UESP Forums

Ginnunga - Online Gaming guild since 1999

Ginnunga is an online gaming guild which was formed late 1999 in the game EverQuest by Jhurg (Eyke) and Laurent (Ernesto). We have existed in the online world ever since. We have a basic set of rules and morals that guides our behaviour, regardless of which game we play and our motto has always been that we should have fun together. This does however not mean that we are just a family guild. We play to win – not always to be the best, but we are quite aware of quality, not just in personality and behaviour, but also in game excellence. We are a European guild, meaning 95% of our members are from europe(ish) while the rest are others (aliens) who play during GMT/CET hours.

We have not yet picked a faction, but any applicants prior to game launched is expected to go with the guilds faction. If you wish to play a specific race, you are required to pre-order the game.


Recruitment

We are currently recruiting!


Here are a few basic rules that we live by:

Ginnunga is and has always been a high level guild. We want adults who play a fair amount but have high communication skills and a massive love for gaming. We are looking for players who will stick around after the game is long dead and buried to play future games with us as well. So, we want more than just skills with the specific game, we want awesome, awesome people who are fun to hang with.
We pride ourselves in being a big yet close-knit community with a family atmosphere. Due to our outstanding history in previous MMOs we receive a lot of applications for our sections, which means that unfortunately not everyone can make it into the guild. Submitting a thorough, spell-checked and honest application will increase your chances tremendously, whereas one-liners will result in immediate rejection.

Requirements:

• Play a lot. We don’t mean 16 hours a day, but if you only play an hour a day, we might not be the best guild for you.
• At least 20 years of age as we are a mature guild.
• You need to have Teamspeak3 installed, a working microphone, a solid connection and a computer that can run the game without issues.
• You enjoy playing the game and you enjoy to be commited to it and the guild.
• Enjoy fighting, winning AND losing.

So, here is a slightly longer “About Us” version:
We formed up back in October/November 1999 in EverQuest, and a whole bunch of us have stayed together ever since then. Naturally, over a long course such as 15 years, members have come and gone, but there is actually a surprisingly large core still goofing around together. At present date, 95% of our members are from europe(ish) while the rest are others (aliens) who play during GMT/CET hours.


Our previous games

Short summary (TL/DR; version):

EverQuest – High-end raiding.

Dark Age of Camelot – Thousands of Lurikeens slaughtered.

World of Warcraft – We had two sections in WoW. A more hardcore version on Stormreaver and a more causal on Nordrassil. The Stormreaver team retired in 2011 but the Nordrassil team is still going.

Lineage II – Top alliance in the world as well as Battletournament winners (Uprising).

Warhammer – We’d like to believe we were the top Order guild on our server. If The Committee says otherwise, it is because their members are jealous that the leadership of the guilds have mancrush and bromance of epic proportions.

Rift – PvP team of Ginnunga goes PvE and constantly have to sit people out due to 20-man limit. PvP team sadly throws in towel.

SWTOR – Lag in open world ruins game. Ginnunga cries.

Guild Wars 2 – We like to think we had the best alliance in the world as the Titan Alliance on Henge of Denravi. Ginnunga relieved the Oceanics and handled the EU timezone. We had an absolute blast and made friends for life.


The longer one:

EverQuest
When we started out in EverQuest we figured we wanted to have a tight guild, with few rules but also a rather strict moral code. We aimed to form a guild where everyone was friends, but still not slack on the discipline and the fighting standards. We never aimed to be the best but we always looked at quality and companionship. During our time in EverQuest, a funny phenomenon occured that I wish to share with you, a phenomenon we called “patchkids”.

You see, in these early MMOs the launch of a new expansion was not a small ordeal. Often the servers were down for several days in a row and many emergency patches occured. Funnily enough, 9 months after the first expansion called “Ruins of Kunark” we had a small explosions of little mini guildmembers popping up and yet again, 9 months after the second expansion, “Scars of Velious” another batch of gnomes appeared. It seemed to all of us, that when we couldn’t make heroics in Norrath, we made babies in the bedrooms. I will in no way, shape or form mention any names, especially not my dear friend Makrill, who seems to be strongly in the lead of Patchkid-production.

We played on the NA server Mithaniel Marr (There weren’t any EU servers back then). When DAoC was released many people moved to that game and the people who remained in EverQuest teamed up with Forsaken Realm to focus entirely on high-end raiding.


Dark Age of Camelot
When Dark Age of Camelot was released in 2001 we played on the server Kay. Yet again an NA server due to the lack of EU servers. We had a great time in DAoC, for the first time introducing ourselves to 3D RvR combat and alot of our earlier experiences with EverQuest really helped us out here, both when it came to slaying endless piles of monsters in Malmohus, to the famous assist-trains in Emain.

We kept the guild going for quite some time in Dark Age of Camelot, but when the beta of Starwars Galaxies came out, pretty much all of us obtained a beta key, and we battled it out and had a really good time during the beta, but when the game was released, only a very few of us actually stayed and played it, sadly.

The guild was rolling on in DAoC and we merged with some other guild there to keep our membership amount up to a decent level, and with the merged we renamed the guild to “Volsungs” to iron out any merging kinks etc.

Still to this day, we play every now and then on the classic servers, under the flag of “OndGris”.


Lineage II
In 2004 the open beta for Lineage II was released, stunned by the amazing graphics, I decided to try the game out. We formed up the guild with 10-15 of our old members, who had stuck together in EQ and some from DAoC and quickly gained a bunch of new friends, who would turn out to be awesome!

