The Ensidia journey

Recently, Ensidia, one of the most famous and talked about guilds in WoW’s history disbanded. For some, it was an expected outcome of one of the more daring projects in the PvE realm, where two of the most successful guilds at the end of The Burning Crusade merged and created an entity, that at first swept the PvE scene, destroying content with ease, and PvE the community either liked it or hated it, everyone had an opinion about it. The later history of Ensidia was somewhat tainted by some failure and loads of drama, though not in any way diminishing their impact on the scene or the potential that it still carried. This series of blogs will be about my journey through Ensidia, from the last days of Nihilum to the time where I finally gave up, the end of Wrath of the Lich King expansion. One might ask, why Nihilum? Well, to know how Ensidia ran, why it was successful and why it eventually failed, you have to know its origins, and pretty much the half of Ensidia’s core was Nihilum’s, bringing its attitude and modus operandi  to the conglomerate.  SK Gaming’s side is of equal importance, but since I’ve never played there, I can’t help but only paint that side of the picture only with rumors, my own observations and obviously filthy lies and fabrications. This part is only about Nihilum, its inner workings and last days.

Nihilum at its peak

What made Nihilum great?

This was a question often asked on message boards and blogs. For me, a very short answer was that it was quite different from other end game guilds of the era. Most of the top guilds had great players, good leadership, decent recruitment methods and the will to compete, but Nihilum was in every aspect quite different. My first impression of the guild when I joined in late vanilla, post Naxxramas was that it was full of opposites. How can a guild that has such centralistic leadership scheme and yet so fractioned and chaotic a structure work was beyond me. Kungen was an absolutist guild master, whose word was final about pretty much everything, he was the main tank, the one that developed most strategies, lead the raids and managed to bail between every big content patch. At the same time, his underlings were divided into groups, mostly by nationality, that didn’t necessarily communicate or like each other that much, that never used global voice comms like Ventrillo or Teamspeak for raiding, the only purpose it held for them was casual chatting and, more importantly, dissing other groups and individuals. So you can imagine that a new recruit, and there have been MANY new recruits, could sometimes feel alienated and distanced from the guild, if you could even call it that during the periods with no progress.  And this is no exaggeration either. As a young recruit, eager to fit in and actually make it through a trial period – something no one ever defined, took notice of or cared about – I spent more time playing with people from the outside the guild than with people from Nihilum. I already wrote about it, how there were maybe two people that cared enough to explain tactics and what was expected from me, and It surely wasn’t my class leader that did it.

So this non-caring and general dislike of new people couldn’t possibly be what made Nihilum great or successful. Well, there were two Nihilums. One was the one I just described, the apathetic between-progress-cba-with-this-s**tty-game Nihilum, where most pretty much stopped playing while there was nothing to do and threaten to quit on daily basis, and the beast that was racking world first like Mancy’s mother racks lovers.

And the internal structure and leadership didn’t change at the time, but there was something that was considered holy, and it was “Progress”. People almost forgot their differences, I mean we still hated each other and in the best case disliked most of the other people, but now we were in it together against all others so they were kinda frozen for the time being. This hunger is something that I still feel is the #1 thing that a guild needs to be successful in PvE. I’ve seen it more than once, and lack of it is in my opinion one of the main reasons both Nihilum and Ensidia eventually failed. I never saw the benefit of guilds blindly farming content even after everyone has what they need just for the sake of farming. It’s destructive and even if some leaders think it holds people together, I always felt it leads to quite the opposite. I mean I can barely stand half of the raid while we have to do shit together, why make us do stuff we don’t want with people we don’t like, who even cares about farming. So we pretty much just didn’t do it. When a player got their stuff, he’d just stop raiding with the rest, unless he was one of “those” that want to play even after they get their gear, imagine that! Or in Kungen’s case, lie that water got into your computer (????) and quit for half a year, as the only leader of the guild.

Hydross cleanup (thanks to Inthya for all the SS)

I’ve mentioned general attitude towards the recruits and this was also, as cruel as this paragraph might sound, one of the main keys for Nihilum's success and something I’ve been a supporter of in Ensidia, where the idea obviously fell on infertile ground. Hazing, busting balls and sometimes outright torturing of recruits was one of the things we did, we it did well and I personally believe made more good players than any other method out there. There was no pampering and “oh you’ll do better next time” attitude, it was closer to molestation than anything else. Trial by fire some called it, for others it was simply fun, almost all recruits had to go through it. Mistakes were brought out and judged in a public forum, usually straight out in guild or raid chat, people that did mistakes were mobbed and gutted for it, and eventually they either gave out, quit in drama, got cut by Kungen, usually accompanied with everyone logging in and screenshotting the line Kungen is going to use this time around. The third option was becoming an asset to the guild and an actual good player. Not everyone that got recruited was good, the truth couldn’t be any further from that, but assuredly everyone that got accepted by the “core” was a good player. Because it didn’t matter how douchey, egotistical or arrogant someone was, it only mattered how the player performed during progress and most importantly under pressure.

