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Hello,
I have been playing this game on and off for a few years now and as I’ve just realised, most of them years were spent as either a Guild Master or an Officer in a few different guilds. I have acquired a bit of knowledge in the different methods and ideas behind guild leadership and I want to share them with you, just in the hope that I can use my experience to help newly come Guild Masters or newly promoted Officers.
***Disclaimer***
I’m not here to make myself look better than anyone or to suggest that you must learn from me because all my ideas are right. I simply want to share some insights.
Also you may note that I am not in a guild. This is because my guild is taking a sort of hiatus for the summer months; real life issues etc. I hope this does not have an affect on how you perceive this thread.
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Officers
Officers, to me, are the most important part of a guild. They are the unsung heroes of guild management. I have had a number of wonderful officers in my time. People who were able to settle issues I couldn’t myself. To make a guild successful you will need people like this, you will need reliable people that you can trust to hold the guild together when you’re not on-line (because let’s face it, we can’t be there all the time). Officers can also be very helpful with creating guild events, acting as raid leaders in Raiding Guilds and sometimes just for keeping the members chatting and happy.Recruitment
This differs with every type of guild so I will explain how to go about each way in each section below.I will say a few words on the new Guild Finder system recently implemented though. This can be very handy for making recruitment slightly easier. I suggest you take a look at it and see how it can benefit you. It functions well for all guilds.
One problem with is that has been mentioned countless times is the lack of notification to a GM or Officers when a new player has applied. This leads to problems with invitation due to the player having logged off by the time the application is noticed. There are ways around this;Add the applicant to your friends list and whisper them whenever they come on-line again
Keep a regular check on your requests list
Individually mail each applicant and ask them to contact you whenever they can. Be sure and mention what guild you are representing in the mail, some people may have applied to more than one guild.Guild Websites
It is not necessary to have a guild website and some people will tell you they are useless but I disagree completely. Sites can be one of the handiest thing at a GMs fingertips. They are a great way of communicating with your guild, displaying screen shots of good memories, sharing information about all the different classes and roles and also they are very good for alerting your guild if will not be available to log onto the game for any reason.They can also be a fantastic help to recruitment. If you list your guild site in your advertisement then people can go look at it and see a lot more information like raid times etc and can also use it to apply. Having a application section to your guild is vital for Raiding and PvP Guilds.
Here’s a list of a few different Guild Hosting websites:
www.wowstead.com
www.guildportal.com
www.guildomatic.com
www.guildlaunch.com
www.enjin.com
www.ejeet.comGuild Bank/Permissions/Repairs
When giving permissions to certain ranks in your guild you must be very careful that you don’t give too much to people that you can’t trust. Especially with social guilds you are apt to come across ninjas that just want access to the bank so they can steal whatever is available and then scurry off. So be careful.Repairs are a nice incentive to get people to stay and make them a little bit happier. With the new guild perks it has become a lot easier to keep money in the guild bank so once you have enough you can always allow repairs to core members or whoever you’d like, it’s at your discretion. To Raiding guilds I’d advise guild repairs to all raiders because wiping can be costly on the individual player.
There are many different things you can do with your Guild Bank and it’s basically up to you and the needs of your guild what you do with it. Some ideas are to separate your tabs into different sections of the game i.e. Low level materials(to help people level professions), Max Level Materials(Herbs, Shards, Leather), Rares and Epics etc.
You can even have an in-Guild auction house where you could sell BoE items for cheaper than the AH. There are a lot of different things you can do.Types of Guilds
There are a lot of different types of guilds out there and I’ve managed quite a few of them. I will not get into my whole guild history for fear of boring you all to death and maybe making myself feel a bit too nostalgic but I will comment on the difference in guilds and the different ways they need to be approached in terms of management.
Perk Guilds
Since the introduction of Cataclysm these have started popping up everywhere, much more than before-hand. The reason is because of the new Guild Perks system which allows our guilds to level, much like our characters, from completing quests, dungeons, raids, battlegrounds and other such events. These can be done solo and as a guild group. Each level we get a new perk and obviously this has inspired a lot of people to go out and create guilds solely to obtain these perks.If you are planning on creating a guild like this then prepare to encounter a lot of, how can I put this, bad behaviour, some unsavoury characters and downright ignorance. I’ve seen a lot of these guilds get very out of hand in their desire to get more and more members. You can easily avoid unpleasant situations by being a bit more selective with your recruitment. Remember, you’re better off with people you can trust and get along with than a guild full of people who don’t know each other do nothing together. Guild perks are nice but I don’t think their worth the amount of spam and clutter overloading can cause.
