Guild Management

This is part two of a multi-article post, part one can be found here.

I start off this post again by stating I am by no means an expert with this topic.  I’ve had plenty of trial and error though, and I can tell you what’s worked for me and what hasn’t, and what I believe you need to do to succeed in recruiting efforts.  Again I’m assuming you are starting off from scratch, or with at most a very small handful of people.

If you take only one thing away from this post, remember this above all else when recruiting:  If you do not assign value to being a member of your guild, you will attract people that also consider being a member of your guild meaningless and they will treat it that way. This is your guild, you have goals for it, you care about making it work, and you want members with similar goals to want to be there.

For those reasons, you need to be selective with who you recruit.  I know it’s very very tempting to take anyone that is even slightly interested, but you will be doing yourself a disservice down the road by taking anyone without screening them at all.  I’m jumping ahead a bit, so lets start off with what you can do to get the right kinds of people responding to you in the first place.

I’ll start with the most obvious one, which is networking.  Hopefully you already know some people.  They may or may not be interested in your guild, but you can at least get the word out that you’re looking for people.  Odds are good that they also have friends that might be looking for a guild.  Make sure and pass along exactly what your guild will be (as we defined in the first article).

I should bring up something that I consider HIGHLY frowned upon, which is what I call “sniping members”.  This is when someone comes recruiting people that are already guilded elsewhere, and I try to be very careful not to do this.  If you are spreading the word about your guild and that you’re starting one, that’s fine.  If you are actively seeking out individuals already guilded and trying convince them to leave their current guild for yours, that’s not fine.  As a matter of fact I like to point that out to anyone that comes and talks to me about joining my guild.  I like people to let their current guild leader know that they are leaving, or I may even offer to talk to their current guild leader just so there isn’t any misunderstanding.  Which guild a person is in is entirely their business, but how they get there can make major waves with guild leaders if you aren’t very careful about how you handle it.

Back to finding people.

The second option open to you are the official forums.  I’m not one to really browse them much, because I generally don’t like what I see there.   In this case though, you want to cast a wide net and hit every option available to you.  Post a thread about your guild in your realm forums.  Be as clear as humanly possible exactly what your guild is, and more importantly IS NOT.  If you don’t take people under a certain age, say so.  If you plan to raid, make sure you tell people that you are just starting out so they don’t expect to raid immediately, and also what times you are proposing to raid.  Spell out everything that defines your guild.  Make sure to include everything, anything that would offer someone looking for a guild a niche in your guild that other guilds may lack.  If you have people already, make sure to mention specifically what you need, gear requirements if any, experience wanted, everything.

Also, check the realm forums often for people that post that they are looking for a guild.  Again, make sure that they would be a good fit for you before replying to them or talking to them in game.  Proactively looking for people posting was something I hadn’t been doing, and someone else pointed it out to me and it has actually found my guild several people when we needed them.  People, even good ones, can be a little lazy, and you’re willingness to go find them where others aren’t can be the difference between filling a guild and quitting.

Option three is the dirty option of in-game recruiting.  I don’t know anyone that enjoys doing this, but it works.

You want to come up with a clever way to get people’s attention via a macro in-game, and hopefully get the right people’s attention.  I’ve tried this multiple ways, with varying degrees of success.  Again, you want to cast a wide net so I suggest multiple options.  You are limited in space with whatever message you want to convey, and I highly suggest avoiding more than one macro worth of text.

The first way to go is to state your raid times, what you’re looking for, and whatever other useful pertinent information you can squeeze into the space you have.  Informative, to the point, and dry.  It does work, and people looking for something specific will already be pre-screened before they contact you (they know that the raid times would work for them, or that you said you’re looking for a Warlock and they are a Warlock).

The second way to go is to add more flavor and less substance, and ask that people interested contact you.  So for example (fill in the blanks) “Are you tired of ____ and looking for a guild with ____?  So am I!  So I’m starting a guild that ____.”  Whisper me for more info.”  Sometimes the funnier the better, it will draw more attention, but though you may draw more interest you’ll probably end up screening out more people since they don’t have as much information before contacting you.

