Tank like a girl

As I mentioned a while back, I was interviewed via e-mail for an article in the Swedish magazine Level, about my guild. Daughters of the Horde and its Alliance counterpart Daughters OfThe Alliance on US-Bronzebeard are as far as I know the two largest girls-only guilds in the world. I have been an officer in DotH since 2006, and was interviewed as representative of DotH.

• How did the idea of an all female guild emerge? Why just girls? Tell me about the background.
  
  Daughters of the Horde was born in the Livejournal community wow_ladies. This is currently the biggest WoW community in LJ, with 7k+ members. Back in the day, when WoW was still young and fresh, wow_ladies was the refuge where girls were able to talk about WoW with other girls, as the game was absolutely male-dominated at the time. The percentage of female players is a lot higher now than it was then. It all started with this post. Basically a guild of community members, all female, a haven. They ran a poll, horde won as faction, and Daughters of the Horde was created on Bronzebeard-US. A short time later, Daughters of the Alliance was created on the same server, because some people preferred the ‘prettier’ races at the time. Many DotA players are also members of DotH and vice versa, and I am close friends with a bunch of them. I think we have maybe one original member left from back then, our former GM Tryna, who led DotH through the first couple years until recently.

  Originally, most people rolled alts to play in DotH, with their mains on other servers, and when dealing with boys got too much, they came to chill in DotH. This, to some degree is still happening today. Many members raid more seriously on other servers and hang out with us when they just want to relax and have some light fun. But there’s also a core of people who have made Bronzebeard their main home. I have tried playing on other servers, for example a realm with RL friends, but I always
  miss my home on Bronzebeard.

• What (if anything), apart from the all-girl-thing, do you think differs Daughters of the Horde from other guilds?
  
  I think we offer more diversity than the typical WoW guild. If you look at guild structures, there’s usually leveling guilds, social guilds, and guilds that raid. While we’re not exactly a leveling guild, we are extremely alt-friendly. All of us love to play alts, and it’s not uncommon that our members have all character slots full on Bronzebeard. Our guild is also very social, there’s always some chatter going on in gchat. We also do some light, yet successful raiding, so you can really do anything in our guild aside from dedicated 25-man raiding.
• What kind of mood or atmosphere is there in the guild?

  I think it’s usually very light-hearted and fun. Some of our members are crazy funny, like the world’s sexiest orc DK, Fangril. I am probably one of the more serious people in DotH, because I tend to take PvE progress very seriously.

• I’ve heard a lot of preconceived notions about girls in WoW-guilds. That having a girl in a guild can cause more drama and so forth. What are your thoughts on that? Is there a lot of drama in Daughters of the Horde.

Ah, the drama question. I think that drama can happen with girls in a guild, but it can happen with guys in a guild as well. Loot-drama is not based on gender. I think it’s just a stereotype that girls in WoW mean drama. It’s not my experience in DotH at all. In my 3 years as officer, there were moments that had some drama, but they’re very rare and unusual. I have seen some people join who could probably be classified as ‘guild princesses’, always more interested in taking than giving to the guild, but people like that usually leave fairly quickly, because gender cannot really be used as an advantage when we’re all the same.

• How do you solve conflicts that arise in the guild?
  
  We don’t have a GM and officers, we’re more an officer council. We rotate different duties amongst officers, including the GM hat. We regularly run a Suggestion Box in our LJ community, which allows people to voice concerns which only the officers can read. We encourage people to approach the officers if there are any issues, but in all honesty, we’re not really asked that often about problem situations. I think girls might have the tendency to just swallow certain issues, in hopes they’ll go away. There really is very little conflict that we’re made aware of.
• What does the recruitment process look like? How can you check and know for sure that the one applying to join is a girl?
  
  We actively recruit maybe once a year, in wow_ladies, but of course we’re always taking in new members. Joining us is pretty easy. There is no application process. All that they have to do is to /join our recruitment channel and give us their LJ name. We then check their LJ. Sometimes it’s very easy to tell that it must be a girl, but sometimes it isn’t, and then we do Ventrilo checks. Just a quick chat, to verify it’s a girl via voice chat. That’s usually the point that weeds out the most guys trying to sneak in, because the amount of people who mysteriously do not have a microphone, or it’s broken, or they can’t install Vent nor use in-game chat, it’s ridiculous. As we were originally born in a Livejournal community, we require an LJ account for all our members. Basically our forum replacement. We post everything regarding guild business in wow_doth.livejournal.com
• What kind of char is most common within Daughters of the Horde? Are there a lot of males? Which class is most popular?
  
