Exploding Labrats • Guild

Forums

DKP

Guild

Members

It is currently Sat May 17, 2008 5:04 am

Guild History - Meetings

Contact: #explabs @ Quakenet

Exploding Labrats is a Finnish World of Warcraft guild. We play Alliance side on European server Stormreaver. When Exploding Labrats was found we were a pure PvP (player versus player) guild, but as we grew in numbers and skilled players we realized that the better we do in PvE (player versus environment) the better chances we have in PvP as we have better equipment. As it stands now we have players oriented to PvE, players oriented to PvP and most of our players do their best to enjoy both of them. We have no requirements for either PvE or PvP talent specifications and we use DKP (Dragon Kill Points) to share the drops as equally as possible to both PvP and PvE players depending on their activity in our raids. The purpose of Exploding Labrats is for everyone to have fun and to not spoil the fun for other people, except for beating them senseless in PvP. I do believe we have achieved it this far.

Joining Exploding Labrats:
Exploding Labrats won't take any player who is not capable of speaking and understanding Finnish language. We usually do not have much need for more players, but once in a while some spots are opened due to people canceling accounts or going less active. As it stands we only take skilled players with good equipment that come along well with other people and who are also intelligent enough to understand orders. You should use our forums if you are interested in joining our guild, if we are in need of a certain class, we'll be using those forums to inform about it. Just remember when you ask to join our ranks that we have no need for idiots, whiners or people who do not play at all.

The long story how Exploding Labrats reached The Burning Crusade:

The creation of Exploding Labrats:
Before I start, I really do not actually know why I wrote this story as it kinda did take a lot of effort to write. I believe I mostly wrote it for myself, to get some sort of memento when the happiness of EL ends someday. I have done my best to be as accurate as possible, but I am certain that not everything is going to be written exactly the way it happened, as Exploding Labrats has been there for such a long time. The story is written from my perspective, as that is the only one I know and it is written by me because I was one who pressed to button: 'Create guild' (or whatever it read in the button ;) ). This is definitely going to be long, so if you are afraid your eyes will hurt after reading more than 3 lines of text, then I suggest that you do not bother reading this.

Long ago, which I think is something like 3 years ago; I was recruited to a Finnish Quake 3 clan called Polarbears by its clan leader named Gabster. We started playing Quake 3 CTF after some circumstances and I went up to being the assistant leader of the guild. Later on a highly skilled Finnish Q3TDM clan called Deluxe started playing Q3CTF and wanted to start practice with us as we were more experienced and the scene was pretty small. We got to know each other pretty well and played together in the Finnish national Q3CTF team and in some random practice games in the evenings. Somewhere in the end of year 2004 World of Warcraft U.S. closed beta opened for Gamespy subscribers and a week later it was made open for public play, which is when I stepped for the first time into the World of Warcraft. For me it was the fourth MMORPG I had ever tried and the first serious one I played for more than 2 hours. Allthough even if I did not know just about anything about MMORPGs I started playing with my IRL hardcore MMORPG freak friend. We used Teamspeak 2 to communicate and I did enjoy the game quite a bit, so I joined the advertising group consisting Jimbo and Isopaha who had tried some of the earliest betas of the game. We advertised the game to my clanmates and to Deluxe who were all starting to get a little bit bored of the old Quake. In the U.S. beta we weren't organized one bit and got heavily separated across servers and factions but in the end we had half a dozen players interested in the game, even though we didn't manage to reach even level 30.

After the U.S. Open beta ended some of us joined the Korean Beta. I myself did manage to create an account for it, but I never bothered to actually download the proper version of the game so I do not know much about what happened in this beta. Pretty much all I know this was the last time we saw Jimbo in the game and we were on Horde. He joined the military service in January and never managed to join the Final beta, but he still hosted the DKP site we used almost every day and a Teamspeak server for a while.