Plus you have to think how hard it is to manage so many people. It is quite an undertaking and you will need a few devoted officers to help you out.
Social/Leveling Guilds
These have been around for years and pose a lot of the same problems as the Perk Guilds although they can also be very beneficial, especially to knew players. They are designed to help people get to know the different functionalities of the game in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere.If you are planning on creating a guild like this make sure you have a basic knowledge of the game so you can help people. If you do not then your members will not take you seriously and your leadership will be undermined.
In terms of recruitment you can blast it wide open if you like, accepting any level, class or age or of course you may apply some restrictions of your own choosing. You may have an age limit; this is not unusual because some guild chatter can be for the more mature people. If it is then be sure to introduce an age limit to avoid children’s mind’s being hurt.
Other restrictions can be things like minimum level requirement or class restrictions (although this is unusual).
Raiding Guilds
One of the hardest things to do right now is to set up a raiding guild and build it from the ground up. Most other guilds are easier because you don’t need to worry so much about the recruitment criteria but a raiding guild you need to have a certain level of standards. The players you want are sometimes hard to find, they need to be skilled at raiding or at least willing to learn, experience preferably, dedication, time and above all they need to be able to communicate and take advise or criticisms from a Raid Leader. Players with proper experience will be harder to acquire because fresh guilds have no repute these days with the introduction of Perks and Guild Level.I’ve seen people asking what’s the best way to build a guild from scratch and I’ll tell them the way I did it. A while ago I started a guild with a real life friend of mine (Co-GM and Co-GM, may not think it would work but it did, very well) and we started on a new server where we didn’t know anyone. Recruitment was painfully slow at the start but I knew we’d keep at it because it would happen and it would be great. That’s the main thing, you need to believe in your own abilities to do it.
Advertise in Trade (not too much though – no one likes a spammer) and on the Realm Forums. When making a post of the realm forums make sure it is easy to read and above all make sure it explains your situation, that you are just starting out and are looking for some dedicated players to come help be a part of setting up this guild. Interview everyone who shows interest, be friendly and get them in, once they are there you treat them very well, make them feel at home and needed. Eventually the members will start to build up, you may also PuG the extra few to get a raid together if you can, just to avoid your members growing stale or bored. The biggest thing I can say is to treat every member as well as you treated your first.
Now there are differences with 25 and 10 man raiding guilds. With 25 man you will need a lot more help from your officers because there is a lot more people to deal with and you will expect to have a bit more trouble getting the numbers in if you are starting from the ground up. 25 man guilds tend to be less personal and purely raid focused, not to say there aren’t any out there that don’t all feel connected to one another but with more people comes more distance, it’s hard to talk to everyone. 10 mans tend to be a little more intimate, especially if you have the same 10 people raiding together, it’s easier to get to know each other.
Lastly, make sure your Raid Leaders know everything about the fights you are doing. Make sure you have set up and declared a loot distribution method that seems fair to you well before you defeat any bosses. Use your guild site wisely, add and update any major information to it whenever possible or needed. Whether you are hardcore or casual don’t forget that people are not infallible, if they make mistakes address it calmly and hopefully you can overcome it.
PvP Guilds
Unfortunately I have not got much experience with this end of things but I will tell you what I know of what I’ve seen. PvP guilds tend to be more competitive. If you create one and label yourselves as PvP then prepare to face challenges from other people on the realm. The PvP world is more dog eat dog than raiding. When recruiting try and grab as many reasonable and relaxed players.There’s a lot of things you can do in a PvP guild. You can run random Battlegrounds with a small group of guildies, do TB, find arena team-mates and work your way up to building a solid Rated Battleground team. I’ve also seen PvP guilds before that ran PvE content on off nights, similar to how some PvE guilds will dabble in PvP.
When I started writing this I intended to just share some insights, hints and tips but it has turned out more like a guide so I am going to label it as one and hope that some of you will like it so much that you will vote for a sticky. That would be brilliant. If you have nay suggestions for anything I should include then don’t hesitate to say. I’m very open to any ideas. Thank you very much for reading and I hope I helped in some way. Take care.
- Sam
