Community Spotlight: Starship

Recently, we had the privilege and pleasure to chat with Adam and Cooptimally – two of the masterminds behind the Starship WoW Community. Starship is a community that revolves around inclusivity, trust and support, events, tournaments, and giveaways, all while providing knowledge and guidance for newer players.

We sat down with Adam and Cooptimally to discuss how they built their community, how support and empathy play a big role in the way the community operates, and their upcoming Starship event: The Race to World Worst. The event will be played on retail servers and pits multiple teams of level-locked characters against one another to speed run Wrath of the Lich King dungeons. You’ll be able to watch the entire Race to World Worst live on Sunday, January 21st at 10:30am PST/7:30pm CET. On top of that, we will be featuring the streams of several members of the Starship community throughout the week, so keep your eyes peeled!

Table of Contents

“We tend to lead with empathy and support each other as much as possible. In our core operations side, we have people from all walks of life, including people trained in mental health…When it comes to keeping our community a nice place to be, we have zero tolerance against certain topics which helps a lot.” –Adam

Q-1: Hey! Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us today, it’s wonderful having you. First, we’d like to get to know each of you a little better. Can you please tell us more about yourselves?

Adam: Hello RaiderIO! (I can't believe I’m actually saying that 😀)

It is a total honor to be here, thanks for the opportunity! We are both called Adam. I’m Honestly and he is Coop. I'm from Nottingham in the gloomy UK. I'm a Wrath of the Lich King baby. I originally played from Wrath through Cataclysm and took a long hiatus from Cataclysm to Battle for Azeroth due to family and career commitments. I decided I missed WoW too much and needed it in my life again, but I promised myself I wouldn't get too involved…and ended up starting another community. 😂

I started in Wrath as a Rogue, tried healing in BFA and Shadowlands and got scared, then fell in love with Monk, and now I'm a Windwalker main. Outside of WoW I mostly spend time with my amazing family. Oh, I love cooking too!

Cooptimally: Hey there! I'm Coop, I was born in London, but I live in Poland and travel the world with my cat (yes, you read that correctly). In-game I surprisingly dislike pet classes and generally switch between most of the original classes and specs.
I spend quite a lot of time reading and trying to come up with fun ideas for things to do!

“In Starship, we work hard to foster inclusivity in a non-judgemental environment. Our ethos here is super important: you can come and sit with us.” –Adam

Q-2: As “Overlords” of the Starship Community, you are the points of contact for many members. How did you decide that you wanted to have a welcoming and inviting community? What are the lessons you had to learn in the process?

Adam: I absolutely love building communities. In real life, I work in the games industry as a Community Lead. I’ve been in the industry for about 12 years and worked on PC, Console, and Mobile games. My passion for building these communities began in Wrath where I started a few guilds. One of the guilds I founded is still going strong all these years later. Shout out to everyone in Jane Doe on Terokkar. 💗

There are many really cool people in the game and WoW often gets a bad rep due to the negativity coming to the surface. I wanted to bring together a group of nice people and give them a place to call home. Also, I found that a lot of people I spoke to were a little uneasy about experiencing some of the end-game content due to feeling like they would be called out or griefed for making a mistake. In Starship, we work hard to foster inclusivity in a non-judgemental environment. Our ethos here is super important: you can come and sit with us.

A huge part of what we do is our Raid School which runs EVERY Sunday unless we have a tournament on. We have met so many amazing personalities through our weekly school. Also, I just want to give a special digital high-five to Zippy, our raid lead for Raid School. He is SUPER chill and has a way of explaining things really clearly. It’s quite impressive. You have to see it. My words don’t do it justice. 😀

Another thing we do is try and make partnerships with brands and orgs because we love to give our community perks for being members. We run regular giveaways in conjunction with our partners.





Q-3: What are the main pillars that Starship is built upon and what do they mean to you? How do you hold yourselves accountable for defending (or maintaining) those pillars?

