Greetings fellow Star Wars: The Old Republic players,

this is a recruitment post issued by the guild administration of the European SWTOR guild “Dogma”. The post will most likely be a relatively long read, since our concepts, philosophy and way-of-play cannot be described with just a few words. If you follow the link to our website (http://www.dogmaguild.net/), be sure to have a look at our Database section (http://dr-hq.eu/ipb/index.php?/page/index.html/_/rules/star-wars-the-old-republic-rules/) where you can find more in-depth information about our history, our goals and structure – everything you need to know about us.


General information

Activities: PvE, endgame content, crafting, PvP
Server: Frostclaw – EU // Faction: Empire
Guild style: Selective recruitment, mature close-knit community
Minimum level: 40+ (30+ if you are willing and able to catch up quickly)
Website: www.dogmaguild.net)
Facilities: Forums, member blogs, Mumble server

Raiding schedule: to be announced
Open to: currently all classes, mainly melee and ranged DPS (for detailed and updated information on openings, refer to our recruitment forum (http://dr-hq.eu/ipb/index.php?/forum/49-star-wars-the-old-republic/))


A little bit of history

Dogma is a long standing guild, first founded as “The Guild Project” during the beta test of Horizons – Empires of Istaria in 2003. Since then we have played many games together, including EverQuest 2, Vanguard – Saga of Heroes and Darkfall.

Our underlying structure and organization has been fine-tuned over the years and has seen great success - for instance in Vanguard where within of four weeks we had GMs investigating how our guild bank could be this well filled already; our Guild Master "Myth" holding the guild bank being twice as rich as anyone else on this planet playing Vanguard. We had the best crafter setup ever seen, we were in control of the market and our guildies were clad in only the finest of craftable gear. Myth personally has been complimented by Vanguard's former Lead GM Taliesin after they had finished their investigation on our guildbank. He was told he had never seen any guild with only a similar level of organization and teamplay.

This is only a small excerpt from our almost 10-year history as a guild. For a more detailed summary of the past years, please refer to the Guild History post (http://dr-hq.eu/ipb/index.php?/page/index.html/_/rules/star-wars-the-old-republic-rules/guild-history-a-brief-outlook-on-the-history-r21) in our Database.


The People behind “Dogma”

Most of us have been playing online games since Ultima Online and Meridian 59 and are very experienced in the genre; you could also say we’re “MMORPG veterans”. We are mostly Europeans, usually with a few US and Asian people thrown into our mix which makes this a “European based” guild and leads to the fact that our main playtime is between 6pm GMT+1 to around 1am GMT+1 (Berlin, Stockholm, Central European Time). However, we do not restrict our guild to only inviting European people, since this would be against what we think is a major part of playing a MMORPG in the first place: diversity of people and a multi-cultural and national setup of communities. The only important thing for us is that our members can be active in our peak playtimes.

For Star Wars: The Old Republic we have taken a different approach than usually. Instead of opening up recruitment pre-release – for Vanguard we have started to build our member base as early as a year beforehand – we have focused on contacting old members who have been taking other directions over the years to create a solid core of players who know each other and the guild very well. Your advantage is to be able to join a tried and tested organization with an established and strong structure, a guild with a distinct understanding of how to operate.


The concept of “Dogma”, how is it different from other guilds?

The whole concept behind our guild is very different from many other guilds out there. “The Guild Project”, which continued through all of our previous installments and eventually led to the forming of “Dogma” for Star Wars: The Old Republic is a project to build up a strong, friendly and very efficient community of people who consider each other friends and value loyalty, friendship and honor above all else. A major part of this concept is that we want all of our members to take an active part in the ongoing development of the guild, especially in the initial “pre-release” phase. This could be considered an “open source” project, where input is valued and asked for, where everyone can take on an useful role within the guild and help to actively “shape the end product”, which is planned to be a rather small close knit guild community that is successful in the game and will exist for the years to come.

Continuity is something we deem to be very important, we build this guild to last for years to come, not for guild hoppers, nor for people who tend to quit the games they play after 6 months or take a break and never come back.

We strive to give this installment of "Dogma" a structure that allows for us to manage a small circle of guild members, yet flexible enough to allow us to manage a very large guild, should game mechanics of SWTOR favor a guild to be rather large, that is. We achieve that by using a "guild constitution" with administrative organs that are connected via a system of checks and balances. Basically we take a good constitutional law system as the basis, modify it to fit a way smaller scale and tune it down to be simply and easy to understand and then we run the guild within this given frame.

