When the Pre-Launch Guild Program was announced by Bioware it caused a largely positive response in the community. Bioware provided basic tools for people to organize themselves into guilds so when the game releases you are starting the adventure together with your friends. With tens of thousands of guilds being made within the first months it is clear that the community welcomed the Program with open hands. This great mass of guilds makes it kind of hard to find the right one though. With the launch getting closer and the Guild Program in its third and final phase I thought it would be a good idea to try and present a few prominent guilds so you might find a guild you could call your home. The honor of being the first guild to be presented on SWTOR Life is a guild from my own country. I thought it would be interesting to share a story about what it’s like to create a guild and be in the Red Zone country (countries that are not in the initial launch list) and still manage to gather a fair number of members. Here’s the Guild Story of Balkan Force as told by its founders Branislav and Bojan.

 
Organizing a guild is never an easy task. What initialy drove you to start a guild?
 
First of all, we would like to thank Srdjan, in the name of Balkan Force Guild, for making this interview possible. Bojan (shule82) and Branislav (Banezza), were always talking about creating a SWTOR guild before launch. We’ve waited for this game for sooo long, and our idea was to enjoy it as much as possible. As soon as the guild pre launch system was avaliable on swtor.com, we’ve created our guild – Balkan Force.
 
Can you tell me a bit more about why the guild is called Balkan Force?
 
Our goal was to gather players from all ex-Yugoslavian countries (Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Slovenia), in one guild. Since all of those countries are located on the Balkan Peninsula, we decided to name our guild after it.
 
Why have you decided to create a regional guild rather than an international one?
 
Our biggest motive was to share swtor experience with as many people from our region as possible. Communication was also important to us, because languages from our region (ex-Yugoslavia) are all almost the same.
 
Are you planning on accepting members from other countries beside the ones from the Balkan area?
 
To be honest, we weren’t really expecting this many people from our region to join. At first, we were considering of accepting members from other countries, but since we have a formidable and rising number of memebers from our region already (over 100 and growing in our HQ), that is not necessary, for now.
 
I see that your list Serbo – Croatian and English as your guild’s languages. Do you have any policies regarding guild chat and what are you plans on how to approach the language barrier problems.
 
Currently, we have no policies regarding guild chat language, since we only have members from ex-Yugoslavian countries. Everyone is getting along nicely, and we perfectly understand each other. As far as chat beyond our guild goes, we are open to communicate in English, that goes for ingame chat, and for voice chat (TeamSpeak/Ventrillo) of course.
 
How do you plan to acquire the game considering it will not be available in your country at launch? Has this hampered your efforts to create a bigger regional guild?
 
We can confirm that around 20 of our devoted members have already managed to get their preorder somehow. We encourage our members to get preorders by any means necessary: Ordering online, getting via mail and through friends or family that live in the green zone countries. It was a surprise to see how many people are willing to get the game by any means necessary.
 
Do you think the number of players from the region will grow considerably once the game is available for purchase localy? Do you think this will increase the size of your guild as well?
 
Absolutely! The size of our guild, and the size of swtor community in our region will be affected as well, positively of course.
 
Which game features are you most excited about?
 
Which games features are we NOT excited about, would be the right question 🙂
 
Are you a strictly PvP guild and will your focus be solely on gettting PvP accolades and not focus too much on raiding and end game PvE content?
 
Our main goal is to have a good time. We think that could be achieved through PvP mostly. PvE is going to be our focus as well, when we’re not PvP-ing.
 
Have you already created some allies and adversaries that you want to share the server with? Do you have any PvP events planned once the game launches?
 
Officialy, we have an alliance with a guild called “Blessed Darkness“. We are currently negotiating alliances with some smaller guilds from our region as well. Our list of adversaries is currently empty, but that will change soon after launch :).
 

We thank the Balkan Force for answering some questions for us. You can find them at
 
Guild site: www.balkanforce.com
 
Guild HQ: http://www.swtor.com/guilds/13530/balkan-force
 
Guild video:
 

Tags: Balkan force, guild, interview