A third option is to not macro at all, and actually type something very conversational and in the moment.  If you do this, actually type something and use it just that once and re-type something new for the next time.  People can get really “tuned out” to spam and sometimes a conversational approach will be something someone actually reads instead of just skipping right past what may look like “spam” to them.

So now you’ve got what you want to say ready, so where do you say it?

First you have the “Guild Recruitment Channel”.  This is a channel much like the trade channel, but it’s strictly for guild recruitment and spamming your guild’s recruitment.  It’s only active in major cities (if I recall correctly unless it’s been changed), and if you’re in a guild it’s off by default.  This is where you are SUPPOSED to be spamming your guild’s recruitment stuff.  Don’t go nuts, but feel free to hit your macro in this channel every so often.  Give it a few minutes at least between hitting it, or at least make sure your text has scrolled WAY off before hitting it again.  People will definitely get turned off by over-spamming, and anyone else will let you know.  Don’t be a jerk and spam right after other guilds.  The idea is to MAKE friends, not make enemies.

The big downside to the Guild Recruitment Channel is….no one is in it.  There are those nice few that are actually in there looking for a guild, but they are few and far between.  They ARE there, I’ve gotten people from there, but not a huge amount.  A lot of people don’t like to be guildess so they never see the channel, or forget they can join it and never do, or for whatever reason just never go in there.

That leads us to the dirtiest of dirty things:  The Trade Channel.  Let’s get one thing straight, you technically are NOT supposed to be using this channel for guild recruitment, and people will remind you of that fact.  I personally don’t like people spamming in it, or recruiting in it, but the fact of the matter here is that it can get results.  Though I may not like how the results are gotten, I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it doesn’t work.  I have literally spammed the recruitment channel for an hour with no bites, then hit trade channel once and ended up with 5 people wanting to talk to me.

IF you decide to mess with doing this in Trade, and I’m not going to publicly suggest that you do, there are a few things to keep in mind.  Do NOT spam trade over and over.  At MOST hit it once every so often.  I can’t tell you how often, but even once an hour or 30 minutes is probably PLENTY.  It’s an annoyance to people, and overdoing it at all can easily have a negative effect instead of a positive one.

Looking for people in the above in-game ways works, and you will get out of it what you put into it.  Hopefully you have a TV or something else near you, because you can definitely spend some time doing this, and if you are determined to get a guild running you might need to go at this a while.  If you are chatty talk up other people in town and spread the word while you do this.  Plan on giving up time to do this, but if you are persistent and flexible to change to what works, you WILL get results.

SO…on to screening people.

The first thing I do is VERY briefly talk to people just to get the basics to double check if they are even aware of what the guild is about at a basic level.  If so I then send them to a guild application on my guild’s website.

You can set up a guild website with your own application for free at many sites these days.  On that application I have questions that I am looking for answers for that are more than “yes” or “no”.  The questions are all important and should be ones that you already know what kind of answers you’re looking for.  For example:  “Are you currently in a guild? If so why are you leaving?”  and “Have you had any suspensions or bans of your account(s), and if so why?” and “What do you want and hope to gain by being a member of the guild?”.  I also ask if they use the in-game mods we expect them to use, and other things.

Those questions are screening ones yes, but also I’m interested in how they answer them.  Can they follow instructions?  Are they willing to put in effort?  If the answers are no, then they are probably a “no” to the guild.  By putting effort into their application, and by having someone fill out an application in the first place, you are assigning a value to being in your guild.  If you want to be in the guild, I need you to do X, Y and Z.  If you don’t want to do those things then I don’t want you here, because this guild is a good one, for people willing to do those things.

Yes it’s just a game, for fun.  If you’re going to spend a lot of time playing though you want to surround yourself with people who want the same things out of the game as you do.

After an application (assuming all goes well), right before an invite, I chat to the person applying.  Talk to them!  Talk to them (whisper in game) for 10 minutes at least if you can.  If it’s not someone you want to talk to for that long odds are good you don’t want them in your guild talking in /g every night.  Again make sure that they know what the guild rules are and what is expected, so there isn’t ANY chance of “but I didn’t know x y or z”.