Most players came from very organized mid-tier guilds, with everyone nicely and politely on Ventrillo listening to their leader, waiting for orders and trying to execute them to their best ability. In Nihilum, that scene was replaced with 10 different Ventrillo channels, ranging from two (usually some anime watching fags (Quantz and Muqq) discussing newest Naruto episode stroking eachother) to up to ten people just spamming, yelling, insulting eachother and spouting racial slurs like it’s “hello”. And this would be one of the more polite channels. So whichever one the new promising recruits decided to join was met by disdain, mockery and eventually a flame fest. In addition, the raid would be lead only through reading raid chat in Kungen’s often broken English, caps lock spam macros and hateful whispers of someone telling you to get the hell out of the guild. Ah, the good old days.

Not all raids were successful!

But assuredly, whoever passed this phase, got promoted and, even more importantly, accepted, was surely someone you could count on when racing for a world first. We didn’t have 25 good players, at the best times maybe 15 great ones, but the ones that were great could carry the raid and you could be one hundred percent positive they wouldn’t screw up on the 1%. This system didn’t work too well on mentally unstable people, though it did make them cause a lot of good juicy drama, and I mean A LOT.

There were multiple ways of passing the trial and getting a raid spot, as I said, all spots were far from being filled with only good players. There were always people that were an “asset” through some other way, be it working on the site, being a walking auction house, or the usual and most pathetic way “being the class that’s overpowered at the moment”. But there was only one criterion by which you’d be accepted by the core, aka the class leader channel where pretty much everything was decided. By that I mean a bunch of people yelling at Kungen to do something and then him doing the exact opposite. That criterion that garnered most respect was in game skill level. How good you were, was how respected and accepted you were, period. This is probably why the Nihilum side could never really accept Mek as their leader in Ensidia. Kungen was a leader and class leaders were class leaders not because someone gave them that title (there are exceptions though, Gd for an example), but because the ones that were important respected them for what they’ve done in the game. There was no one during TBC that played in Nihilum and was somewhat successful in it that wouldn’t say that Kungen was deservingly the GM. He was simply the best player I’ve seen in this game, granted he did stop caring eventually during Ensidia times and not perform on same level as in Nihilum, but for the most part he was a f**king beast. Lead the raid, main tank, develop most of the tactics we and consequently most of the scene used,  talk in CL chat during fight and lead the guild to dozens of world firsts is a feat no one can claim within the WoW community. And all of that without a centralized Ventrilo channel. Ironically the one instance we started using Vent for raiding was the instance we sucked in and failed.

Mommy Kungen taking care of the children

What made Nihilum fail in the end?

As I mentioned above, every guild eventually fades away. For Nihilum it was a mixture of lazy recruiting, sleeping on the laurels, loss of hunger and the fact a lot of important people quit. Incidentally, I think these are the exact parallels to why Ensidia failed as well (spoiler alert!). With almost a year between Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, we officially pretty much stopped raiding, only reason why most even showed up after they got their stuff was the fact we did sell runs and to help Cloze get his glaives. In the meantime many people quit the game and even though we got some awesome new members, it just wasn’t of high enough quality to replace all the oldschoolers that quit the game. And when the new instance was just about to get released, we kind of did notice that our roster was too weak, that we didn’t have enough depth to cover a long raiding period, and as much as we did try to remedy the situation, it was too little too late. Bananeen was made a recruitment officer and we did find some super good players like Sykostig and a priest who’s name I don’t remember anymore, but with a very unfortunate release date for us, the fact that some of the core that did stay was out on vacation and the fact we had the worst tanks in the history of WoW couldn’t bode well, and it didn’t. We failed on M’uru badly, in a most frustrating stint of progress I’ve ever been at, having to suffer through people I hated the most in the world being on the most important roles in the fight, failing try after a try searching for more excuses than Jinxarn when he died in a fight. This was the first time I didn’t feel like raiding anymore. And this was shared with the most of my friends as well, pretty much the whole core of the guild was uninterested, because we knew we were just a shadow of our former selves, having to suffer through the incompetence of certain individuals that in reality shouldn’t even get to see the farm cripple raids on the emptiest server in Kazakhstan.

But you reap what you sow, they say in the land of lame clichés, I don’t want to make any more excuses (which the last paragraph was nothing but), but that was the reality of the situation. After we did manage to claim the M’uru world 875.412th kill, we got to feel a whole other batch of fail on Kil’Jaeden, whom we again managed to kill somewhere around millionth in the world for all It mattered.

After that it was obvious we need to drastically change things around, or we’ll see as many world firsts as Method, and among the million possibilities of what we could have and should have done and how we need to proceed, one day while farming Sunwell for no other apparent reason but to bash Zooc on how gay his new e-romance affair is, some of us heard of rumors from a pretty, if not 100% certain source, that we were pretty much certainly merging with SK gaming, our biggest competition at the time and to say the least, there was no love lost between us at the time. Some of us confronted Kungen about it and asked if that’s true and, after he confirmed it, I think my first thought was “ok, can we kick the retards right away?”

In sequel to this I’ll be writing about the merge itself, most of the technicalities (the ones I’m familiar with, I’ll just lie about the rest, np), how our first raids with “them” went and what the inner workings, mentality and attitude inside the new guild were and what made it special – “special” as in retarded, of course.