This is the general catch all thread for all of your guild management discussion. Ranging from how to recruit in a recruitment drought, to loot systems, to how to abuse your power for sexual favors.
Supposedly threads like this should have some sort of resource list:
Stolen shamelessly from the WoW guild relation forums:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11124&sid=1So just to make things a little easier, here is a list of guides and threads already available on the forums. I'm sure browsing through 46 pages I missed some, but I hopefully got the bulk of them.
Guide to the Guild Relations Forum -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2287951143&sid=1
By Aerte, the first stop for the forum.
So you want to write a Guide? -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2647304980&postId=25737222319&sid=1#8
Also by Aerte, this one gives outstanding tips on how to write a guide for the Guild Relations forum.
GUIDES ABOUT RUNNING A GUILDGuide & FAQ to In-Game Guild Creation -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11963472&sid=1
Ashling's guide to guild creation. Everything you wanted to know about making a guild but were afraid to ask.
So You Want to Be a Guild Leader . A Guide -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17532432&sid=1
Yet another guide by Wytch, this one is a must read for any aspiring or current guild leader.
Guild Loot Distribution Systems -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14733001&sid=1
Stickied guide by Angelie about the different loot distribution systems available to guilds (like DKP)
A Guide to Recruitment For New Guilds -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11872705&sid=1
A guide by Anaea posted as a reproduction of another guide, in order to assist new guilds in learning how to recruit and recruit well.
Officers: A Guide -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=34203875&sid=1
Aerte's guide to choosing excellent Officers.
TBC Transitioning . A Case Study -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=101900728&sid=1TBC Transitioning. A Case Study, part II -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1371604509&sid=1
By Wytch, a detailed thread showing the transition from pre-TBC to the Burning Crusade, including leveling to 70 and starting to venture into Karazhan.
Guide to Fun Guild Events -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12052659&sid=1
By Rte, a compiled list of fun events you can do with your guild other than raiding.
Guide to Guild Banking -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=102789582&sid=1
Also by Rte, a guide on everything you wanted to know about setting up and running a guild bank.
Guild Banks: The Be-All End-All Guide -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2969691551&sid=1
Compilation of FAQs and information concerning the guild banks introduced in patch 2.3.
Creating Useful Guild Ranks: a FAQ -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11963391&sid=1
By Anaea - this gives plenty of ideas on how to make creative yet useful guild ranks.
Guide to Forming Alliances & Mergers -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=108328644&sid=1
Ashling's guide on the pros and cons of guild mergers and alliances, and how to manage to perform them.
Casual/Social Guild raiding someday maybe -
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=86644660&sid=1
Rhaina's guide to forming or running a guild that hopes to one day raid, but isn't quite there yet.
Guide: We're Ready To Start Raiding! - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=3168404998&sid=1
Rhiana's much more detailed follow up to the above guide.
Guide to Building Groups - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=112633558&sid=1
Trixie's guide to building groups. Note that the actual guide starts a bit down the thread.
Properly Analyzing Damage Meters - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=331116234&sid=1
by Allelopathy, provides insight into how to take those statistics gathered by damage meter mods and turn them into useful information that you can use to better your players.
Time Management for Raiding Guilds - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1531275263&sid=1
by Ciderhelm, an excellent guide on how to keep your raiders raiding and making the best use of their raid schedule.
A Guide to Writing a Successful Guild Mission - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2215493387&sid=1
by Daylight, a guide to writing one of the most important pieces to your guild, the mission statement (or charter).
Guide to Searching for the Right Guild - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2215576089&sid=1
Daylight tackles an often asked question of how to find the right guild.
CREATING GUILD WEBSITES
Website Critique - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=71852048&sid=1
Started by Ashling, this thread is dedicated to posting your website and receiving feedback about it from other members.
Compiled list of useful website utilities - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12674210&sid=1
Vuelhering brings us a list of some of the best tools guilds can use when making their own website.
