Since Scott is the GM of Cursed Earth and I am his ... well, wife... we have been taking a look at the guild and searching for ways to improve it. Now that we are 70 we obviously want to run a few end game instances and the best way to do that is to start with ones guild. And so we have opened the floor to our guildmates to start inviting and to open up our numbers.
There have been a few additions recently in response. We are now up to 43 characters, which is better than we have been. We have noticed a few issues, though.
- A few of the new guild members have been rolling alts and those have been added to the guild. While that isn't a problem (obviously we have a few ourselves), it does skew our numbers and limits the players we can have to run instances.
- We aren't selective about our entry process. We haven't kicked anyone out yet (fortunately the really questionable ones have left themselves), but perhaps we do need to be a bit more vocal about what kind of guild we run. The other day we had a new edition to our crew - yay, we thought, a level 38 rogue. Perfect for all of those mid level instances we wanted to run. Well aside from the constant "can someone run me through..." and complaints that no one was available - there was like two of us on at the time - the fellow was actually advertising in STV that he was buying Runescape accounts since his had been banned. How ever you want to spend your money, pal, is fine with me, but do we really want that advertising associated with our guild? He quit the guild shortly thereafter.
- Since our schedules are so wonky, we have asked that our guildmates register on our forums, so we can schedule instance runs, etc. No one is doing this! Is this something that a lot of guilds face or is this something that is just for us?
Guild management can be extremely frustrating when the guild isn't all together with you. How do you get over that?
2 comments:
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I used to be the GM of a small guild on a small server. The first thing I would do is figure out what type of guild you want to have. Social? Leveling? Casual Raiding? Hardcore Raiding? PVP?
While most guilds will be a mix of those things, try to figure out where you want to focus your energy. Then sell that aspect of your guild to prospective members.
My guild built itself around running a single 5 man instance a night. We consistantly ran 5 max level players through instances, and before I knew it we had two groups running stuff. Then three, and then four, and soon we were thinking about doing some raiding.
That was our focus, casual raiding, and eventually we saw Ragnaros, Onyxia, Hakkar, and Ossirian die. BWL kicked our butts, though.
It was hard in the beginning because not everyone was the same level. Once things started happening regularly at the level cap, then the lower level players had a reason to level faster. Then things snowballed from there.
The one thing I would advise against is a hasty guild merger. Guild mergers do work, but they are just as likely to blow up in your face.
My wife and I were in a similar situation a while back. We were in charge of a guild of about 60 accounts, with the most being lvl 60 (pre BC). We tried in vain to get people to use the website to sign up and request instances. Eventually we tried an ingame scheduler called GEM I believe. This allowed for signing up in game. It killed web traffic, but it helped the guild.
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