A Brief History of Soul-Bound
SoulBound is a group of gamers who have common interests and goals, but consider their friendships and having fun to
be of the highest importance. We are a family, not just a guild.
How are we Different from other Guilds?
Soulbound supports all of the major MMORPG games, rather than just one format. We are currently heavily based in World of Warcraft,
but have guild members in EQ2, GuildWars, and others. We set up the guild this way so that players can venture out into
other areas/games, but still have their "home" to come to, in the form of our message board and community.
Soulbound does not restrict
players based on levels, etc. We allow people to play how they like. After all, you are here to have fun. Some players are
powergamers, some are not… but all are welcome. You will not find level restrictions here, as that would separate our
friends from us.Soulbound tries to give a lot of freedom to its players, and not burden you down with rules
and restrictions. As part of our family, we trust that you will operate in the best interest of our guild. However, because of
the freedom we allow, those members hat join us from other restrictive, more structured guilds, often times feel alienated;
as if they’re in a guild that is not supporting them. Please be aware, the leaders of Soulbound are always behind the scenes, discussing how we can improve our guild, and how to best serve our community. We do our best to organize guild events when interest is shown, and we do what we can to help our lower players with armor, weapons, etc. But we also expect our players to step up and do their part: meet other guild members, form groups amongst yourselves, participate in raids, etc. If you want to become an integral part of our family, don't be shy!
Our RulesHave fun!Show respect! Soulbound has members of all ages. Because of this, we strive to maintain a PG-13 vocabulary both in game & on the boards.Maintain integrity!
Soulbound does not tolerate game exploits by members. Our guild was formed from those who wanted to play a good, clean game,
and we will strongly enforce this within our group.The above three rules are the basic principals for our guild,
however, you need to review the rules in their entirety at The Laws of Soulbound. These rules will give you a much clearer
picture of what Soulbound is about. If you can operate within these rules, you will have no problem fitting into our family.
Our History
As told by Willie and Raddad
From Krieger to Molten Lava to Soul Bound…. In the beginning, Lavawalker and other of our founders were
part of Krieger, a guild playing Diablo. This guild was quite large at the time. During this time period the use of
cheats was common, and preying on other gamers was a standard practice that the gaming industry did not seem to want
to address.This rather large faction within Krieger tried numerous times to make changes within the guild
. After numerous attempts to make these changes failed, Lavawalker and a few others left Krieger to form Moltenlava.
Moltenlava was a new concept for online guilds.
It policed its own membership frequently for the use of cheats and hacks. It watched for those who were involved in
predatory behavior and stood against them.Lavawalker gathered people together who wanted to play a clean,
honorable game of Diablo, without cheats or hacks or PKing. Our first and most important rule was to have fun. We had a
lot of fun and got to know each other, and we grew in size till there was nearly 200 of us.
Then we got wind of something new... Ultima Online was coming!! We prepared for this game as a community.
Whoever got news about it would come onto battle.net and share it. Well we leapt onto UO like wildfire... and our world
changed. We now could all meet and see each other virtually all at once for the first time!
And our playing wasn't just limited to 4 players or a text chat room.
We also had a whole new set of rules and problems to address... there was a lot of hesitancy to make new rules for UO.
What happened was, we had our first major exodus of players leaving Molten Lava. With a whole new game it brought out a
whole new player for many people. UO servers were also regional... and to help with latency and slower connections, many
members went to servers which were more local to them. Many of us with better connections made characters on a lot of
servers, just so we could play with all our friends within the guild. And some factions developed which grew to a point
that they split off from Molten Lava to go about things in their own way. Things went on for several months quite
nicely with the guild really holding together well, even on different servers. The main thing now that faced us was
that some people were growing dissatisfied with UO, while others were not. Some people even went back to Diablo.
Some people went to Quake, and when StarCraft came out, many more went there.This is when Molten Lava
truly became a guild that supported players, not a guild which supported a game. It was our friendships that
held the guild together at a time when many people could have left to join game specific clans.
Don't get me wrong, some people did indeed do that, but many more of us held our friendships higher than our needs
to excel at the pursuit of any one game.Then the fecal matter hit the rotary oscillator once more when
Everquest came out. What made this game such a different beast from UO was that in EQ suddenly you had another
factor which divided players, LEVELS... and no system in place to address this within the guild.
This created more divisions within the guild even while people were in the same game on the same server.
Much like today, some people played casually, some people powergamed... and remember, some people didn't get into
EQ at all.Many of Moltenlava's main communications came through the discussion board now rather than in-game.
It was just too hard to communicate with the guild all in one sitting. Our discussion board evolved into our main method
of communication, supplemented as it always had been by weekly IRC meetings.Much like in UO, players again
eventually grew tired of EQ on the Mithaniel Marr server… some quit, some moved to other servers to try the game out
with a different atmosphere that can evolve on other servers. I still believe we maintained a close bond of friendship
with each other even though we were in different games and on different servers within a game. And what happened next
proved it.Lavawalker disbanded the guild.I won't go into the details of why he disbanded
the guild... I don't think anyone knows for sure.The important thing was that WE DIDN'T DISBAND!
We had to rename ourselves because Lavawalker claimed ownership of the Moltenlava property. We became SoulBound.
What held us together were our friendships which had been the glue holding the guild together almost from the start.
We held together almost to the member.It wasn't the games which held us... it was our friendships.
We began to address ourselves as a community, rather than just a guild. And our friendships are still keeping our
“community” strong today..
|