Banner Requests . Info & Artists - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=98647168&sid=1
A consolidated thread of graphic artists willing to help guilds with their graphic banner and website needs.
Guide: Getting people to use your website - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2288039691&sid=1
By yours truly, just a quick and dirty list of ways to drive traffic to your site.
RANDOM GUIDES
We would like to raid - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2518909236&sid=1
By Calianna, this is a good start for the player who is looking to get into raiding. Offers excellent suggestions on what to expect when prepping and entering into a raid.
An Intro to RP Guilds - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2518013698&postId=24778198895&sid=1#4
While not technically a guide yet, this plus Silme's comments after provide a good start for players interested in creating or running RP guilds. Put here to fill the gap until a proper guide can be created.
How to Create and Host a Quest - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2647255156&sid=1
From Callistana of Sleeper Cartel, who know a thing or two about creating custom quests.
Utilities
WoW Lemmings: http://www.wowlemmings.com - a utility for helping guilds sort through the mess that is the Guild Recruitment Forum. More information can be found at http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665466726&postId=46649869357&sid=1
How to Protect Yourself - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4822675831&sid=1&pageNo=1
Not restricted to just guilds, Arrowfear's guide can help protect individuals (and thus the guilds they belong to) from hackers and other malicious intrusions. Generally good computing practices as well.
http://www.tankspot.com/rt/news.php The Round Table, a sort of Chamber of Commerce for guild leaders to meet and discuss guild leadership. Also does podcasts and in game meetings.
EJ discussions on guild bank spending and revenue generation:
http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t25127-generating_guild_bank_money/http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t25035-how_effectively_use_guild_bank_revenue/
Wow Lemmings: A text parser that scans the guild recruitment forums to let you narrow down your options.
http://www.wowlemmings.com/
Terra Nova: A bunch of academics who spend 90% of their time fellating Second Life, but sometimes they produce useful articles.
http://terranova.blogs.com/
If anyone else has any general info I'll be happy to add it. I'm also looking for resources that aren't WoW focused or other resources for specific MMO's.
Posts
So to start off the discussion....guild breaks. Does anyone else's guild sometimes declare a "This week we're taking off." holiday? We do it and it seems to be super effective. It reduces in guild tensions and we always seem to come back really focused and energized.
Of more relevance, there's a very heavy focus on guild raid management here. That's pretty universal?
I have a raid/WoW bias but I accept it and I'm willing to add additional viewpoints.
As purely hypothetical discussions I suspect your most successful guilds will be ones who adopt a more general staff approach. Over all GM handles logistics, staff under him handle field command. My understanding is that it's fairly common in EvE for that kind of structure.
Absolutely.
Does WoW have "Arena Guilds"?
Not that I've heard of, but I'm not a heavy PvPer. It wouldn't shock me to find out about a few. There are of course Twink guilds and PvP focused guilds but that specific I don't know.
Yep.
I'm curious, if we have anyone here from one or a more general PvP guild how they structure themselves.
We did this on occasion in my previous guild, and it was always effective. People got a chance to just goof off, and came back with a much better raid-game than they had before the break. It's a great way to prevent raid burnout, in my experience.
D/P: 2621-2512-5050
If you're going to run a guild, don't be a drama whore!
I'm certainly not, but one of the guys I run with was in a 10 person Arenas guild. They worked on finding the best combinations of classes/specs and players/style-of-play/attitudes to achieve the best ratings. When the second series of badge gear hit with the ZA patch, they would also organize a Kara full clear every Tuesday and Heroic Slave Pens followed by Heroic Underbog 4 days a week in order to get badges quickly. Those guys were NUTS, but most of them stopped playing and that was the end of that.
Why? Something to discuss. What happened that triggered this statement? This isn't a chat thread, lets let people learn something from this.
we did a break for the first bit of summer once, because apparently people play less in the summer when they don't have school. pretty much ruined our guild forever as there was so much splintering.
ah well, fuck em all.
