 7 days of no website logins/visits your account gets eligible to be afk flagged. When someone then requests to join or shows up in our pending invite box we invite them and remove whoever has been away from the site the longest. Eventually the actual AFK time might be several weeks but the minimum to be in the danger zone is 1 week.
IF the site sees you've been away for to long it will send you a message asking you if your still playing. Click the link enclosed to automatically verify that you are still playing. Hopefully someday they will give us a "Last Login" and we can do away with this whole ordeal.
