Buying gold from gold farmers is against the rules of the game, and hence has always been against the kinship rules. Members were also advised that gold trading is far from being a victimless crime, since gold farmers are almost always responsible for hacked accounts: part the virtual gold you buy online has been stolen from your fellow players. Now, according to the Guardian, it turns out that there is something far, far nastier behind the gold farming rackets: the online slog is actually carried out by prisoners in Chinese labour camps.

"As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money." Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may...aming-scam.

After this, any member of TWA who is caught buying gold will be expelled from the kinship. No excuses.

Would all members please note that you are advised to have NO AUCTIONS listed on the auction house two days prior to the transfer to Turbine.

Turbine have advised that any auctions still listed at the time of the transfer may be lost so please make sure you do not create any new auctions after 29th May! Please also ensure that any existing auctions you have listed end before 31st May!

As we have recently welcomed several new members, I thought it useful to post some up-to-date information about our current raids and how they work.

The Western Alliance runs several raids and instances each week, and a unique feature of the kinship is that any member can access the events page on the forum and schedule his or her own event, specifying not only time and date, but also other parameters such as which classes to include. We actively encourage members to make use of this facility!

At the moment, TWA runs three regular raids on the current end-game instance, Ost Dunhoth. These take place on Mondays (sometimes this may switch to Wednesdays), Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The Monday raid, known at the ®Est Raid, is the easiest to join for members and Friends of the West (though, as usual, members have priority); as long as you have reached the necessary level (l.65) and have even halfway decent gear, you are welcome to sign up. Event spots are sorted by signup order, though the usual raid leader (Ovidia, a.k.a. Skjalar) may make last-minute changes in order to achieve the minimal balance necessary.

The Tuesday and Thursday raids are the kinship’s official raids, and are usually led by Kairos, the kinship deputy leader and raids officer, or by Thoronthor, the kinship leader. These are also open raids, but signups obey the following priorities:
1. Signed-up members of the Washday Group;
2. All other TWA members;
3. FOTW.

To become a member of the Washday Group, you have to sign up here: [http://www.thewesternalliance.org/index....pic=6207.0]. Please read the introductory text before signing up, as you will incur certain obligations by doing so.

The Thursday Washday Group raid is, in turn, the next easiest to join. It tends to target those OD wings which we know reasonably well, and one of the objects is to give raiders experience of this very difficult sequence of fights, while also helping them gear up with the new armour.

The Tuesday raid concentrates on the fight currently being explored; in other words, the toughest one to complete at the time. Currently, it is Durin’s Bane (Fear Wing). As a result, this is the hardest raid to join, since success is largely dependent on experience, and extensive rotation would defeat this. If you fail to get a slot, keep in mind that once the fight is cracked, we will be able to open up participation to virtually everybody.

IMPORTANT POINTS

1. You must come equipped with a full range of potions, including morale and power, as well as battle scrolls and hope tokens. Do not expect your leader to provide these for you!
2. If you sign up for an event, you are expected to show up, and to show up on time. If you are late for kick-off, your place may be taken by a reserve. Conversely, reserves are also expected to show up, and to stick around until at least start time.
3. If you are unable to make it, or are held up, please make every effort to warn your leader or group, even at the last minute. Failure to do will bring you bad karma, which could affect your signup chances in future.
4. The raids officer can make admin changes to the makeup of a raid in the interests of balance and efficiency. Any such changes will be posted in advance and, if necessary, an explanation given.
5. One a raid begins, the raid leader has a right to change participants in the interests of the raid. During the raid, the raid leader’s decision on any matter not covered by kinship law and regulations is final.

LOOT

1. Members who schedule and lead their own events can apply any loot rule they want, subject to the kinship’s usual honesty and fair play rules. It will help to avoid misunderstandings if you explain these at the start.
2. TWA does not use DKP points. We normally apply common-sense “need” rules. Raiders can only win one “major” item per evening, major being currently defined as armour tokens, first-age tokens, gold items and any seriously good teal items. The leader may restrict rolling on some items to certain classes if they are very obviously designed to benefit a specific class or classes.
3. At present, and until further notice, raiders in the kinship are limited to one first-age token per member, not per toon. As the token is transferable, you can apply it to whichever toon you consider to be your main. This will change as more members become equipped with first-agers.
4. As we approach the last fights in the OD sequence, the officer council will at some point decide to apply a 4/5 and/or a 5/6 rule for armour tokens (only), restricting the rolls to those who have already 3 or 4 of the armour items. Plenty of notice of this will be given.
5. In any dispute, the raid leader’s decision is final.

