In our guild many of our members have been around for years – we all know each other, we’ve put a lot of time into our guild, and we really like spending time with each other. A while back one of our guildmates invited a few people he’d only ever met online to come to witness renewal his wedding vows, and after that we had so much fun we wanted to make an official event. We were able to have 12 people attend of about the 100 who play SWTOR… not bad! Everyone from all of our games were invited but every single one of the members attending ended up being a SWTOR player.

Before the event, a lot of people asked for Tshirts. So I redesigned our logo in large format and created a design for the back w/ the New york skyline on it and our guild name.

After we voted on a date and location I figured it was worth a shot to message the community members of all three games we play. Both SWTOR and Wildstar responded and sent us some Tshirts for our event!

Eric Musco also sent us a pack of Cartel Coins codes to hand out…. niccccceee. I don’t know what I’m going to buy with them yet, but as another guildmate said, “I will be sure to buy myself something pretty.” 450 Cartel Coins is worth about $5 and we were sent 25… going to have to call a win on the loot department! I also brought two Guild Wars 2 books to give away to cover all three games we played.

This was the first time most of us had met in real life. We came from all over the US mostly, with some people taking planes and renting hotels, others taking a train ride over from near NYC. Because most of us had met before ingame, on our forums or on voice comms we were pretty comfortable and got along really well.

I wanted to plan one very memorable special event. So I decided to take us all kayaking on the Manhattan River. I wanted something that was very ‘New York’, but also more than just visiting a crowded tourist attraction. It was really enjoyable and surprisingly easy. Definitely do recommend the Manhattan Kayak Company!

It was a pretty amazing trip. One of the strangest things to experience was putting a real “face” to a name/voice. I always imagine people look like their characters even though I know it’s not true (I’m clearly not a big beefy trooper lady) but it was still a bit of a shock especially people I had a very strong ‘head canon’ visualization of by their voice or by their character’s looks. The wierdest ones for me weren’t the people who played the opposite gender, but rather those who looked a bit like their characters, but not perfectly.

It was also really neat to talk about non-gaming stuff in a context that made sense. When we play, we are almost always talking about mechanics, our newest outfit, ‘kill the healer!’ or whatever weird decision was made recently in the patch notes… but when we were all together in real life it just made sense to talk about our other hobbies and jobs. I learned more about my guildmates’ careers in that one week than I did in the last year of chatting with them casually. I also feel like I have a stronger sense of knowing that they’re ‘people’… and not just some strangers on the internet I spend a lot of time with.

It was also fun to sit on the beautiful rooftop deck at night and just talk and laugh for hours. We talked about guild gossip, companion romances, and Togruta. Of course.

10/10 would guildmate in real life again. The trip was a lot of work to plan but totally worth it. If I would do it again in the future I would try and figure out a way more people could go, and try and figure out a way to make it less expensive.