Most of you probably know my bear, Spamburger. He’s been my trusty sidekick since 2004, and we’ve sure been through a lot together. You see, Spam is a bit lazy—sometimes he takes breaks from adventuring and raiding at the end of expansion cycles when there isn’t much new going on in WoW. And so, like United Defense itself, Spamburger spent most of this summer and fall sleeping happily in a sort of hibernation:

Today, however, Azeroth as we know it will cease to exist.

The Shattering will forever change the lands that that have become familiar to us, leaving in its wake a brand new and exciting world for us to explore--just look what it did to Westfall:

Not surprisingly, world-shattering events are the kind of things that wake bears up:

And so too has United Defense been awakening over the past weeks. We’ve seen a steady flow of old members re-activating their accounts and logging in with fresh enthusiasm. Doc is once more devastating our raid nights with his nefarious toy-train-mongering. Rahnir is turning up the heat on his endless crusade to capture every mount in the know universe. Quessir is once again teaching good manners to Horde children in Stranglethorn Vale. Farmerdan is preparing to log in and cook us up a fresh batch of Cold Bacon. And Conj, of course, is donning his Gnomish X-Ray Goggles and RP-ing airport security screening procedures at the Stormwind gates. There’s excitement in the air, and UD just feels good right now.

So what will UD look like going into the Cataclysm expansion? Well, the guild character is going to change quite a bit from what we saw in Wrath. We’re going to get back to our roots as a smaller, tighter-knit group of friends. We, the UD members, have personally grown a great deal since our early days nearly six years ago. Farmerdan, Teesha, Brothermunro, Jadelouise, Camaron, and others have become fathers and mothers. A number of us have recently gotten married. Some of us have embarked upon new careers. UD’s atmosphere is going to evolve to reflect our growth as individuals. We’re going to move away from a top-down leadership style and towards a more relaxed, natural, informal organizational identity.

Here are some specific changes we can look forward to:

With 10-man raids becoming equally viable alternatives to the larger raids, we’re going to focus on them exclusively. Gone are the days of cumbersome loot systems and herding cats into 25-man raid groups.

We’re hoping to reduce the number and complexity of official policies and encourage individual members to schedule, plan, and execute guild events.

We’re going to create a “United Defense Leveling Annex” on a PvE server where members can level Worgen and other alts in peace without having to deal with pesky gankers. The Annex will help us stay in touch and level together, and provide benefits such as an active guild bank. Once our lowbie alts mature to level 85, we can then transfer them back to Daggerspine and begin pursuing end-game content with the main guild.

We’re going to offer a Horde sub-guild on Daggerspine: “Defense United.” DU will provide benefits similar to those of the Annex, with the added advantage of being able to mail heirloom items to young Goblin alts and transfer other items through the neutral auction house. The Defense United tabard features blue laurels on a gold background, and the top rank is, of course, Conjeneratur.

And then there are the Guild Leveling System and Guild Achievements. This new aspect of the game deserves a front page post of its own, since it will totally revolutionize how we work together as a guild. It will offer tangible benefits ranging from the ability to produce a guild bank anywhere, to speed increases, to new mounts and pets, to spells that summon and rez all raid members at once. UD has always been a kooky bunch of eccentrics. Suddenly, all those crazy side-projects we all love to work on will have real benefits for everyone in the guild. We’ll finally be able to hold guild progression events that aren’t raids: it’s as though Blizzard has created an institutional Shenanigans system just for us!

I could go on and on about all the new possibilities, but I’ll cut myself short here.

In order to better capture the excitement that’s currently building in UD, I sent Conj out into the field with a video camera. He asked a bunch of otters what they thought about United Defense’s prospects in CATA, to which they replied:

WAAAAAGH!!!
See you in game!
-Hiero (and Spam)