Hot Mess is an 18+ guild of adults with real jobs who enjoy the funsies of playing Warcraft.

Hot Mess’s name was borne from our tendency to down hard bosses despite not, on a superficial level, appearing to have our shit together. Under the hood, we’re a team of people who know each other well, know the game a lot more than we let on, and don’t get mopey about dying repeatedly.

We approach the fights in a much different way than you may be used to. The videos online may describe THE strategy for defeating a boss and may describe THE roles and THE places to stand.

We may ignore all of those things!

The YouTube strategy may prescribe a certain number of tanks, or ranged dps, or gear level, which we may not have.

Can we kill the boss despite that? Definitely maybe! We’ve done it many times before. Cause we’re fuckin’ amazing.

Will we have to come up with a new strategy to do it, involving, killing ourselves over and over? Definitely yes!

We take the game seriously in the sense that we try to learn the game as well as we can and play it well, but we don’t take it seriously in the sense that our emotions are rooted in whether the boss goes down. If that was what made us happy, we’d be grinding for gold to buy gear on the auction house. Which we may or may not do, depending on how bored we are (but not on whether we’re worried someone will judge us).

Our general policy is to “take the team we have.” This is not a sports team where we recruit the best people we can and bench the weakest. People bring the character they enjoy the most, and if that means that we don’t have the “ideal” setup, then we’ll just have to be that more amazing to compensate. If that means we have eight rogues, then this will be the fight wherein we figure out how to kill the boss with eight rogues.

We also don’t just let people wallow at the bottom of the charts–if they’re having trouble, we help them out. We’ve seen plenty of players start meh and transform into amazing in a couple weeks. And we know they stick around and are more reliable for getting through hard content down the road. So we invest in the team.

There’s no real way to actually win this game. So with that out of the way, the most we can do is take ourselves into the most challenging content we can and enjoy it. We think you’ll be surprised with how far into the content you can get with an imperfect gear score and with no one shouting “fifty DKP minus”. Our team is made up of very smart people, and we find smart ways to solve the puzzles that make up the game, without stressing out over it.

Most of all, we prize the social aspect, which is why we seek out players who are friendly and appreciate diversity, which is why our guild finds appeal to people of all types and our roster reflects the diversity of people who play the game.

If you’re interested in joining us, check out the join page.