We now started forming a guild together and had to figure out a name for it. Even I don't remember exactly who was the one who said it, but after some time while we twisted the letters around from Deluxe and Polarbears the word ExpLabs (I believe it's dEluXe + PoLABearS) was formed. And so our 6 founders joined the channel #explabs in Quakenet.org. Clown, Kekkie and Wit were from Deluxe, Gabster, Isopaha and I were from Polarbears and together we agreed that each and every one of us would be in an equal leading position. Only when a tie of 3-3 happens the guild leader would have the upper hand over the other leaders. I spent quite some time creating some poor website for us to enable us easier list for rules, screenshots or other crucial info. All 6 of us agreed to make me the guild leader as I was willing to put some effort on creating and managing the website. My friend Mulq shouted many times with a loud voice how much the name of our guild sucks (ExpLabs or Experience Laboratories as was the first idea). Experience Laboratories really wasn't such a proper name for an MMORPG guild to be honest. Some were ready to abandon the original ExpLabs and to find some traditional Finnish Phrase for our guild or some Latin name. We had many votes and lots of arguing. Finally it was kekkie who managed to discover the word Explosion Labrats that was changed into a little bit more proper form, which is what we selected to be our guild: Exploding Labrats.

European Final beta and leveling phase:
We had allready agreed that we would join Alliance in the final release on the server #wow.fi @ quakenet would choose. The reasons were pretty simple, #wow.fi had loads of idiots at that time and after some research we discovered most of them would be choosing horde. So we would get lots and lots of opportunities to slaughter stupid players and also, we selected alliance because we knew that the Horde was a lot better faction in PvP because of their racials. It would not be as satisfying to beat others with overpowered races as it would be to do the same with the underhanded ones. After a vote that ended 6-5 for the Alliance, we joined the Alliance in the European Final beta on server 5 to get familiar with the Alliance quests prehand. Some of us managed to reach 40-45, to get a mount and we also managed to recruit some more players to our guild. At the start of the final release of World of Warcraft we had 13 players. As we were so few I'm going to list every one of them here:

Priests: Celori, Isb (Wit) Warriors: Ottomaani (clown), Mulq (my annoying IRL hardcore freak friend)
Rogues: Mayfade, Kenkie (kekkie, who later on changed to a warlock)
Warlocks: Wåårlååk
Mages: Kathyan (me), Meanster
Druids: Rauha (gabster, whom I kinda forced to take the druid as no one else was willing to play one.)
Paladins: Rakkaus (skim), Nestori, Jackal

This is what we started our guild with. When the servers opened at the late night some of us rushed straight into the server #wow.fi had selected: Stormreaver and played a few levels there. After this we encountered a huge problem as the server started lagging BAD for almost every Finnish player. This didn't happen on some servers and #wow.fi decided to select another server to be theirs. After some discussion we finally decided that we would stay in Stormreaver after all and wait for the lag problems to disappear. They did do exactly that after some waiting. I myself started playing with Isb, we were pretty much the first ones on our server to kill the Hogger! When I reached level 10 or so, I had to start gathering names for our guild charter to be able to actually create our guild. To be honest it wasn't such an easy task as we had only 10 players available at the start of the game and I had to gather 9 names from characters scattered across the Azeroth. Out of the 2 night elves Mayfade finally came to me near Ironforge to write his signature and I finally managed to create Exploding Labrats at 12th of February 2005.

During our leveling phase we had very different speeds in leveling, the group of 5 I played in rushed many levels ahead of every one else and Rauha started furious recruitment of players so that everyone would have someone to level up with. He took pretty much everyone to our guild that was Finnish and proper level. By the time I reached level 60 we had two level 60 members and at least 40 "low-level" players.

Beginning of raiding
It took for a while for even ten members to reach the level cap, and when we had around twenty level 60 players we formed an alliance with another big Alliance guild, Ragnarok and headed to the Molten Core together. Our raids were pretty horrible, 12 paladins, low level players and raids were separated between EL and Ragnarok players. I took turns with Ragnarok's Guild Master in leading those raids and we managed to kill Baron Geddon and Shazzrah. The alliance was broken when Ragnarok got enough members on their own to wield full raids. We tried to make an alliance with another guild but it didn't exactly work out and we decided to start furious recruitment to wield our very own 40 man raid group. We took everyone in who was Finnish and level 60 or near that, just everyone we could find. I spent this time creating a proper DKP system and ended up with modified zero-sum DKP that uses bidding and free loots (so no loot gets DE'd when it's needed even for the slightest amount).

