Here we are again. How was everyone’s Monday? …yeah me too. There’s a reason I save this column for AFTER that. However, as much as I only function as a zombie on Mondays, this week’s Spotlight guild works around the clock to make sure they’re the top dog on the block and give their members every opportunity to succeed. The winner of this week’s Spotlight Guild is:
Over the course of the week, I had a chance to speak with Zap from Condemned about the guild and have some cool answers for everyone. These guys even went as far as getting us their recruitment video for everyone to enjoy. It’s at the bottom of the article.
We’ve just passed our six year anniversary as a guild. We started back in 2006 and have retained a great number of our members and leadership time since our inception, which we believe is reflective of the team-based, achievement-oriented and professional but fun culture that we’ve established. While we add new members and officers in each game we play, our guild’s capacity to retain and develop our core players is an achievement that we’re particularly proud of.
Unlike multi-gaming clans, Condemned only focuses on a single game at one time, so we’re all about Guild Wars 2. In the interim between now and launch, our members are playing a variety of other games – including the MOBAs and Diablo III, along with some players grinding out their Hall of Monuments points in Guild Wars 1.The work that we put into developing our strategy and approach for both structured PVP and World vs. World requires significant time and energy, so we’re glad that we’ve had the space between our departure from Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2’s launch to devote to tactics and organization.
GWI: How rigorous is the application process?
Rigorous – our ranks are filled with exceptional players who each have team-based attitudes and impressive track records of prior MMO accomplishments, and they rightly expect that new members we bring into the guild will be folks that they’re eager to play with.
As such, we have a fairly in-depth initial application process consisting of a written application and follow-up questions. For applicants who advance past this stage, they engage in a group and personal interview with a panel of officers.
Over the years, we’ve developed a predictive model for admission into the guild – meaning that we have both a standardized interview process as well as a multi-competency evaluation rubric that was developed by looking at our top performing players, reflecting on the skills and experiences they had when they applied to the guild, and then developing our interview process to select for those traits.
All that said, we invite any player who is interested to apply – we have a lot of faith in our interview process in ensuring not only that an applicant is the right fit for Condemned, but also that we’re the right fit for that particular player as a guild.
As in all games we’ve played, we intend to compete at the highest level in all aspects of the game. In past games, this has meant an equal focus on both world and instanced PvP as well as PvE, but given Guild Wars 2’s lack of competitive raiding content, we’ll be focusing almost entirely on World vs. World and structured PvP.For WvW, our squads are led by seasoned Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer veterans who have had a great deal of experience in this format, and we intend to ensure that our server rises to the top of the WvW elo-matching charts and stays there for the foreseeable future. To ensure this, we’ve partnered in an Alliance with a number of other guilds of impressive pedigrees from around the world, and we look forward to sharing more details of this Alliance with Guild Wars Insider and the Guild Wars 2 community in the future!
For structured PvP, our teams are led and organized by Jhazy, the former World Rank #1 hunter from World of Warcraft’s arenas, and we plan on having a half-dozen of division A competitive teams who will be vying for tournament wins. The rosters for these teams are both malleable and competitive and are not based on longevity or rank within the guild. This means that even new players who join have the ability to ensure a spot on the rosters, or can make the choice to join one of the division B teams within our guild.
GWI: Tell me about some cool features on your website.
In addition to our various news and social media feeds, which are actively maintained and feature ongoing information and press about Condemned, we view our site as the main communication hub for our members. Members regularly communicate amongst themselves and with the broader community in our live chat, and our guild and alliance forums are rife with ongoing theorycrafting, discussion of tactics and strategy, and general socializing.
One of the consistent pieces of feedback we receive from our members is how much the enjoy the atmosphere and culture of our guild. We have a no-tolerance policy for drama and cliques, and the atmosphere in-game, in-vent and on our website is reflective of that. While we tend to socialize and have fun in off-hours, the atmosphere of our structured guild event times is exactly what you’d expect from one of the world’s leading guilds: we’re serious, organized, professional, and goal-oriented.
GWI: Any award or accolades given to Condemned? Significant achievements?
The past accomplishments are something that we’re collectively, as a guild, incredibly proud of. While many other guilds often point to their intentions about what they intend to do in Guild Wars 2 – and we understand why this is the case, particularly for new guilds that have formed more recently – Condemned is one of a handful that has a track record of world-ranked achievement of reaching the goals we set.
Over the past six years, we’ve been on the cutting edge of PvE progression and PvP dominance in each of the games we’ve played.
For PvE, we were the World Rank #1 guild for progression raiding in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and were World Rank #6 for progression raiding in RIFT.
For PvP, we had the most winners of any guild in the developer-held Best of the Best tournament in Vanguard, were widely recognized as the most dominant Destruction guild on the Praag server in Warhammer, the most dominant Elyos guild, with the highest number of keeps held on the Triniel server in Aion, and the highest performing guild in both open world and instanced PvP on RIFT’s Deepstrike server and Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Port Nowhere.
We’re humbled by the achievements that we’ve earned over the past six years, and have a great deal of respect for the dedicated members in our ranks who have worked hard to earn them.
GWI: Are there any ranks in the guild structure that new members can hope to achieve?
Our rank system is simple and responds directly to the needs of the guild – we have a general rank for members and then a rank for our leadership team, which consists of our guildmaster, our primary officers and our officer assistants. Each of our officer positions is focused on a particular area of guild management, and we fill these positions with the best person available to manage that area, which allows us to ensure that the guild runs smoothly while avoiding ‘officer bloat’ that can come with other established guilds.
That said, new members who have a desire to be part of leadership alongside an impressive ability to contribute have real potential to secure an officer position when one is available.
Condemned runs guild-scheduled event times, where attendance is tracked, from 9:00 to 12:00 EST Monday through Thursday, with an addition of Sunday when needed. That being said, we typically have members on around the clock, and in past games we have often issued a “Call to Arms” for all available players outside of our scheduled times – encouraged but non-mandatory participation events.Members of our structured PvP division teams have additional attendance requirements for practices, scrimmages and play that extends beyond – rather than in place of – our guild scheduled events.
From all of us at Condemned, we’d like to extend our thanks to Guild Wars Insider for the interview – we remain huge fans of your site and look forward to collaborating more in the future.
All in all, the all-star members of Condemned are going to make a large splash in the Guild Wars 2 community, as already evidenced, but once they get in-game, everyone will get to see where they really pull out the stops.