Hypothetically (as in pre-beta/pre-release), similar to how you've described; with "strategic" leaders and "tactical" leaders.
How long did you take? Where were you in terms of progression? I'm curious how your guild was different.
we took a break for about a month. the people getting really upset, but we could not have honestly even fielded a good raid for that month anyways.
In your estimation do you think it was the break itself or the duration of the break? And if you don't mind, why?
Yeah, the thread title kinda worried me when 99% of the content of the OP was WoW-related. (Then there was the one where it briefly mentioned SL...)
I worry for the day where even PA considers WoW the only MMO.
(This is not to incite flaming or trolling or what have you, it's just an observation.)
No derails till at least page ten. Shoo.
I understand, and to be honest I expect a lot of WoW talk here. I'd be willing to put something up on CoX bases but I know next to nothing about them. I have an SG of 1 in that game. I did save two slots on the hopes we'd get lots of other resources.
i think it was a combination of the two.
some stubborn people didn't think we should take a break and that we should have simply recruited people to replace the raiders who wouldn't be playing, despite it being a pretty considerable amount of our core raiders. these guys were very upset when the guild leadership said hey, we aren't organizing anything for a while.
then there were the people who at first were fine with the break, but since it was undefined and started extending past when they thought it would they started joining the first group of vocal naysayers.
in the end, the guild basically split in two. the people upset about the non raiding leaving to form some other guild focused on raiding while the rest of us continued on about our business. the splinter guild was told that outside a few vocal members they were all welcome back to join us if they wanted, which in the end most of them did. in the end though we became a more raid oriented guild, which focused on always having the recruits to keep the raids going. this led to recruiting people i would rather kick in the face than talk to and our guild was such a clusterfuck of different groups of people that hated each other that i was not surprised at all to hear that the guild recently folded in.
Intresting, how long did it last after the split? Did the split make it temporarily better, worse or neutral?
I forget what they call it but how do you manage the SG funding? Is it pure donation or do you set up fund raising nights?
It sounds like a slow death. Were they raiding to the end? What was your guild structure? How were the officers organized?
Basically, CoX has two currencies, Influence, which is what players use individually to buy stuff, and Prestige, which is what SGs use to buy stuff. We basically run it on a voluntary basis, though at one point we had a rule that people had to have earned a certain amount of Prestige before they got rights to use all the stuff in our base, like bins for enhancements and so on. I don't think we're strictly observing that these days.
One of the crappier things about CoX is that as your level got higher, the amount of prestige you earned started to reduce the amount of influence your earned if you had "Super Group Mode" on, which is required to earn prestige. After a certain level, you earned zero influence if in SG mode. Fortunately, the developers are about to change that so your influence earning rate never drops below 50% while in SG mode.
We generally dislike scheduling a break while working on a boss, as it forces peopel to relearn habits, wasting time, but taking a break right before the first attempts on a new boss can work wonders.
If you don't mind my asking, how did you arrive at the amount needed for the privileges and how was the decision made?
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I've been in many guilds where the officer core was filled with incompetence based on this.
I am proud to say that I hold the officers in my guild to extremely high standards, which they meet.
My guild's officers (including me) are just dudes my guild leader thinks are cool. It rocks.
Of course, its a pvp/arena only guild....
The prestige number for promotion was pretty arbitrary, just needed to be high enough that we wouldn't be giving storage-take rights to someone really new and unknown. It's never been an issue, except for minor times when new folks take SG ranks too seriously -- having come from games where group ranks and permissions were more important. CoH/V is a very laid-back game as far as this stuff is concerned. (And in most other ways too.)
Rent isn't a big deal. At this point, there's not enough non-raid stuff to even spend our extra prestige on. And buying serious raid stuff or secure plots is silly considering the rather hopeless state of base raids at the moment, so we haven't done that. We can raid for fun, though, if we ever wanted. Hopefully in the near future there will be more to do with non-PVP bases.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
What standards and how do you hold them to them? What is your office churn rate like?