Today I had planned to introduce you to the following guild in a suave and nonchalant manner and not make a big deal out of it, but I reconsidered. I am really stoked to be able to show off a guild from my old neck of the ‘woods’. Yeay for Scandinavia! Also apart from being a thrumming Swedish community and hard at work at forging links across Scandinavia with other Danish, Swedish and Norwegian guilds they also have their own brand of wine named after the guild. Don’t believe me? Read on and please enjoy this excellent interview with Swedish guild, Ruthless!

I got to play with Ruthless' amazing graphics for this title image!

Quick Stats:

Allegiance to: The Sith Empire

PvP

Other language than English, Francais or Deutsch, Europe (GMT)

Endgame content, scheduled play sessions, chatty/talkative

Founded in June 30, 2010, led by Briitney

158 members

What prompted the formation of your guild?

Ruthless was started by Sviinet on the 30 of june 2010 after he wasn’t able to find any SWTOR guild or community. So he formed Ruthless under the name Swedish Guild Project well in advance of the release to see if he could build a solid player base and a place were Swedish TOR fans could hang out get to know each other and talk about the game in our own native tongue, it is easier to relate more to people that share the same language as you and you also avoid a lot of misunderstandings that can occur when things get lost in translation.

Ruthless Logo

What was the date of your guild’s formation?

The original site launched on the 30th of June so we consider that as our birthday, there are probably older guilds out there that played other MMOs who will be playing SWTOR but we consider ourselves the oldest Swedish SWTOR guild out there. As of a couple of months ago the leadership of Ruthless passed temporally from Sviinet to Britney because of real life issues.

How did you pick the name?

We knew we couldn’t call ourselves the Swedish Guild project so we opened it up for everyone that was part of the guild back then to come up with some ideas. There were a lot of suggestion and in the end Ruthless won by a small margin. Now it just fits us, can’t imagine us calling ourselves anything else.

How many members are you strong? How many are active?

Right now we have 155 registered members on the SWTOR site and 299 on our guild site, 150 of those I would classify as active.

Stockholm University Campus Event. Photo by Furgles

What is unique about your guild? What, in your opinion, makes it stand out from the crowd?

Ruthless is trying to appeal to both the hardcore and casual Swedish players, and we have a division for both type of players, and so far it worked out very well. The goal isn’t to be the best guild in terms of PvE or PvP progression. Ruthless will however strive to be the Swedish guild where people enjoy themselves the most. We are the guild for everyone regardless of what you want out of the game. Our biggest goal will be to have as much fun as possible while playing what we hope to be, a fantastic game.

We live by four words basically: community, solidarity, friendship and respect.

Tell us about your guild’s artwork, the banner, web design, video, anything else? Don’t forget to name the artists if they are one of your crew.

The art work is done by our guild mate Seyo, we tried different styles (the logo had a bit of a asian feel to it for a very long time), and different colour combinations, we asked what our members like the most and choose that. Seyo is a very good artist and we are really proud of him. He has done some really cool desktop backgrounds that a lot of us are using and a few of us are proudly sporting the guild avatar he designed. But he isn’t just a very good designer he has been very much involved with a lot of programming of the new site as well.

Bounty Hunter by Seyo

What is the most important piece of advice you would give to a new guild starting up?

Plan as much as you can in advance. Have a clear picture in your head what you want to achieve with the guild, write it down. Think about how you want to structure the guild. Outline your goals, your plan for the future. Set up the rules you want your guild to live by, the rules are there as a tool for you to steer the guild in the direction you want to reach. Get a good friend to help you, someone you really trust and make sure he shares your vision of the guild. Don’t expect it to be easy, the recruiting will go slow in the beginning, but don’t give up, keep at it. Find what makes your guild unique and focus on marketing those factors.

Are you looking for more members?

We are targeting any friendly Swedish speaking person who are interested in Star Wars: The Old Republic and want to play as Sith Empire on a PVP server. We have a place for both the casual palyer and the hardcore progression focused player. You are welcome as you are and we will make our best to make sure you like our guild and the time you spend with us.

Third event in Stockholm. Photo by Furgles

When looking at prospective applicants and their applications, what is your pet peeve? Or what would you advise NOT to do?

We are interested in you as an individual and we want to invest our time in you, so please invest your time in writing your application. We want to get to know our members personally before recruiting them to our guild, you’ll have to fill out an application on our forums before we decide if you’re suited for our guild or not. As long as you’re mature and act respectful there should be no worries! This is mainly to get to know you as a person. We will not require our members to have a certain skill within gaming, we will however encourage our members to do their absolute best both in PVE and PVP content. We will also encourage our members to strive to be better players in general. We believe that each and everyone of us can improve both as a player and as a human being! We will be looking for people who will be loyal to our guild and who will try to help us make the guild a better community for all of our members.

How do you guys pass the time and keep the excitement and guild commitment up while waiting for the game to release?