  We have quite a few male characters, but the overwhelming majority plays female characters. We have very very few tanks, to my own sorrow, not as many healers as one would like to think, and used to have mostly ranged DPS. Lately, this has seen a bit of a shift that mirrors the general WotLK tendency, with a lot more people playing melee DPS after DKs were introduced. Based on statistics, hunter is the most popular class, closely followed by deathknights. When TBC was released, our guild grew exponentially, in what I would like to call the ‘Belf Invasion of 2007′. They’re still by far the most popular race, outweighing everything else by a huge margin, which makes me sad. Only the few and the proud like me play orcs. It’s a running joke in DotH that Thrall will kill a kitten everytime someone re-rolls a bloodelf.

  I play the least-played race and class combo, orc warrior, what does this say about me?

• Another preconceived notion is that girls usually prefer to play healers or support classes — do you agree? How is the balance between the classes in your guild?
  
  As mentioned before, we are usually short on healers. I mean, we obviously have enough to raid with, and more healers than tanks, but DPS classes hugely outweigh anything else in DotH. We have some fantastic DPS in DotH, so that preconceived notion is really not true for us at all.
• The male writers in the magazine want to know if there is much giggle and joking around on your vent-channel.
  
  That is a really funny question. I know that it’s common in many guilds to hang out in Vent at all times, but we don’t do that. We mostly use Vent for raiding or when we have a social event, and even then, it’s few people talking. I try to talk as much as possible when I am in Vent, but some girls really aren’t comfortable with talking much, while they type novels in gchat. I think most of us love to be silly, but not the gigglish type.
• What kind of comments do Daughters of the Horde usually get? Do people like the idea of a guild consisting of all girls? Do they think that it’s wrong to exlude and include players based on their sex? And what is your reply to people who gets upset about it?
  
  We’re one of the oldest guilds on our server at this point and have seen many guilds rise and fall. A lot of newer players actually have no clue that we’re all girls. We don’t go out and flaunt it, we just assume that our guild tag is obvious enough. I think old-school Bronzebeard respect us, and everyone else just assumes we’re all male. Whenever I pug as a tank and talk strategy on bosses, people always refer to me as male. Because, you know, girls would never tank, haha. We used to have one guy
  who long transferred servers, who hated both DotH and DotA and loved to slander both guilds in the realm forum. But as he was the realm clown, no one took him serious at all. He actually tried to sneak into our guild under a different name, and then in protest formed his own ‘all-girls’ guild that failed dramatically.

  Other than that guy, no one’s ever had any problems with us for being exclusive to girls.

• World of Warcraft is a game that has a big female audience, at least compared to other MMO:s like Eve Online, Warhammer or Age of Conan. Why do you think that is? What does WoW have that the other games lack?
  
  WoW has the most intuitive interface and you only need to play a couple of hours to get into it. I think the learning curve is probably more steep in other MMOs. Also, I think girls prefer PvE more than PvP, though we have a couple die-hard PvPers and arena players in DotH as well. I think AoC probably has very low appeal for girls, because the core of it is so sexist. I mean, they only recently fixed that female characters hit just as hard as males. At least I hope that was fixed. I wouldn’t call WoW easy, but it’s fun, colorful, very easy to learn, and yet hard to master.
• I’ve received a couple of mails from girls who are considering WoW to be a sexist game and who thinks that Blizzard is objectifying the female characters, and that complains about being harassed ingame by “horny 15-yearolds”. What are your thoughts on this? Thoughts on being a girl and playing WoW.
  
  My general advice for any female player would be to not flaunt their gender. I mean, realistically, if you look at things, no one really needs to know if you’re a boy or a girl behind the computer. Just play at your best. That way you get to avoid the teenage hornballs that no doubt exist in WoW. Yes, WoW has objectifying moments, though there are a lot fewer models these days that make me shake my head. My alt mage is currently running around in thigh-highs, and my warrior used to wear
  plate-thigh highs and a plate bikini in her 40s, stuff that looks like a shirt and normal legguards on a male model. But you know, it’s harmless stuff. No one’s boobs are hanging out, and considering the amount of objectification happening in advertisement, TV, and movies, it’s really minimal. It doesn’t bother me.

  I think Blizzard understands that this is seen as an issue in parts, and I can’t recall any skank gear in Northrend. I mean, sure, paladin T8 shows off female bellies [edit: the interview was done before Blizzard changed the model], but for the most part, female characters are just as covered as male ones. And that’s a good improvement.