Adam: Inclusivity, Trust & Support. We like to be as approachable as possible. We lay down pretty basic rules for being part of our community and we try not to overcomplicate things. We are the kind of community that avoids drama at all costs so if something comes up it's usually identified pretty quickly and as we are really open about things too, as a result, we (the operations side) are made aware of any issues pretty quickly.

We tend to lead with empathy and support each other as much as possible. In our core operations side, we have people from all walks of life including people trained in mental health. Our recent partnership with Safe in Our World strengthens this further.

When it comes to keeping our community a nice place to be we have zero tolerance against certain topics which helps a lot.



Q-4: You provide Starship with many different events like the Raid School Night, Mythic+ Nights where you team beginners with more experienced players, and Trivia Nights, to name just a few. You also offer Class forums where players can discuss and help each other. How do you maintain such a variety of events?

Adam: It’s a lot of work but we have some incredible people behind the scenes to help out.

In our main Operations side we have me, Coop, Zippy, and our wonderful Community Manager Talvi who run the core activities and general operations. From there, we have a bunch of tasks that are managed by our Custodians.

These are people who have been recognized as really active and helpful in the community and have a unique ability to keep people hyped about playing and entering events. Right now there are seven of them, all with different task sets ranging from gathering Twitch clips from our events to building WeakAuras & casting.

Then we have our raid leads who run various teams inside our guild Starship on Terokkar. It’s a massive group effort! There are no ranks, just tasks, and we work as a collective.

“Although we're not the first community to add a competitive element to old world dungeons or raids by any means, I think we might be the first to get the right mix of accessibility, fun, and competition. It's special to me in particular because it's something that we've managed to do as a group of friends…” –Cooptimally

Q-5: The Race to World’s Worst is an in-game event that you organize which is pretty outside of the box. Can you tell us more about the Race and how the idea grew? What makes this particular event so special and important to you?

Adam: This is definitely a question for Coop. He’s the mastermind behind the race... I actually met him through one of the crazy events he used to do in the game. We are privileged to have him and love that we now have a platform to showcase his creativity.

Cooptimally: To be completely honest I think it grew out of boredom! I've always been interested in old world content and have gone back into it ever since The Burning Crusade and doing it with other people makes it even better! Adding some sort of competitive element to that seemed like it would be a fun little event for our guild and before we knew it, it had taken off!

Although we're not the first community to add a competitive element to old world dungeons or raids by any means, I think we might be the first to get the right mix of accessibility, fun, and competition. It's special to me in particular because it's something that we've managed to do as a group of friends, and having something like this that you can do together is honestly an experience that not many people get.

“...In a sense, this event was made with people like myself in mind who want to experience the old world in a competitive and relevant way, but not go as ‘all out’...” –Cooptimally

Q-6: What is the rationale behind playing these kinds of events on retail servers instead of Classic or SoD servers?

Cooptimally: I briefly touched on accessibility in the previous answer and in this answer, it will be mentioned again because it's pretty much the entire reason.

I love watching Hardcore and Classic events a lot, but I know that I wouldn't like to participate in them because of the time needed to commit to them. So, in a sense, this event was made with people like myself in mind who want to experience the old world in a competitive and relevant way, but not go as "all out" as an event on the SoD servers would demand.

“I think that a lot of what Blizz does to accommodate newer players kind of goes against the grain when it comes to community building. Everything is now super-accessible. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, but there needs to be a bit more balance.” –Adam

Q-7: From a community host perspective, is there anything you wish Blizzard would support more? Are there any tools, rules, or events that would enhance communities like Starship?

Adam: I love this game so much, from my perspective, I just wish that there would be more guild and maybe community achievements added. As a GM, that system they added in Cataclysm was incredible! It’s really good for guild unity. I remember when the guild level 25 achievement was introduced, my old community was so determined to get ‘Realm First! Guild Level 25’ that 20-40 of us all booked the day off work to grind it out. We totally smashed it. Good times!

I think that a lot of what Blizz does to accommodate newer players kind of goes against the grain when it comes to community building. Everything is now super-accessible.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, but there needs to be a bit more balance. It kind of breaks my boomer heart that you don’t need to be in a regular team to raid. I really loved that aspect of WoW. Maybe they could fix this by adding more guild/community achievements. I'm no expert but it seems like it would help. Also…. guild/community housing. We need it. Imagine being able to decorate your guild hall with the heads of raid bosses you have killed as a group. Inspiring!