While waiting for the release of SWTOR we have daily discussions on TeamSpeak together where we get to know each other and spend time playing different games together. We’re currently playing many different games including Lord of the Rings Online, Alien Swarm, Diablo 2, League of Legends, StarCraft 2, Counter-Strike among others. We arrange game night were we play a pre decided game, right now we have plans of having a Battlefield 3 release game night some of our members have ordered their own server which we will play on together.

Ruthless Logo

What is your guild looking forward to doing in SWTOR in particular?

Everything and anything. Like most of you out there we can’t wait to get the hands on the game and play it together. Some of our members will race to end game and want to try to compete in operation progression, some of our member just want to liberate the galaxy from Republic scum and some of our members just want to get there hands of as much credits they possibly can, to be the Star Wars version of Gordon Gekko.

Just goes to show you never know what comes up in a guild feature. Gordon Gecko, ladies and gentlemen! Photo Esquire.com

Guild amenities. What does your guild have to offer its members? Forum, Chat, Exotic bellydancing etc. How about a Vent or TS server?

We have a lot of tools for our members to socialize: Facebook, IRC-chat, guild forums and a Team Speak server. The shout box on the website is really popular at the moment. Our brand new website will also work as a Star Wars community site and we will have articles, editorials and guides for them to read. We encourage our members to share what they want to, we have people sharing their own art work and poetry, our site is for it’s member and as a result of that it basically contain everything. All we ask them is to be respectful toward each other and don’t violate the fan site agreement. Most of our site is open for everyone even none guild members.

Stockholm Event. Photo by Furgles

What was the toughest hurdle for you and your guild to get over in the time you’ve spent together?

Sviinet said if he really had to do anything over again he would have done two thing differently and that is deciding on the guild name and what alignment we were going to have in advance. Another problem we have is burn out, some people get tired of waiting for the game to be released. When the guild started we were waiting for a Spring 2011 release then for Holiday 2011 and now we finally got the DATE!!! It will be epic and december can’t come soon enough.

Tell us about You. What draws you to SWTOR?

My name is Jonathan “Britney” Johansson, I’m a BioWare fan in general played every game that they ever released. I played a lot of Knights Of The Old Republic as a kid, I just loved the game, think I’ve played it over ten times. When I first heard of SWTOR (back in early 2009) I thought it was great, a BioWare game made into a MMO, that’s like my dream become true! What draws me the most is the fact that it’s a multiplayer BioWare game, to make decisions that doesn’t only affect you, but others as well. A perfect game to play with your friends, a new MMO in general. Everything seems so perfect.

 

Stockholm Event. Photo by Furgles

What class will you be playing?

I’m going to play Sith Inquisitor Sorcerer as my main character. But I will play every single class just for the story.

What made you decide to run a guild?

Well, it wasn’t really my decision. Our guild leader Sviinet had to take a break to sort out some personal stuff and Ruthless needed a person to accept members on our SWTOR.com guild. And since I was the most active officer at the moment, I got the position Guild Master. But I still just see myself as an officer.

Ruthless’ Recruitment video:

Ebanon: No one had any idea that Varg was working on a new one, he did it by himself.

Ebanon tells me the music is from the “Alone in the Dark” soundtrack.

What is it like to run a guild a year or more in advance of the game the guild is formed to play in?

It’s really fun, I can’t say too much since I’ve only been GM for 2 months now. But It’s really fun and challenging. I would say that we are more like a gaming community until the release of SWTOR. Most of our members find other members to play different games with, we even have some servers like Minecraft and Team Fortress 2 for our members.

Have you guys ever met IRL? Planning to?

We have had 5 guild meet ups so far, some in Stockholm and some in Gothenburg. We feel that they have been a real success and we have people going to these events from all over Sweden. It is different to meet each other in real life, we get to connect the person to the voice we hear on Teamspeak, we get a face to the name on the forum. We will believe it will only make us stronger and tighter as a community and as a guild. In end of October will have guild event number 6 and go on a 24 hour cruise to Finland. Most likely the next get together after that will most likely be at Dreamhack, a lot of us are going to that and we are really excited that Bioware are planing to be there as well.

The darker header used on Ruthless' new site

Anything else you’d like to add? Maybe an anecdote for readers to enjoy and identify with?

One of our members works for a distillery and he has manage to create an Apple wine named Ruthless after the guild, the wine will not be sold and they are only making 30 bottles or so, they will be donated to the guild. The Officers will decide what to do with these bottles and the number of people within the guild that want one is really huge.

Thank you so much, Britney and Ebanon, for sharing Ruthless with us here at TORWars. If you are interested in signing up with Ruthless you can do so here in their recruitment thread.
You can also find them on Twitter and Facebook.

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This week’s Galaxy of Guilds is brought to you by Enjin.com, where you can set up and host an epic guild page for free.