TDH Part 2: How to Name Your Guild

Since the game is split into two sides, Horde and Alliance, (which don't tend to interact much save on the battlefield), I was mostly exposed to the "cool kid" guilds on Horde side. So what makes a "cool kid" in Warcraft, and what makes a "cool guild" for that matter?

WoW's gameplay is based around collecting hard-to-obtain gear. The best gear is only obtainable through a large scale group activity called "raiding". The "coolest" people on Malygos server from a purely materialistic point of view had the best gear. Therefore, they were also in "raiding guilds". "Raiding" requires coordinating up to 200 people to arrange for 40 of them to be available on any given night, with a proper mix of skills and specialties. Of course I knew nothing of this at the time. From my point of view they had cool stuff and an aura of success. And a guild tag wrapped in alligator brackets under their printed character name. Mine just said "Aardvarkina" with no cool brackets :(

There were many guilded players walking about Orgrimmar (the Horde Capital). "The Wings of Tiamat" was an older guild that was at this point on its way out. "The Many" was also a popular guild. Two of my employees at Chewy Software were in "The Many". They didn't want to leave their guild to join mine. The reason offered I didn't really understand at the time: something about having earned points towards getting good gear in their guild or something.

One-word guild names began coming into vogue. Hell. Virtus. Aeternus. Emminence (the premier alliance guild). Virtus was the creme-de-la-creme of horde guilds. Their players were the most highly regarded. Funny how being too busy to talk to someone makes you more an object of envy. (Not that they weren't cool people to chat with... I'm just saying)

This one word latin stuff seemed a tad pretentious to me. I wanted something funny that would help me recruit more players. Several off-color inside joke names were passed over.

I began trying to work on "Horde" puns.

Hordiculture - too obscure
Horde'oerves - too French, and not menacing enough
Hordinary People - too weird
Aunt Hordtense - again, too obscure

Two Dollar Horde came in a flash of inspiration. Off-color enough to be funny without being patently offensive. Pure gold.

We've been copied several times. There are now "Two Dollar Horde" guilds that have sprung up on other servers. We have also been written up repeatedly on the "best guild name" threads that crop up from time to time. However, I can safely say that we were the first.

I picked up a guild charter for Two Dollar Horde that evening and began collecting the 10 signatures needed to create the guild.

Next Time: The first members & guild formation