L2 was our first open PVP game, and being a carebear and PvE hero in my heart we managed to huggle our way through the very testosterone-filled and hostile enviroment of an FFA PVP game. By being friendly and awesome, we managed to grab a castle, and then subsequently hold that castle for a period of 10 months, which at that time was the longest anyone had held on to a castle.

What separates an FFA PvP game the most from a regular MMO is that it adds an additional dimesion to the game, that being politics. Half the game took place on forums where the leaders and members discussed issuses, whined, flamed and declared wars. Myself being a rather sneaky , we managed to manouver ourselves into a whole bunch of favourable positions just by wordplay and communication.

We were a rather small guild, with mediocre levels, but the rest of the server had been led to believe that we were something fiercly strong and with the use of cunning tricks and alliances, we managed to influence the top game for a very long time without being openly contested in combat.

However, all houses of cards must fall one day. At some point we had managed to ally ourselves with some strong forces in the game, as well as control most of the castles on the server. This led to an alliance of 36 guilds to attack us in our cosy little castle Oren. Now, 36 guilds, that is quite alot, even by more modern and larger games standards. Somehow we and our 11 allied guilds managed to hold the fort and won a landslide victory, which after a few wars had been fought, allowed us to be the first guild/alliance to ever conquer the main castle of the game, Aden more or less uncontested due to peace treaties forged.

A short while after this, I, myself had to move and would loose my internet connection for quite some time. Since it was not possible to transfer the leadership in guilds at that time, we reformed our guild as Reborn under the command of Cogency. Reborn would then after a short while ally together with Enmity and form the strongest and most successful alliance in Lineage 2's history,Uprising.

What we did in Uprising would be a far too long tale to tell here, but there are very very few people who have ever played Lineage 2 that has not heard of us at this time.


World of Warcraft
Lineage 2 wasn’t for everyone, especially not for our old PvE heroes from the ages of EverQuest, so when World of Warcraft was released, for the first time we started up the guild simultaniously in a different game. We even went so far to start up two guilds in World of Warcraft, one on a PvE (Bloodhoof) server and one on a PvP (Stormreaver) server. The PvP server attracted most of the old DAoC people, as well as some killing hungry people from EQ and L2, while the PvE side consisted mostly of the awesome people who we first started EQ with, who were now too old, or too busy to play in the more competitive climat on the PvP server.

Ginnunga is one of the only guilds who have been active from day 1 on Stormreaver that is still active and going strong and eventhough we shut down our Bloodhoof section after a while, we decided to start it up again half a year later on the Nordrassil server.


Warhammer Online
Warhammer was a perfect game for us. The many years of experience as playing in groups really paid off and we quickly rose to one of the top guilds on the server both in open world combat as well as scenarios. The tight knit community on Karak-Hirn gave us many great friends both amongst our allies as well as our then be enemies. One of the great things with Warhammer was, at least for us, that no matter how many people we had online, there was always something for us to do and nobody was ever excluded.


Rift
The guildsection for the guild Ginnunga in Rift on Whitefall was mainly compromised of old PvP players from Dark Age of Camelot, Lineage 2 and Warhammer. We really liked this game. It was the perfect execution of a ”WoW clone” and it cherrypicked features from all games that had come before it.

What made us ultimately quit was the very nature of the instanced raiding. It was just not possible to keep forcing people to sit out for raids since there was nothing outside raiding for them to do that had value to them. The top PvP rank was quickly obtained and open world combat served no other purpose than harassing the other side.


Star Wars: The Old Republic
We played it, we loved the hutball and we cleaned up the raids. Open world combat was abyssmal and unplayable and the second we realized this, we began dismantling the guild. Bit of a shame since the single player aspect of the game was great, and hutball was by far the best battleground we had ever encountered (in close competition with punting dwarves in Tor Anroc in Warhammer).


Guild Wars 2
In Guild Wars 2 we played in the Titan Alliance on Henge of Denravi.

The Titan Alliance was a unique partnership of guilds from around the globe with the common goal to be the dominant server in World vs World and also to create a thriving community where there’s ample action whenever you log on. This goal was accomplished by bringing some of the worlds strongest guilds together as a team with shared leadership, excellent organization and an around-the-clock presence on the battlefield.


The Real World
During all these years we have played together, we have tried to have at least one annual gathering somewhere in the world, most of the time time it has been hosted in Sweden, for the simple reason that quite a few of us live there, especially post-WOW and it is very easy to arrange free living for all the guests that fly in. This years meeting was just concluded, eventhough I myself wasn’t able to attend this year, but they tell me they had an awesome amount of fun, including rilfe-shooting, waterskiing, waffles, oh waffles and party-boating. Although hard to beat our last year when we rented an island for two days, where we had a huge BBQ and got silly until we all fell asleep in the green grass, just like it should be during a swedish summer!

Online gaming is for us so much more than just a bunch of nicknames behind computer screens. We form friendships and bonds that reach far beyond the borders of cyberspace and reach deep into the real world of flesh and blood. I am happy to say that some of the people I met back in 1999 in EverQuest are today some of my very best friends that carry me through lifes hills and valleys. We are so much more than just a guild. We are Ginnunga.

Ginnunga going strong for 15 years now!

Ginnunga

If I remember my Old Norse correctly ginnunga means "immeasurable" or "vast". Interesting choice for a name.

I suppose your site is ginnunga.org