Seraphim was formed in the middle of HackForums' map dominance and defined itself by refusing to fight, and its thread became the venue for the early guild era's most substantive argument about that dominance.

History

The thread opened on 8 August 2016 with an unusually candid statement of purpose. "Do you like guild wars? Do you like dominating the territory map and controlling the entire province of Wynn...? Well get the fuck out then," the opening post began, before setting out the terms: "The Seraphim alliance is a 100% community based alliance... There's no intention of actively providing support for guild wars."^[1] What it offered instead was a way around the guild-slot cap of the period — "an opportunity to grown their communities beyond the bugged-out, limited guild slots" — plus shared art and thread graphics, and the founder was frank about his motive: "80% of the reason I set this up is because I want an excuse to make new graphics." Membership was deliberately non-exclusive: "any guild can join the alliance, regardless of if they are already in another alliance."^[1]

Within a day the thread was taken over by an argument between veterans about whether HackForums' position resembled Ordo Malleus' earlier control of the map. That exchange — Glitchedslayer against Drew1011, LeoDiesAlot and Yuno F Gasai — preserved much of what is known about Ordo Malleus, Hax's ejection from it, and the composition of the bloc holding territory in 2016^[2]. LeoDiesAlot, a chief of Libertas and so describing his own guild's arrangement, said that Hax "work with Lir and Bla in order to hold territories".^[3][4] The founder's own verdict on his thread: "Thanks for hijacking my thread gais. Appreciate it."^[5]

Membership

Seraphim had four recorded member guilds: Saltiest, Libertas, FOX and Holders Of LE.^[6] In September 2016 Libertas held 60 territories, second only to HackForums' 146^[7], so a declared community alliance with no war function counted among its members the map's second-largest warring power. Holders Of LE was simultaneously a member of Halcyon^[8] and joined Valkyrie that October^[9], which the alliance's own rules expressly permitted.^[1]

Seraphim predates the machine-recorded alliance logs, which begin in January 2018.^[10]

Legacy

No activity after the founding was ever recorded, and neither was the alliance's end. Its legacy is the argument it hosted: much of what is known about Ordo Malleus, and the clearest contemporaneous statement that HackForums was not acting alone, were written on the thread of an alliance set up as a joke about not warring.^[2]