So I wanna talk about trolls for a minute.

My first and to date favorite WoW guild was the Flowers of Happiness. It was a guild of trolls. It was founded by Blart, more famously known as Fansy the Famous Bard.

Real quick, I want to talk about the definition of trolling. Spewing racist, sexist shit and sending harassing messages to people is not trolling; it’s being a hateful little shit. Robert Brockway covers it pretty well here. We looked for creative ways to play the game that were not intended and often not condoned by the developers. Yeah, they were often annoying, but our basic goal was to GET those racist hateful comments from people who could not just walk away from the person trying to start a church worshiping that one druid that sits on a mailbox all day.

I once held an election for the President of the Barrens in Barrens Chat. (The winner promised to make Chuck Norris Day a zone-wide holiday, and was of the opinion that Thrall started the war in Arathi Gulch over resources, not Alliance WMDs.) We spent nearly three hours in the same Warsong Gulch match playing hide and seek with the flag. (A couple of weeks later they added the map marker for flag positions.) I also spent several Battleground matches roleplaying a janitor.

Some of my favorite memories from all of my considerable time playing MMOs come from those days. I recently visited the site to try and dig up some of my old picture stories, only to find the forums have been shut down. The guild had been in decline for a while, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I am sad to see it go.

When the guild was good, it was a source of endless entertainment. Blart wrote one of the first mass guild invite scripts in vanilla WoW, and ballooned FoH to the largest guild on the server. (A rumor started that he sold a modified version of the script to gold farmers and started the gold seller spam.) We didn’t tell people how to leave, and ended up having more members than the game could count. Then we passed guild lead to a gold farmer who didn’t speak much English, and did our best to follow his commands.

Castor is a love letter to the weird stories we made playing a game wrong.