The first kinship raid on Ost Dunhoth will take place a week from today, on Thursday March 31st at 7.00 pm (UK time). For that Thursday only, I am posting a 24-man raid, so that everybody who wants to take a crack at it can sign up (and if it fills up, keep signing up on standby). Hopefully we will have enough for two groups; in that case, before we begin we will split up into two raids, and Thor and I will each lead one. If there are not enough signups for two raids, then we will select the participants for one raid on the evening.

This will be the policy for the first Ost Dunhoth raid only, so that we can test the waters and also see how much real interest there is. After that raid, I will start long-term raiding signup threads for either one or two groups.

From Faya on the CM forums this afternoon:

Hi all,
We are looking at a tentative release date of the 22nd, March for the update. This is of course barring any unforseen issues or major bugs found in test.

It now looks as though upgrade 2 should be with us by early or mid-April at the very latest, and with it the new 12-man raid at Ost Dunhoth. This is a preliminary survey to see how the membership feels about this raid; we will make more concrete plans based on the results of the poll, so if you have any interest in raiding at all, please make your views known.

We will definitely be running one regular bi-weekly kinship raid, as usual on Mondays and Thursdays, and a new raiding group will be started up for it. This group will attempt the raid at tier 2, and will be known as the "hard-core" group; if you vote for option 1 in the poll, and sign up for this group, you will be expected to take part in at least one raid per week.

For those who cannot commit to the hard-core group, who prefer a more relaxed approach and who perhaps want to propose different days and times, we hope to launch a "casual" group. If enough people sign up for this to make it viable, it will be up to the members of the group to decide on when and how they want to proceed, including which tier of the raid to tackle.

Option 3 is for those who don't really care to commit to either group, but would still like to take a crack at the raid now and again - though in that case, they will of course have lower priority in signing up than declared members of the group.

Another election has come and gone.

Elected for another term, Thoronthor and Kairos return as Leader and Deputy Leader.

From the officers, Tharelon, Eowren and Ingaras were also re-elected.

This election we welcome two new members to the Council, Clifford and Eresmir.


We wish to thank Skjalar and Jebidiah for their time serving the kinship as officers and as such will induct them into the Honour Guard.

Thanks to all members who took their time to vote and continue their support of the greatest Kinship on the server.

Due to a new form of spam attack on SMF forums in general, I've switched the forum over to a slightly more robust log in system: It now uses your registered email address to log in, instead of your username! This is because most people's usernames are all over the forum, and thus easily accessible for spammers trying to log in. Your email address on the other hand is hidden from the public, so this should prevent spammers from trying to guess your password.

If you have trouble logging in after this, feel free to contact me.

This is an update on the kinship raiding policy and plans for the future. We know there is some interesting new content coming our way, but until it arrives, we will concentrate on BG and the Lieutenant in particular – despite what some of you might think, we are far from getting him on farm yet. One positive aspect of reaching this stage is that we are virtually guaranteed a weekly run at the LT; despite all the perfectly valid grumbling about BG, I have to say that I personally find the LT fight in hard mode one of the best and most challenging in the game, and as such I don’t mind repeating it a few more times. Yes, it’s unforgiving, but it’s also intelligently designed and no longer includes any downright stupid traps. Even the double eyes in part 2 are something we’ve learned how to handle.

That said, I would like to draw everybody’s attention to the Raiding Group rules once again, notably the bit about “you must … undertake to take part in at least one raid a week”. Now we’ve let that bit slide more than a little, and I certainly don’t plan on enforcing it to the letter. However, I’m currently in the process of updating and weeding out the Raiding Group, and would like to see all the active members of the group sign up (even on standby) for a raid at least once every couple of weeks, and also of course turn up on the day. Remember that a LT group still needs to be quite carefully balanced, and can’t really include more than two inexperienced players or alts – so if you were a member of the original BG development party and are a bit fed up with it by now, please continue to join the group once in a while, otherwise it becomes very difficult to guide new players through it.

As far as future raiding is concerned, I will be inclined to give priority on the main kinship raid nights to active members of the current raiding group, and will be keeping a record of who shows up. With a bit of luck, though, given our current rate of recruitment we may, even after a post-election cleanup of inactive members, be in a position to fill two raiding parties at the next update. Radiance will no longer be an issue, so hopefully more members will feel able to join in from the start.

Bottom line: raiding, particularly end-game raiding and exploring a new raid, require a certain minimum of commitment and dedication. Without in any way getting hard-core about things, we will be looking to reward that commitment.

Returning to the new Thorog raid for the second time yesterday, our team took him down without much difficulty on the second attempt. This completes a full house of every PvE raid and instance in the game to date for the Western Alliance. Congratulations, all!

Happy new year to all our members and friends.

A very good result for TWA on Monday's Lieutenant raid.  With only 50% of the original group taking part, and including three people completely new to the fight, we took the Lieutenant down to 50% of morale before wiping on the fifth attempt (all in HM); we also got to Phase 2 with only two Morskor pools on the last two attempts. Very encouraging. Congratulations to Nethrandir, Shauna, Tristyn and Parmur (and the old lags, of course).