So last night over twenty Paranoidians gathered in The Anxious Isle to celebrate Paranoid turning 15.

Nyra did a really nice speech before the awards, and there have been several absolutely heartwarming and lovely posts made on discord and in /g in-game. This guild means a lot, to a lot of people. It’s not just pixels on a screen, but friends, connections that transcend it being a game. I could go on, but I have a reputation for being excessively ‘wordy’ as it is. So I’ll just say, the sentiment we ended on at the party – “here’s to 15 more years!”

How did the party go?

We got together in the town square

and our first activity was a series of 4 riddles that had to be solved in order to find the location of the first party game. I don’t have any screenshots of that because we were all having too much to take them! Nyra came up with the clues, and it was a good laugh with the 4 active officers hiding and guildies zipping all over the neighbourhood hunting. The final clue was a callback to the winter veil party, where we’d played “X marks the spot” (aka my house) because we had to go inside for musical chairs.

I have a lot of screenshots from this activity so here’s a couple

Xer handled the start/stop of the music on a YouTube livestream, with his worgen warrior entertaining us all with his groovy dance moves in the center of the ring of chairs.

After a break, we then all ran to the stage (as you can see in the featured image). First we had a game (15 rounds as blizz does) of Mount Mania!! Where I summoned a varied selection of mounts, and people tried to match. Our winner was Valguat with 12/15!

Then it was time for the awards! Nyra handed them out and I’m actually gutted I didn’t record it because honestly my heart was so full. All the cheering and clapping and back and forth chatting. At least Nyra can post the script, and we have the memories! I did take one screenshot of us at the stage, with some cake and kegs for the atmosphere (can’t have a birthday without cake!)

Finally we ended with the raffle! Xer livestreamed the draw as the wheel of names spun and landed on Clara!

Well I say finally as we did have one last game, that we’d ‘officially’ run out of time for, but most people stayed anyway. A footrace across the zone from the Lighthouse, up to the Griffin roost I think? (Nyra dropped a pin on the map). It was class vs class as we were allowed to use abilities (just not mount up). You’d have thought a Demon Hunter would have been good, but I was so far behind I eventually summoned my mount to join up with everyone at the races end haha.

The portal page for the 15th Anniversary is going to stay up forever. It’ll get edited to include the award information etc. and probably a link to this post. I hope very much to be writing a similar post for the 20th birthday! Only trouble is, how will we top such a fantastic night as last night?

Happy Birthday Paranoid!!