Origin of Twelve

Foreword by Darkshaunz
The following subsections within this entry have been extracted from Fork 's outstanding work on recounting the inception of the Twelve community as a whole. The original thread by Fork can be found here. Some of the content here may have different formatting or some paraphrasing.

You may always consult the original text for the unaltered recount by Fork. Everything you are about to read is Fork 's take on the origin of Twelve. By all accounts - it is accurate, detailed and covers all the information you could hope to learn about Twelve's genesis. Frankly, it's an intriguing read and a nice window to the past. Enjoy!

The Core Team
What I feel to be the most important thing about Twelve is the strong foundation it's built on, that being Myself, Spoon , Willy and Darkshaunz.

We were all good mates in high school and one day Darkshaunz and myself discovered we played on the same World of Warcraft server - Blackrock, the only unofficial oceanic server at the time - but in different guilds. I was in Atomic and he was in Soul Raven, but it must have been fate because those two guilds eventually merged to become Elysium. Batwoman (Fork) and Dwarvinator (Shaunz) were finally together.

We played there for a while and were soon joined on the server by Spoon and Willy after telling them how awesome it was at school, however the guild was falling apart due to poor leadership and Blackrock was crumbling in on itself with continued stability issues and extremely long queues. We decided to jump ship as a new wave of servers were released. Darkshaunz remained behind to continue with Elysium which he had become an officer of.

(I eventually rejoined the Twelve WoW guild, but not after quitting the game for a bit! During that period, I spent more time on the Twelve Forums than on the game itself.) Darkshaunz 01:10, April 19, 2012 (UTC)

Twelve's Birth
We 'rerolled' on Greymane Horde side. The reason we rolled there was because Spoon figured a PVE server might be a more fun change of pace (note: his max level achieved was only level 30 before leaving Blackrock). Willy and I hated it from the beginning because it was PvE and we loved to smash shit with our hammers but we persisted to about level 20 because Spoon was too stubborn to relocate again. Mind you the only reason he wanted to stay was because "The Barrens chat was cool".. meaning he had a chat with someone about some hipster band.

He was eventually persuaded and we rerolled once again onto the Dark Iron server Horde side and Willy was the guy to start up the first guild charter because he was the fastest leveller. It was called "I'm Twelve" as a sort of play on the apparent age / IQ of the average player, it also gave us an excuse to be as immature as we wanted (and we were at times, as remember this was 6+ years ago) and we recruited a lot of people who just liked to have fun. Spoon and I were both racing from level 59-60, being the first characters either of us had gotten to max level and we managed to both hit 60 within about an hour of eachother (after about two months of playing on the server). Spoon was playing a character named Waffleiron and I was playing on Maeby.

However things took a turn for the worse when we got bored of the PUG-able dungeons and wanted to start raiding as we were on a North American server and so there were very few players in our timezone, which made recruitment very difficult. The fact that Spoon and I were both Hunters (aka non-tank, non-healing, therefore very useless in starting and/or leading a raid) made it even more difficult. The fact that Willy was a Hunter had absolutely no bearing on this though as by this point he had deleted his character, started playing alliance side, gotten a character up to level 40 or 50 and then decided he was bored with that too and then deleted it again.

We picked up Docilus and Kiral along our Dark Iron adventures and managed to organise the high level players in the guild to kill many of the guards and named NPCs in Stormwind before finally being taken down by many guards and Alliance players in the King's chamber. We even managed to organise with a similarly sized asian guild to get some of our max level players into one of their first Zul'Gurub raids. This happened at some random time of day and only Spoon, two random high levels from our guild that we didn't really know and myself got to experience it. But we had a blast regardless. We needed more of this but we needed it to be on our own terms and that just wasn't going to happen on this server.

The new 'Oceanic' servers were being created for the first time and while we didn't want to abandon the characters we'd put so much time into, we thought we'd at least see what it was like. So as the Frostmourne server came up for the first time we reserved a bunch of names Alliance side (i.e how we got Fork and Spoon [and Willy got Knife but then hated it and deleted the character at about level 4]) and almost a week after the server released, we finally decided to play there for a while. We created a guild as soon as we hit level 10 and decided to name it , primarily to seem more mature in hopes of reaching more people with recruitment as many were turned off by the name itself on the previous server. We also decided to play as 'useful' classes and we created a Priest and a Druid each to be healers to cover some of the primary needs of dungeons.

.. and it succeeded! After not too long we realised that it was so, so much better playing with other people of the same timezone and we decided to make Frostmourne our permanent home and abandoned Dark Iron for good. Since then Twelve has grown and manifested itself beyond our wildest dreams. We created more than just another WoW guild, Twelve has transcended the usual guild boundaries and become a community, perhaps even a way of life.

As I said before I believe most of this success is due to its founding members. The Cutlery both shared the Guild Leader role and kept roles fair and each other in check. Brutal honesty was key here and one of the four good friends would always tell us how it was when another was being unfair, greedy, too lenient or harsh, making no sense or just being plain stupid.

In Closing
Our WoW guild now stands strong as the oldest [or at least tied with one other] raiding guild on the server. We pride ourselves on strong leadership and steady progression while keeping a casual play style and a level of unprofessionalism that cannot be found elsewhere. Players who leave for 'greener pastures' or more hardcore goals usually return because "there's no other guild like Twelve".

Our forums bring people of all ages from all walks of life, not to mention even players from other games, guilds and even factions.

When we try our hand at other games we swarm the servers with jerkdom. We spread our seed far and deep, team killing, team flashing, ramirezes doing everything and of course, trash talking. Games are better with Twelvians, it's a pure simple fact. Every new game we impregnate spreads the Twelve name and brings new blood into the mix.