Happy Birthday Team Love!
Dec 13th, 2008 by Billiard
One year ago today the guild Team Love [kiSu] was formed. The concept for the guild was borne out of an idea by Axiom at Team Quitter concerning starting a Big Brother Program in order to help grow PvP players for Guild Wars. I suggested to Axiom that it would be good to have a place where less experienced and lesser known players could network with and be mentored by time players in the game. He thought it was a great idea, and since I had previous experience with training literally hundreds of new PvP players in Xen of Onslaught [XoO], he of course thought I would the person best suited for making it happen.
I had recently stepped down from leading XoO and was pretty content just to join another guild and be just a regular player again, but the idea and the opportunity intrigued me. What’s more, with Axiom’s backing it became possible to rally other top players in support of the program. One of the keys I thought was to get the new (and still unnamed) guild into a very active PvP alliance. For this I turned to Yue from Delta Formation [DF] and let him know of my idea. DF was leading a very active guild with other top American PvP guilds such as Dark Alley [dR]. He thought it was a great idea, and quickly moved to form a new guild and give it a place in the alliance. Yue was the person who coined Team Love [kiSu], based on a name that he had been wanting to use for a guild for a long time.
Team Love started recruiting anchor members who provided a core group in the guild, mentors from top guilds who would guest, and less experienced “mentee” members who wanted a chance to learn and get better known in the PvP community. Originally Team Love used Hapa’s Ventrilo server and hosted forums on the Team Quitter website, but as the guild grew and expanded it purchased it’s own 100 person Ventrilo server as well as a dedicated website and forums. In addition to the main Team Love guild, several other [kiSu] guilds were created due to high levels of interest in PvP mentoring. These included Casual Love - originally a practice guild for Team Love and now a core guild in it’s own right, Virtual Love - a guild designed to orient players new to PvP, Eternus Love - a Europe based core guild, and Random Love - a BYOB guild. Of these guilds Casual, Virtual, and to some extent Random are still active, with Team Love reforming a core this month.
Literally hundreds of players have been through and assisted with the Team Love PvP mentoring program. The goal of the program has always been to aid PvP players in helping themselves to learn and improve. [kiSu] guilds have been some of the most active in North American GvG over the past year, completing nearly 3000 matches across all the [kiSu] guilds. In addition, Team Love has also created a new Sealed Deck Generator to facilitate Limited Play GvG matches, as well as helped sponsor the Guild Wars Guru GvG Challenge 2008 PvP tournament.
Team Love continues to carry out it’s PvP mentoring mission, and hopes to play a role in Guild Wars 2 once that game is released.
It’s been a real flurry of activity and learning curves, with both high times and low times. It’s not that [kiSu] is exempt from the cyclical activity standard to most other guilds; but it’s been able to weather the low periods and rebound again. Having that sort of focus has been really key.
I’ve been personally surprised by the network of guests and friends made by the guild. Here’s hopin’ ta even more in the coming year!
Wow… it’s already been a year…