You’ll find the better you are with all of this process, the less work it becomes.  The better you screen people, the less you will lose them for being unhappy.  The less you lose people, the less you will need to recruit.  The less you need to recruit, the better your “veteran” players will get.  The better they get, the better your guild gets.  The better your guild gets, the more people will know it.  The more people know your guild, the more they will know your reputaion and want to be a part of your guild…and the less you will need to recruit.

This is designed to be a multiple article post about what I would do if I were starting a completely new guild.  I should say right off the bat I didn’t start my current guild, but I did become co-leader when it was down to few enough people to run even heroics together, and helped rebuild it.  Also I’ve watched what has and hasn’t worked in multiple games both from a guild leader standpoint and a member standpoint.  So with that said, take this for what it’s worth.  If you can take anything out of this that will help you then great, if not then at least perhaps there is some food for thought here for you.

I’m going to assume you are on a server where you don’t know anyone or perhaps know only a few people.

First, there are a few things to think about before you even start a guild and some questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Do you play enough?  You’ve got to be available (and ONLINE) a lot.  If you log in once or twice a week you’re probably not on enough (depending on the type of guild).  If you take a lot of breaks from the game then someone else should be leading.
2. Can you follow through?  If you aren’t willing to do the not-so-fun stuff to make the guild work, if you quit when things get hard…don’t bother.
3. Are you capable of dealing with pissed off people without losing your head?  No matter what happens you’re going to get WAY more complaints and pissed off people then people who tell you things are great.
4. Are you willing to give up some of your play time to deal with guild related things?  Guild bank issues, messages from in-game mail, forum personal messages, guild management stuff….and lots and LOTS of whispers, daily.  If those things are a problem for you then you should JOIN a guild instead.
5. Are you enough of a “people person”?  If people generally think you’re an asshole they may stay in the guild to get what they want, but they’ll leave as soon as they get it.  Not everyone likes everyone, but you have to at least be “likable” and somewhat friendly.
6. Are you capable of kicking people out of your guild or talking to them and trying to correct behavior you deem “unacceptable” in your guild?
7. Can you delegate authority?

I’m not saying I’m perfect or great with all of the above things.  There are times I definitely fail on some or all of those things.  The above are just things I noticed can be root causes of failures in the management of guilds I’ve seen in this and other games.

So let’s assume you’ve thought it through and you decided you want to start your guild.  You might be thinking “Let’s go get people!  I’ve got a tabard and a bank slot!”….whoa whoa whoa.  Before you go get people, you need to define what kind of guild you want to be, and there are a lot of questions to answer.  You’re going to want to define your guild first so in the long run you recruit the people that will best fit your vision of what you want to accomplish with your guild.

Questions you need to answer if you are going to raid:

• Are you going to be a hard core raiding guild?  Casual guild?  Somewhere in the middle?  Where in the middle?
• If you are a hard core guild, will you kick people out (or sit them out of raids) based on their performance?
• Are there set times you already have in mind?  (That is one of the first questions people will ask when you look for recruits.)
• What do you expect out of your raiders and raids? (Properly gemmed/enchanted gear, flasks and other consumables for raids, etc)
• What system will you use to determine loot?  (This will also be a question everyone asks.)
• Do you aspire to raid only 10 man content, or do you want to run 25 man stuff?  MORE than one 25 man eventually?  (Very large guilds can get quite impersonal, from my experience.)

You need to decide if you want your guild to be adults only, a younger guild, or open to everyone.  Even if you are an “adult only” guild, will explicit language be ok in guild chat?  Will you take mains only or allow people to join on an alt while their main is elsewhere? (You can’t stop people from lying to you, but you can do your best to only recruit mains.)

You also need to decide what kind of behavior is acceptable in your guild.  The guild tag above members heads is a reflection of all of you, and any actions members of your guild take reflect on you and the rest of the guild.  Is it ok for your members to run their mouths in public chat channels (like trade chat), or battle grounds, or dungeons?  Are you ok taking people with suspensions or bans of their account for “bad behavior”?   If you haven’t asked yourself this question, or you think it won’t matter, be prepared to deal with angry whispers from other guild leaders when someone from your guild acts like an ass. (Trust me, you WILL have to deal with this if you run a guild long enough, even if you are careful with screening recruits.)

