The birth of Unleashed

The guild Unleashed of the Ysera server was born before the Ysera server was up.
It spawned as an idea between 3 friends over dinner and beer, more beer than dinner but that's neither here nor there.
The 3 of us started playing WoW as it came out and instantly went to horde (how could one choose alliance after the Warcraft 3 cinematic with Mannoroth's demise?) in one of the terrible 20s: Cenarius. The problem with horde back in the day and in those original servers was that it was nearly impossible to find any sort of balance. You had 4:1 ratios if you were lucky, horde guilds squabbled over petty stuff and player poaching was a daily thing.
The three of us decided we wanted a change, at the time Minimage (me) was playing a horde warrior called Urgash and was trucking in Molten Core with an alliance of small horde guilds, but for every victory and every player we geared up, we had one big guild take em away and our little coallition had to rebuild, so when the option for a fresh start in one of those brand new servers with new hardware presented itself I like it, but I had my reservations. I had seen too many people reroll just to go back to their original toons, so I supported my friends but didn't want to take a very active role in the project.
As things turn out, I was the one with most free time so I was proposed as the GM for this new guild, but I was already a GM and leading a coallition in Molten Core, but I said "what the hell? Might as well give it a shot" fully knowing that my two friends would help me along the way.
So one of my friends, Valkiria, created a site for the guild and we started promoting it in the Looking For Guild forums, as a reroll project when the new servers were live.
Surprisingly enough for us, we had people jump on board, make an account in our new forums and start waiting for the new server with us.
The third friend ended up naming his toon Therion and off we went, waiting for a West Coast server to appear, but none came up, we let the Turalyon server go away because it was East Coast and when Blizzard announced that April 1st 2006 they were bringing up their last server for the time being we jumped on it, regardless of it being EST. That server was Ysera.

As part of a drunken joke and keeping up with it I named my gnome mage Minimage.

We had applicants before the guild was a reality and they too jumped into the server as it came up, we made our own little channel to communicate while we farmed boars to have enough money for the guild charter. Of the initial people to sign the charter and donate money to the cause there are some still playing, most of them still in the guild:

-Emmalee, our first female member of the guild and possibly the longest standing officer. Still actively playing, if casually.
-Aldoric, the guy who didn't want to be the warlock class lead but ended up taking the mantle of raid leader all throughout Burning Crusade and who I considered a co-GM. Still actively raiding.
-Pheral, only active druid for a while, obvious class lead, and the guy who never let us know that druids were actually crybabies and drama queens. Still plays WoW but had to depart Unleashed due to schedules conflicting in WoTLK.
-Minimage, that'd be me. I have been the GM for the whole run of the guild so far, except for a couple minutes in TBC when we killed Archimonde and the promise I had made if we killed him was that I'd get a gkick if we downed him. I actually got two gkicks that night, officers were vindictive. I am still an active raider and loot hoarder.

The other charter signers stayed with us for the first part of Unleashed as a guild, most of them members, some became officers or class leads. Some names I remember from the top of my head: Vash (first hunter class lead), Elmasmalo, Lyu (officer who did nothing but liked the title) and Xarina (tyrannical officer who left the guild as we went into MC).

Unleashed was one of the top 5 guilds in the Ysera server during the initial progression, we were 4th guild to kill Ragnaros and we were also the guild with the smallest membership due to our raid times conflicting with server times. But then server transfers came. Ysera was up in arms when they started, but we saw the endless possibilities of increasing our roster with people from other servers, so we took it. I went on a crusade to lure transfers into our guild as every other guild basically closed their doors and hated on transfers.
From this initial wave of transfers came some members who are still with us 3 and a half years later: Bonesetter (who put us all to shame with his BWL decked mage while we were still scraping for tier 1), Killasnail (who keeps promising he'll come back to WoW shortly, we don't know whether to believe him or not), Aranah (who now moved to Spain but is trying to get a decent internet connection to play with us) and Saffy (my favorite guinea pig ever, that guy could take the most verbal abuse and never get mad). I am sure I am missing some, my memory is very good but not perfect so I apologize.

Every year we celebrate in a way or another that we are an older guild and the only alliance guild to be day 1 and compete in the raiding. Since TBC we have always been in the top 20 server list and top 10 alliance list, which is quite an accomplishment given how much we suffer our members. Our very first anniversary we made a very complex joke about us moving to another server, all officers were in on the joke and to make it more real we started posting it in the forums 2 weeks before april fool's (which you can see is our guild's birthday). Some people were up in arms for this, some others rushed to the presumed server and checked if we were there, others were skeptical. In the end the cat was out of the bag and everyone had a very merry laugh, especially because a guy didn't get skeptical or anything, he just up and transfered to that server right after posting his reply to our thread with words along the lines of "I love Unleashed, I'll go wherever you guys go, I am transfering my toon right now so it doesn't get stuck or something, see you guys there" and there was no time to tell him it was a joke. Sadly he never came back, we guess he just found a guild there, and there used to be a 3 month cooldown to transfer back. Of course, after that episode we stopped doing those kind of jokes in fear of it happening again.
For our second year I threw a tantrum during Kael'thas attempts and started insulting everyone in the guild, including officers, and as part of the ruse Aldoric up and confronted me about it, so I gkicked him, which prompted other officers to gquit becuase of my tyrannical ways. Everyone was shocked but didn't say a word, then we told them it was all a joke and after we reinvited everyone we had our very first Kael'thas kill. What made it more memorable was seeing the kill screenshots afterwards and noticing a guy, Randomname, was unguilded in them. Right after I kicked Aldoric Randomname, a fellow warlock, gquit as a show of support to his class lead and friend, but since other officers gquit as well and the remaining ones were trying not to laugh as we ranted in vent, nobody noticed he had left. So he was unguilded in the kill shots.
Thanks to the kill it was a very memorable night. And then the guilds who were competing with us for the Kael'thas kill didn't believe we had done it due to it being April 1st.
Last year we didn't do anything special, we kind of forgot of our birthday coming and we just took a screenshot of all of us in the site Ulduar was to be released.
This year we are not sure what we'll do, but we are closing in on the 5 year mark, which for WoW is like living to be 125.

This in short is some of the story of Unleashed. We have great stories to share, great debates to start (some of our members are wall of text makers and theorizers) and we will keep this blog updated with all sorts of things, more than one person will be the one posting in this blog since it's a guild blog.

Until then, Lok tar ogar! I mean, for the alliance!

Minimage