Cooptimally: I guess this will be my "boomer take" as the games that I loved the most growing up were essentially either mods or community-driven in some way (Counter-Strike and Call of Duty – especially ProMod). I believe that games left open to the community allow the player base to truly feel invested to a degree that dev feedback doesn't always achieve.

If it were up to me, I would have dungeon designing competitions and implement the winners into the game. I'd also really love it if we could get a bit more of a re-work of old world gearing; that would be amazing and would also run slightly into our next event!





Q-8: The two of you are the faces of the Starship main stream on Twitch and seem to have a lot of fun casting your events. What do you like most about casting? Are there any plans to open up your talent desk to new casters who are hoping for a chance?


Adam: I'm actually more behind the scenes. Coop and the legendary Mattie B are our main casters. Matt has loads of experience casting professionally and as a hobby, he's a great addition to our community.

With regards to opening up the desk, we are on the verge of launching our ‘Stream Team’ campaign (Name TBD). We plan on giving some of our streamers opportunities on the desk for sure! If you are interested in joining us to make the most of these opportunities hit us up on Discord.

Cooptimally: ‘Live’ anything comes with an amount of risk that makes it exciting! I've never really thought about why I like casting or hosting so much - I just know that I've always been drawn towards things like teaching or presenting and inevitably find myself in jobs that allow me to do it!





Q-9: Do you have any playlists or special songs that you would love to share with us? Which songs get you really hyped? Which songs pump you up when the competition gets serious and heated?

Adam: We have an anthem. Run with Us by Glitterwolf which is a cover of the 1980’s track from the cartoon ‘The Racoons’ of the same name, originally by Lisa Lougheed.

The lyrics embody everything that we stand for. We love it so much and we were lucky enough to get a shoutout from the band last year too xD



Aside from ‘Run with Us’, we usually build a new playlist for each event. We are huge fans of Anjuna so there are usually some Anjuna tracks thrown into those playlists. Oh…shoutout to Taylor Swift too.

Here's the playlist for the upcoming Race to World Worst:





Q-10: Are there any other closing thoughts you’d like to share with us today? What do you have in store for 2024?

Cooptimally: We have a fairly packed schedule for the coming year, especially given the fact that we have IRL jobs!

Not only will we have further iterations of this event but we have our first event in partnership with the Timewalking Discord at the start of February, but will also have other assorted bits and pieces throughout the year that we'd love for more people to be a part of, as well!

People should definitely head over to our Discord and check us out if they like community events; there's always something going on - and hopefully, it's fun!

Adam: We have roughly 45 events planned for 2024 so far, ranging from small events like a Druid-only raid to our major tournaments like Race to World Worst and Runway Rivals (our transmog event). You can catch all of these on our Twitch.

Huge thanks to everyone in our community for being so unbelievably amazing all the time. Mega shoutout to all of our future members too. You may as well join us, you are more than welcome.

Thanks to everyone who keeps this space station in orbit, Our ‘Ops’ crew, Talvi, Zippy & Coop. Our Custodians and Raid Leads, Auril, Nya, Kim, Plague, MattieB, Rawley, Dave, Louie and Noki.

Special thanks to our supporters and partners. Varya at Warcraft, Picco and Aesyric at RaiderIO, Opie at Zygor, Natasha at Gamer Advantage and Rosie at Safe in our World.

We are always looking for new people and are on the hunt for more raid leaders so we can expand our raid school to help more people. Feel free to DM me on Discord to get involved.

Peace, love, and rainbows. 🌈

P.S Blizz plz buff WW GG

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Links

• Find Adam on Raider.IO
  
• Find Cooptimally on Raider.IO
  
• Follow Starship on Twitch
  
• Follow Starship on Twitter
  
• Follow Starship on their Website
  
• Join Starship on Discord
  

About the Authors