For further information – as mentioned above – please head over to our website at www.dogmaguild.net) and have a look at our Database section (http://dr-hq.eu/ipb/index.php?/page/index.html/_/rules/star-wars-the-old-republic-rules/).


Goals - have changed over the years...

We always liked to be among the “top end” guilds within the environment we chose to play in. This included raiding, crafting and in general any aspect the MMORPG we are playing has to offer. Nowadays we are older, wiser and have less time at our hands to play computer games. However our play style has not changed that much; we still like to play efficiently, but clearly our focus is on the community, on the individual member, not the time he or she can commit.

As said, we value the community behind the guild to be the utmost important thing to grant the guilds success. This means that we do not tolerate a lot of things and also that we demand a lot of our members, but give back just as much in return.

Once logged in, however, we expect dedication towards the guild as a whole and towards the goals of the guild. We expect our members to take the guild “seriously” and do their best to help the whole guild achieve its goals. An example to shorten this a bit: If you are online and an event would be called, we would expect you to drop whatever you are doing and be there as fast as humanly possible. If you are not online, no one will ever blame you, unless you said you'd be, of course.

Our day to day activities range from general questing, running dailies, flashpoints and warzones, participating in open-world PvP as well as raiding on a regular basis


What we ask from our members, what people we are looking for:

- We ask for absolute loyalty towards the guild, its common goals and its constitution, "The Dogma".
- We ask for dedication as mentioned above and for participation in various ways.
- We need only such people, who fit into our community, are ready to read our message boards, utilize our website and the community-promoting tools on it and want to get involved in the community in general.
- We are looking exclusively for people who share our beliefs, goals and philosophy.
- We are looking exclusively for people who want a permanent home, not for people who tend to change their guild tag from time to time.
- We are looking exclusively for people who wish to participate by taking on various positions within the guild, taking over tasks and responsibilities, are ready to make suggestions, speak their mind openly, are able to discuss various issues including problems in a mature, reasonable way and are enjoying a close community, where every single member considers every other member a friend, not a number on the roster required for this or that.


What we are not looking for:

- People who tend to join a guild just for practical reasons such as obtaining loot or out of similarly egoistical and community-harming motives.
- People who cannot ever be online during our peak playtimes.
- People who tend to do “guild hopping”.
- People unable to lead a mature, constructive discussion.
- People with a community-harming attitude, lack of loyalty, dedication, participation or a tendency to harassment of others or any other behavior that might cause harm to their individual reputation and thus to the guilds reputation.
- People with an “uber” attitude.
- People who endorse in smack talk in a "religious way"
- People who enjoy “d00d sp3ak”.
- People who are not able or willing to read message boards once a day and actively take part in ongoing discussions.
- People who are afraid of responsibility.
- People who fail to be able to see a "guild" as something spiritual, like any project you put your passion and a lot of commitment into.
- People with the strong drive to be "the" leader of something.
- People who want power, more power, and even more power.
- People who do not understand that the founders of "The Guild Project" will always be in charge in some way, if only with a right to "veto".
- People who get annoyed by the length of our posts.


Current state of the project and how to go about acquiring more information

At the moment we are in the “preparation phase”. This means that our player core is established and we are ready to open up public recruitment. At this time, to join our guild, you will have to post on the recruitment board on our website and get involved with the people there, get to know them a bit and then you may be taken in and get the opportunity to help in building up this guild, shape its way and develop various parts of its structure over the next months.

We are currently in the process of building up our raid team to progress through the content and experience every aspect of the game together. To achieve that, we are looking to invite 10 (a maximum of 15) new members over the course of the next 4 weeks.

Since this is a kind of “open source” project, during this phase we expect even more participation than we would during later phases. At this moment we are also looking for people to volunteer for certain administrative positions within the guild, for experienced players mostly, best with leadership or officer background from previous guilds.

However, we are open to “genre newcomers” at all times and we will do our best to help them where we can, since helping out is part of our philosophy. This is especially true for Star Wars: The Old Republic as the game is designed to attract those who haven’t played an MMO before. We respect newcomers and the only thing we ask from you is a willingness to learn and improve, the ability to learn and listen to advice given to you when it comes to game mechanics, gearing or speccing a character to unlock its full capabilities while fitting your personal play style.

Thank you for taking the time and reading this lengthy post, thank you for your interest in “Dogma”!


With best regards,

Ardenya
Initiator "The Guild Project" and leader of Dogma