CURRENT OST DUNHOTH RAID PROGRESSION

DISEASE WING
Completed in T1
Completed in T2
Completed in T2 Challenge mode

WOUND WING
Completed in T1
Completed in T2

POISON WING
Completed in T1

FEAR WING
Completed in T1
T2: currently under investigation

Time for a little bit of celebration! We're making good progress on the latest Ost Dunhoth raid, with, after besting the Wound wing earlier, a first Tier II success on the Disease wing tonight!

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Another round of elections will be held in the last week of May starting on May 23rd.

All full members are eligible to stand for a position and vote, the details can be found in our constitution

If you want to apply for a post make an application in the appropriate threads in the Kinship Rules section of the forum.

Good luck to all candidates and please remember to vote.

For the avoidance of any misunderstanding in future:

• Invite time for kinship (Washday Group) raids is normally 18:45 UK time. This means participants have to be online and ready to go at fifteen minutes to the hour.
• The advertised start time is 18:55 UK time, namely five minutes to the hour.
• At 19:00 hrs UK time, namely on the hour exactly, the guillotine drops. After this time, if you're not in the raid group, you no longer have a guaranteed slot. This means that from here on I will be looking for a suitable alternative for whoever is absent, starting with the kinship's signed up and present reserves. If there are several reserves of the right classes or skills present, then the chances are I will pick a replacement from amongst them in the next few minutes. If there isn't a suitable standby present and waiting, then I will have to go further afield, which will of course take longer - in one recent case (a Delta Group raid, I think), we waited for almost an hour before filling the raid group. The point here is that the delay is enforced by circumstances, and makes no difference to the fact that the original signup no longer has automatic priority.

Obviously, if no replacement has been found and the original signup finally shows up, he will be invited to join the raid. Losing your priority through lateness is not a punishment, it's simply a practical response to circumstances. Normally, once a replacement has been invited to join a raid, their slot is guaranteed and they will not be dropped even if the original signup turns up.

Finally, it stands to reason that if somebody is running late and gets in touch to say so, we might wait a short while (up to 10 minutes) to wait for them. By the same token, if given adequate warning we might start clearing mobs with an 11-man raid, as we did once or twice in BG, but this is obviously not yet feasible in OD.

Kinship raiders - by which I mean all raiders, not just the Washday Group - are required to follow certain very simple, self-evident rules; these can effectively be summed up in one prime directive, which is "Show respect for your fellow raiders".

Raiding at any level is a time-consuming and above all cooperative business. This means that eleven other people have put aside their normal occupations in order to participate, and to give you the opportunity of participating. Of course this is just a game, but the dedication that goes into participating in a raid represents a very real investment in time and effort by everyone else; if you treat that investment with contempt, you are treating your fellow kinship members with contempt.

How do you show contempt? I really shouldn't need to elaborate, but here are some of the most glaring examples:
• You show contempt by consistently signing up and never turning up;
• You show contempt by suddenly going AFK without permission and never showing up again;
• You show contempt by never or rarely sharing in the burden of group buffing, and by making the same 3-4 people provide scrolls and hope tokens for the group;
• You show contempt by turning insufficiently prepared and equipped, or without the necessary potions.

There is absolutely no excuse, short of a RL crisis, for signing up for any raid and then dropping out without any kind of warning at all; some of the unofficial raids organised during the last two weeks by volunteers have suffered particularly badly from this behaviour. This is a "use it or lose it" situation: if it appears that not enough members value efforts of this kind, then sooner rather than later, people will stop bothering. As for the Washday Group, I would remind members that there are certain ground rules which must be observed, and if these are consistently disregarded, the guilty parties will be dropped from the group and lose their priority.

We are not a hard-core raiding kinship, and raiding is certainly not required of anybody - but if you choose to raid with TWA, then please respect these principles.

We are currently focusing on the Wound and Fear wings at tier 2. So far, we seem to have a reasonable grasp of Wound, but Fear is still very much to learn. I am therefore proposing to implement partial rotation of participants on a weekly basis, rotating every Thursday only, rather than on every single raid. As a result new or less experienced members of the Washday Group can be eased in with Wound, a raid we are more in control of, and can then take a first crack at the Balrog on Thursday, with a second attempt on Fear the following Monday. The point is to keep the same raid makeup (as much as possible) for at least two successive attempts to allow for more intensive experimentation, and also gives rotated players a chance of winning the first armour token drop from Wound.

This means than I will try to keep the Monday group as close as possible to Thursday's. To put it in another way: rotation will effectively take place once a week only, but a spot will effectively guarantee participation in two raids in succession.

NB: If somebody can only make the Monday raids, let me know and we'll try to fit you in regardless.

A new group, to be known as the Washday Group, is being formed for members interested in taking part in the official kinship endgame raids. Please go to http://www.thewesternalliance.org/index....pic=6207.0 for full details and to sign up.

Durin's Bane invites you for cookies and icecream...