The Guild – Foundation

My first post here was more of an introduction, fluff than content. So I decided not to wait for a whole week to get some real content around. For the future, I’ll be working on a weekly post structure, to prevent burnout and be left quiet after putting out a lot of stuff in a short amount of time.

I’ve previously expressed that I was on a journey to find a guild for Cataclysm. Let’s take a look at what constitutes a guild: A guild is congregation of several people sharing the same interest within the game.

The reasons why guilds make or break is the player-base shares different interests. Gchat and interesting persona can only carry a guild so far -even if your blood relative is in the same guild, if it doesn’t fit your needs, you will eventually want to drift apart.

This is the reason why you must have a solid foundation to build your guild upon. Take your time, plan ahead in patience. The crucial mistake Guild Leaders or Guild Applicants share is the burden of time. You feel it’s just too late! Don’t get drifted apart by this rush. Odds are, you’ve been unlucky with your current guild [or even unguilded] long enough already, that it won’t hurt to lose a week or two to thinktank for yourself.

To have a solid player-base that share the common interest, you have to emphasize on two major points:

• Rules
• Applications

You’re finding a guild, because you want to make a guild that suits your interests. Thus, your personality will play a large role in how your guild will turn out to be. Most long-running guilds have ancient traditions, usually rooted back to the Guild Leader’s niche rules when the guild was born. At the early stages, of course your guild won’t have a tradition. To develop that tradition, you have to find like-minded players, that share the same interest with you.

Rules play a large role in this. From the simple social conduct rules to convoluted loot rules, these will be the boundaries within your members will play.

• Do you like to say “Fuck” every once in a while? Is it accepted in Ventrilo/Gchat?
• Are certain words or topics banned from Gchat discussion (Such as politics/religion, I’ve even seen some guilds who don’t tolerate the use of ‘lol’ in gchat, or any Real-Life discussions for that matter. Yes, it’s true.)
• How do you distribute the loot? What method of DKP? How is Loot Council is going to decide who gets what?
• What’s the minimum raid attendance (if there is any)? What are the members’ obligations during raids?
• Are alts permitted at all? One? Two? All?
• What’s the power structure of the guild? How much power do Officers have?

Rules set in the early stages, while can be subject to change, will have uttermost importance as to shape your guild.

• Make sure all members are familiar with the rules.
• Don’t be afraid to enforce them. There should be a good reason to have a rule. If you don’t even care about enforcing a certain rule, it shouldn’t be a rule at all.
• Don’t change them at all in the early stages. Plan ahead to have sensible rules in place, listen to your first recruits’ input on rules, but keep them as they are. It’s better to stick to something and try it out then try to be flexible and have no stones set up.

The last part is crucial. Think of you as a charming casanova, and your guild/guild members as the hot girl next door. You want to be charming, dazzling, charismatic and firm. You need to impress. Like Girls, guild members often appreciate their leaders trying something boldly and failing, than being undecided and sloppy. Do try and fail, if you must.

In the early stages, your guild is your’s. You’re the God, you’re the prophet. The guild is non-existant, the sync between guild members is yet to be developed, and the only thing people in your guild have in common is that somehow, you’ve managed to charm them.

Now at this part, be confident in yourself -You’ve just successfully hooked up the girl. If you were full of shit, the girl wouldn’t even get anywhere near you, so you can be sure you have some desirable qualities. Your members joined your guild with certain expectations. Just like you don’t change anything at all about yourself on a random girl’s input in the first date, you don’t change your guild a single bit in the early stage. Your members trust that you enforce over half of the rules as they join you, they join you because they liked the structure. If you start compromising now, how can they be sure you’re not going to compromise about something else that was your selling point for them?

They won’t. And they surely will lose respect, blazingly fast.

[And just like with a girl, you will eventually start compromising things and develop yourself over time, when you have a relationship with your guild members. But it's the first day/week/month still, you probably didn't even have the third raid sex yet, be patient, bear the insults, the remarks, the complaints.

People should like you and your guild for what it is -and if they don't, you'll lose the people that do like you and your vision, and without them, you'll find yourself as a Guild Leader of a guild you don't even like. And what was the reason you were finding a guild, again?]

Applications is another area where most guilds fail. In my experience, most guilds recruit someone because of one of the reasons:

• They desperately need a class/spec and will give a shot to anyone who has decent spelling (and even compromising the last one in some, most-depressing cases)
• They weren’t actively looking out for a certain class/spec, but holy holy shit, holy shit, the guy is awesome/full epic/ex-ensidia/actually a girl.

I’ve heard a lot of views on recruitment at the early stage, where people commonly think you should mass-invite and then weed out the weak. This often fails for a number of reasons:

• People who are genuinely of your salt, but depressed with the large number of people they do not enjoy playing with, leave over time.
• Your “Maybe I’ll kick” members invite their friends over, and even if some of their friends are good, you lose one, you lose them all.
• Your invitation profile is so bad, that you couldn’t persuade the target-audience to join you, and you have a guild-full-of-awfullness.
• Your girls are actually guys.

You have a specific vision of how you want your guild to be, right? Then why do you invite people who don’t actually fit in the profile? To kill one boss faster? At what cost?

People will often tell you not to be picky at the beginning, but once you establish yourself, weed out the weak and invite elites as you make yourself a name. I suggest you do the complete opposite: Be very, very picky in the guild, even if it means you only have five people to do Heroic FoS, and only when you already have an established guild, relax on the applications and give a shot at trials who mildly interest you.

Going back to our “I’m Mr. Sexy Pants, Guild is Hot Chick” analogy, mass-inviting early on is like the guy who hits on every girl who may or may not have a pretty face. You might be the most charming guy ever, but if you set your standards low, that’ll be the only thing you get. Vice versa, even if you aren’t the Mr. Charms, if you keep your standards high and don’t compromise, girls will start thinking what you do have that you don’t even give a crap about the allegedly most beautiful girl in town.

Remember: You want people to want you. Be the belle de la balle. If you have five members, arrange Heroic runs. If you have 10+, do some 10 men raids. If you have a full out guild, then bathe in the joy of 25 men.

Doing 25 men raids is not your priority -if it was, you could simply join a VoA PuG. Doing 25 men with good people (Or if you actually want a guild for 10-mens only, then so be it) is your goal. But don’t mistake it for your priority. Your priority is a good guild, and only you know what it means a good guild, so sell yourself and your vision, and be firm in them.

It might be glaringly obvious, but you should handle all applications at the beginning personally, talk with people, talk with their current/ex guild, chat on Ventrilo, dig in deep. Even long after your guild has been established, and certain officers [that you trust with the guild's culture and tradition] are looking at the applications, view their application and listen to why your officers want to invite this fella before actually inviting them over.

You’re building a guild to play with pro people/friendly people/people who will lick your ass/girls, and you should not compromise from it, least you’ll lose your interest in the guild and either the guild will fall apart, or you’ll be forced to leave and have officers grab the reins to take the guild to a direction you didn’t want it to take.

Until next week,

~DKS

DPS Meter

Related Posts

1. The Guild – Rules
2. The Guild – A Guest Post by DKS
3. [Guest Post] Newbie Guide: To Start A Guild Or Not To Start A Guild
4. Guild Killers