In closing of this section, to give an example, this is how I’d define my guild.  At this point I would say we are a Medium-core guild, that fields one 25 man and multiple 10 man raids per week.  On 25s we expect people to take raiding somewhat seriously (though we laugh constantly), show up prepared, and we all try to constantly improve our play.  We don’t raid 5 nights a week even on new content so we work at it when we DO raid.  On 10s we have a group that runs some harder-core stuff.  We are a guild of only adults 21 and up, and our guild chat is explicit and is not a place for kids.  We have some set raid times during the week but we don’t force strict attendance.  We have our own specific loot system in place.  We do not allow members with “mains” in other guilds.  We expect rowdy (fun) behavior in guild but expect people wearing our tag to act appropriately when grouped with people outside of the guild, or we will not hesitate to remove them.

I would tell a potential recruit an awful lot more than that, but I hope that gives you a guideline for where to start before you recruit.

Part two of this article will dive in to recruiting and actually starting a guild.

There are times when it’s a drag doing some of the not-so-fun stuff of trying to run a guild.  I can’t really say “run”, because the officers do a HUGE amount of the heavy lifting and the members are all in all very good people and helpful in their own regard.  For the most part officers all have their things they do, either assigned stuff or just helpful stuff, and I know I couldn’t do all of those things myself.

Still though there are those times when “it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it” and often times those are the things I have to do.  Perhaps I have to turn someone down for something, or yell at (politely chat with *cough*) someone who isn’t following the rules, or deal with mundane tasks that end up in my lap.  These things can kind of wear on you, even in the best of circumstances.  I also freely admit I’m often times not the most pleasant person to deal with, and I can absolutely slack on stuff which in the end makes even more work for myself.  I think it’s also safe to say sometimes I need to deal with someone who in that moment isn’t at their best either.  In those cases I have to at least *try* to deal with the situation in a reasonable manner without completely flipping out.  Sometimes I do ok, sometimes I don’t.  Often those are my roughest moments.

Then there are times like last night…but first a little back-story.

We raid 25s only two nights a week, 3-4 hours a stretch, so we try and get a lot done in a short amount of time.  Our first raid night of this past week we ran through Vault, the new weekly raid quest, and finally started Icecrown Citadel.  We got through Lord Marrowgar in two tries, and then cleared the trash to Lady Deathwhisper.  We got (I think) 4 total tries on her before we had to call it a night.  The first 3 were sort of tune-ups trying to learn her abilities, but also to try and figure out who needed to be placed where.  The last try of the first night we did a bit better, but still only phase 1 of the fight and still not a chance of beating her enrage timer.  At the end of the night we were tired, and we didn’t even get her into her second phase.  We weren’t dejected, but I think we all were hoping for more.

Last night (our second raid night) we went at her again.  I’m not sure how may attempts we put in on her, but enough to the point that we had trash re-spawn and had to clear it yet again (but we saw our first epic drop off of trash from them, so yay!).  We worked to fine tune our strategy, and kept plugging away at it.

FINALLY, after working on her for literally hours, we had a really great attempt.  Everyone playing as best as they were capable of playing, everyone doing their best to do what they were supposed to do, everyone coordinating their efforts.  Healers were hitting their assignments and also covering for each other.  DPS were on the ball killing adds and responsive to be on the correct targets.  Tanks were picking stuff up quickly and holding onto their multiple targets.  Everyone was using their long cooldowns and battle-rezes at good times to try and maximize the attempt.  Everyone was trying to minimize their damage taken.  Everyone working in concert like a well oiled machine.

We got her to go into phase two.  All of us were calling out things to watch for in vent, making sure the entire raid knew exactly where things were that we needed to move away from.  Everyone was focused, burning the boss because we knew we were running out of time before the enrage.

I could tell it was going to be close, and as we got her under 10% health I think we were all sure she was going to enrage before we would be able to kill her.  Multiple people started yelling “DON’T STOP” and “GIVE HER EVERYTHING YOU HAVE!”  No one was giving up, no quitters here.  I’m not sure exactly how close it got (I think she enraged at 4%?) because I was concentrating on my own damage and trying my best to get a good long rotation on her so if I died I’d have multiple DoTs ticking.