Molten Core and Blackwing Lair
I went to do my military service somewhere between killing Onyxia and Ragnaros. I gave guild master's title to Isb who lead our guild for a while. After he got too tired in leading, he gave that title to Rakkaus. Because it took so long for us to get 40 level 60 members together to raid we were a bit too under-geared to fight for any European or World first kills in BWL. I don't know too much about the time between end of Molten Core and Blackwing Lair because I was playing war in the woods pretty much that time J. What I do know that we got server first Nefarian kill and our biggest competition Massive migrated to another (empty) server because of some lag problems in Stormreaver. After Massive migrated our guild started pretty much dominating all outdoor raid bosses, including green dragons.

AQ40
We were waiting impatiently for opening of Ahn'Qiraj 40 gates to be finally in the same starting line with guilds all over the World. What happened in reality is that the gates got opened on other servers way before they did in ours. We even tried to build up a small competition with the top 3 alliance guilds to speed up the process. But all of this was in vain, as our server didn't get their gates open soon enough. I had finished my military service and tried to quit WoW now because of the frustration caused by the AQ40 gates. I believe our guild got every first kill up to the twin emperors in AQ40. This was the point I decided to join once again and actually create us the tactics to make the World first kill on C'thun. It didn't exactly work out as well as I had hoped, we got like 1 day of training before C'thun was seriously hotnerfed. We didn't even know that it got hotnerfed before Nihilum had already killed him. We pushed our guild to the limit and managed to get Europen 10th kill of C'thun in the very same week it got nerfed. We also defeated Ouro in the same raiding week having had only one attempt on it before that week. Almost 6 weeks after C'thun we managed to kill the final boss of Ahn'Qiraj: Viscidus. Even to this day (a week before burning crusade) we still hold the only Alliance kill on Viscidus in our server.

Naxxramas
When Naxxramas was announced we were hoping that at least this time we'd be on equal line with every other guild in the World. European test realms didn't work one bit so we never got a decent chance to get familiar with the new boss encounters like some U.S. guilds did. We had huge problems at the first week because of midsummer festival and server crashing and so on. When we got back to serious raiding, we had already lost one server first and an U.S. guild (Death & Taxes) had already killed somewhere between 3 and 5 bosses. For the 9 first bosses we were pretty much able to keep up in the World's top 30, but at this point a terrible lag attacked our server. All raid instances in our server started lagging around 19:00 CET (20:00 Finnish time) and were pretty much unplayable. This effectively killed our raiding progress and we also had many people leave our guild as it was pretty much unbearable. When Blizzard finally decided to fix our server four horsemen had already been killed while we had downed only 10 Naxxramas bosses. It was now necessary for the first time in our guild's history to effectively use our guild bank to stack up those insanely expensive shadow protection potions for Loatheb.

We had lost so much time and players in the time of lag that we were still struggling in getting enough warriors and healers for the four horsemen when the final World first kill was once again denied from our grasp by Nihilum. When Blizzard made it possible to transfer to our server by paying a small amount, it really pretty much saved us in the worst moment when we were lacking players the most. Having fought bugged encounters with invisible voids and all ice blocks on one side we finally reached the chamber of Kel'thuzad. Having had only 1 training day before, we used pretty much all the money left in our guild bank to buff everyone up with flasks and pots. We did the magical wipe of 1% before actually being able to take him down. It was the 37th kill in Europe, somewhere in the top 100 worldwide and one of the few kills made before the new burning crusade talents (well not that many were made even with those talents though).

The Burning Crusade
Exploding Labrats will proudly march into the Outlands being the only guild in Stormreaver having killed every single boss in the game. I seriously doubt we'll ever be the World's top PvE guild, because most of our members have work or go to school of some sort, but we're certainly not giving up on trying to be one of the best guilds in the World. Perhaps we'll be able fight for the European first kills in PvE, perhaps we'll own the first PvP arena mounts. We do have the potential, but is it enough in this time consuming game? Only time will tell.

Time : 0.250s | 11 Queries | GZIP : Off