Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Good luck on your seeking of the perfect guild for you!
Most people don't care, as long as you're polite, respectful, courteous, etc. I've had guildies in our guilds as young as 15, and they were great kids; conversely, I've had guildies in their 30s who weren't so great.
You'll find a couple of different types of players in MMOs, as you go along. The first is the players like myself and @Possum, and oh-so-many others. For a great deal of us, the game is played for love of the game, and our guilds are built around people who also love the game. We socialize, we hang out, we explore together, we work together to achieve things. For others, the game is only an outlet to get names on leaderboards, and for the recognition. Many people try one, realize it's not for them, and then try the other. It's all a personal preference thing.
I do recommend you always remember a couple of things:
Hang with people who have similar tastes and experiences to your own
Hang with people who treat you like you're someone before they ask things of you
Hang with people who work to build you up, rather than tear you down
Hang with people who will make you work for things, but still help you along the way
Also, and this is a really big one, especially as you enter your MMO career; hang with people who don't mind answering a bajillion questions, and never treat you badly for asking them. Best of luck to you, and welcome!
Once upon a time, the Internets were young, and so was I, and I would come upon a button that said 'you must be 18 or older to continue' and I wasn't 18 yet
... and I sat there and stared at the button...
what if i pressed it... would they know?
Could they find me? Would they tell my parents? Would everyone on the interweb know I'd lied?
All those possibilities seemed highly unlikely. Yet I never pressed the button.
Who can say why? Some weird nonsensical morality inhabiting my mind (long gone now, mind you).
I'm sure some of the 18+ requests you see are just a matter of legal liability. Nobody enjoys being on the other end of a conversation with somebody's parent who wants to know why you're filling their poor child's head with 'filth'. I've known of smaller scale 'role playing' games that have had to shut down over flak they received because a parent didn't like what they saw.
A lot of it is also personal bias. I do personally think that age as a number has become irrelevant. I've met my share of intelligent and personable eight-year-olds, mature and clever teenagers, and no small number of 30-something trolls, living in the room down the hall from their mom's room, because not all mothers have basements.
Youth comes with a number of stigmas attached to it. Inexperience, Emotional instability, lack of reliability, parental interference.and of course that one 'friend' who is a jerk and ruins everything, but you just have to include him because the two of you are 'bros'.
All that stuff can really apply to most age groups. Just replace parental interference with child interference... or fiancee interference, etc. but it can be natural to suppose you might be able to minimize those issues by excluding a certain age group.
To that I say, 'meh'.
The moment i set foot online, I'm a different person than I am in the real world. All of us are, to some extent. But the fact is, you really can be anyone you choose. We're here to imagine something impossible, so why be restricted by reality?
Don't be 15.. Be 100. or 150. Be a boy or be a girl or be a squirrel... well, maybe this isn't the right game for you if you want to be a squirrel, but then again, maybe there will be a guild for that. My avatar is a fish. Am I a fish?
You don't know for sure, do you? Trump is the president. I could be a fish.
Age is relative. If i saw Ketchup on a table, and it said on the label that the Ketchup was 15 years old, i'd be like 'Daaaaaaamn, that is some old Ketchup.' I wouldn't be putting that on my fries, but if it wanted to join my guild, I wouldn't be asking its age.
What am I talking about? I've lost my train of thought... happens a lot in my dotage ^^
Well, when joining a guild, I think one of the principle concerns for me anyway, has less to do with people's ages and more to do with their availability - and with mine.
As it stands I have a pretty busy life in the real world. I don't actually know how much time i'll have to put into an MMO.. even for right now I couldn't be sure, and i'm trying to guess about what it'll be like a year and a half from now.
A lot can change in a year and a half. Particularly when you're 15. You seem certainly to have found a good community to grow with though!
Cheers!
The mere fact you have asked on the forums in a polite and constructive manner demonstrates a maturity.
There will be plenty of clans.
Therefore I am certain there will be plenty of guilds that will either accept you or provide exceptions.
That said, this doesn't mean these guilds will never recruit any member below 18, but they still officially state only 18+ are recruited just to emphasize what kind of content is available in community.
However maturity of the player is most important, so 18+ recruitment often has exceptions.
I have met some 15 year olds that acted like they were 30 and some 40 years olds that acted like they were 12.
It's all about maturity. As others have pointed out, if you act like a typical adolescent teen that is rude, creates unnecessary drama, makes sexual jokes every 5 secs, whiny, etc then people will not want you in their guild.
My advice is that honesty about your age regardless of the age restriction with the recruiters and officers. It goes a long way to establishing maturity. The way you approached this post is how you should approach recruitment. You do not have to advertise your age but you should not have to hide it either. And once the guild gets to know you and accepts you, no one cares what ages is after that.
When World of Warcraft came out-- as much as I despise the game -- It changed the MMORPG market for better or for worse. People started to flood to the black sheep genre and it became a very main stream thing to do.
What was something we all got laughed at for enjoying and you didn't admit you did like some bad drug addiction, now was cool and all that to be.
Most of us vets have gotten fairly use, I would think, to the new generation of gamers. They do, for me, sometimes ruffle my feathers a bit, but I blame that on being a woman and long history of issues with male gamers due my competitive side. However, given how many vets we DO have joining this game-- I think really you'll be fine.
The upside of us is, we remember what it was like back then and for many of us even remember what it was like to be around that age and gaming. It just come down to the attitude your present,the guild, and if you want to hang with the mature crowd, then-- just be polite and mature.
Most young gamers at least try to be polite and don't act like some know-it-all, tends to go far with me, I know, and I tend to actually be more willing to forgive their moments of immaturity; And heck. We can even be immature at times, soooo... Can't be to hypocritical.
As the saying goes, age is just a number. Maturity comes from life experience. So, in my book. You'll be fine.
But @Ketchup everyone here has already said it, you'll find more 'mature' subjects in 18+ guilds but they'll normally also expect you to have a more mature attitude too towards the guild, ie giving as well as taking, or recognizing the importance of turning up or not disappearing right in the middle of an event that's been planned for weeks.....
But yeah, I've been in guilds with 20 year olds who had the maturity of a five year old or young teenages with absolutely guild leader class maturity and skills.
Good luck
Dark Shadows is an awesome old horror soap opera.
Just lie about your age if you have to but it's likely you'll be 18 or close to it by the time Ashes launches.......