A moment later we FINALLY killed her, and there was an eruption of cheers on vent like I haven’t heard in a long time.  Everyone was yelling and screaming and we all lined up to take a picture together.

Those are the moments for me that make any of the other not-so-fun stuff worthwhile.

We are straight up BETTER raiders as a group then we were at the start of this expansion.  People in the guild that started off not knowing anything about their class have done research and learned about what they need to be doing for us to succeed.  People that didn’t know much or anything about raiding have learned how to react fast and use their abilities to best help the group achieve a common goal.  Do we all have room to improve?  Absolutely, but we’re BETTER then we were.

I saw all of that come to fruition last night.  There isn’t a doubt in my mind our guild has progressed together, and that feels awesome.  Are we shooting for server first or world first kills?  No.  Are we the top progression guild on the server?  Not even close.  But that’s not the point, nor is it what we strive to be.  Are we a better team now then ever before?  Yes.  And that is what makes guild leaders happy.

I’m in the unfortunate position of attempting to balance out our raiding roster.  Overall I try and keep things balanced as best I can.  Not too many people signing up, and not too few.  This is a difficult thing (at best) to do in a guild that doesn’t have a strict attendance requirement.  It’s also not easy to make sure you have enough of the correct classes and specs you need to try and fill raids correctly.  Thankfully my guild doesn’t have a lot of turnover these days, but occasionally we still have to recruit, and that means turning people down on occasion.

Turning someone down for the guild who has a terrible application is easy.  Turning down someone who has a terrible (and deserved) reputation on the server is also a piece of cake.  Hell even kicking someone from the guild who is obviously deserving it isn’t a problem for me.

When we’re full and not recruiting though, it never fails, we ALWAYS get good people applying when we don’t have room in our raiding roster.  When we’re recruiting and we’re short people for raids?  Terrible players apply, that are obviously not at all what we were looking for, known guild-hoppers, people only after whatever gear the guild can get them, etc.  It seems like we never get the people we want when we want them.

Telling good people “No” when they want to join the guild is perhaps my least favorite thing to do in WoW.  The term “good” can mean several things.  Nice people, great raiders, helpful, friendly…a combination of all of those things to varying degrees.  Since the guild I’m in is a raiding guild, but not a complete hardcore one, I don’t strictly look at just gear or achievements, but I try and get an overall feel if someone will fit in with us.

Recently all of this became somewhat of an issue.  Pre-patch 3.3 we were definitely running short on raid sign-ups.  We canceled a couple of 25 man raids, but for the most part we hung in there and ran them (on normal) while missing people.  One week we even did Vault + ToC with 17-21 people, only going over 20 on A’Nub…and for most of that going with 4 healers, one off-spec to boot.

As short as we were running, I knew if I started recruiting as soon as the patch dropped we’d be overfilling and there would be issues. No one that’s been in a stable guild for a long period of time wants to see themselves sitting out of raids because new people joined and “took their spot” (We don’t have assigned spots, but I know how it’s perceived).

Anyway, right before the patch we had a couple of friends of a long time member apply, and they are very nice people.  I dreaded explaining the situation to them but when I did I tried my best to explain to them WHY I could take them into the guild but couldn’t have them sign up for raids.  Not only was there the problem of us overfilling after the patch, but they just so happened to be the exact classes/specs that we have a metric ton of already.  (If they were applicants from out of the blue I could have said no easily, but as friends of a member I want to try and be accommodating if I can.)

Whenever I try and do something like this, I just try and be honest and upfront about it, but I still end up feeling like an asshole.  I know I’m just “doing my job”, but I hate the thought of coming off sounding like an elitist prick who could care less about anything except how his guild’s raids run.  I’ve been on the other side of conversations like the ones I have with people, and it’s no fun.

At least if I’m up front about what we can offer, though I might sound like a jerk I am not making promises that I can’t keep.  Besides that, if I were to say “yes” and just allow raid sign-ups to overfill, I’m creating an ever larger problem for the rest of the guild, who may then decide to come find me with torches and pitchforks and string me up or burn me at the stake.

Blizzard should make a non-combat pet that is guild leader only, and title it “The Lesser of Two Evils”.  You don’t get to choose when to summon it, it just randomly rears it’s ugly head.