Guilds « Rawrcast

My guild is currently in the midst of a recruitment drive which has raised some interesting questions about how applicants are judged. I’m placed in a unique position since I recently went through the application process and was admitted as a full time member to the guild. Part of my full membership benefits is engaging in the review process for new applicants on our guild forums.

All names are going to remain anonymous but the one applicant in particular has caused a modest stir. This applicant’s first run with the guild was met with mediocre reviews. He was, as a reviewing member wrote, “Grumpy, aloof and not a team player.” I was in the first run with this player and what I noticed was not surprising at all. This player was quiet and reserved because he literally knew NO ONE in the guild and we were running a progression raid in Heroic TOC 25 that required everyone’s full and undivided attention. I think anyone would be a little quiet with a brand new group and a tremendous amount of pressure to be at the top of your game. Read more…

Keeping a guild together for any significant amount of time in WoW is an unbelievable accomplishment. People and personalities always seem to get in the way, drama takes over the guild and keeping everyone happy seems to take an extraordinary amount of effort. If you are looking for a guild, you know, one of the good ones, then it pays to do your homework. Here are a couple of tips to finding a guild that fits your personality.

“When the student is ready, he will find his master.” It is not the other way around. Good guilds usually are not in trade channel recruiting. So when you see a guild spamming trade channel or you get a random whisper inviting you to a guild, my advice is to steer clear. The worst (and rudest) way to get an invite is to have the window pop up on your screen, “Mstrbater wants to invite you to the guild, ‘Purple headed yogurt spewers.’” Steer clear of these invites and follow up with a nice /rasp for their efforts.

So how do you find a good guild? My advice is to ask around. Join a PUG group for a dungeon your level and find the best players in terms to gear/play-style, but don’t discount personality at all. In fact, I really think that personality wins out over gear check every day. The ret pally with uber gear but an ugly attitude when you accidentally pull agro in Dead Mines probably will not be a great raid teammate in end-game content. Ideally, your future guild mates will be people that you would want to hang out with in RL.

So when you find a good player and ask him about his guild, you should check for a couple of things. One, what is the guild focused on? Is it end-game content stuff? Progression raiding? Is it a causal group of players that is out just for fun? Is it one that dabbles in end-game raiding? When are the raids are usually set up? Are they willing to gear you up for encounters that you have not caught up to? Are there guild dues or mandatory meetings? Finally, what is the overall attitude of the guild?

These are some very important questions to ask before you submit yourself to join the guild. If too many of these questions do not match what you are looking for, consider looking for another guild. Why join a guild if you can’t raid on their schedule? Or why join a guild that raids when you can, but there are no slots open? Some guilds have a set group of raiders that never changes, so if you can’t get in on the raid, why join?

How the guild handles your request to join the them also says a lot about how the guild is run and organized. It also says a lot about the effort that the leadership has put into developing the guild. If you are not directed to a website to submit an application, you might not be joining an established/organized guild. The website says a lot about the guild’s communication setup and allows dissemination of information even though people are away from the game. (Like at work.) It is virtually impossible to get every member of a guild online at the same time, so the website allows everyone to be on the same page as far as where the guild is heading. Also there should be some sort of interview with an officer in the guild where both of you can gauge how well of a fit you are going to make.

None of these are hard and fast rules. Not all guilds are going to fit into these guidelines, but it is my experience that the guidelines that I outlined here will go a long way to making your experience in WoW a pleasant one. My guild, The Blackwater Seawolves on the Argent Dawn server-US, is celebrating its 5 year anniversary on November 23. Now that is quite an accomplishment.

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Keeping a guild together for any significant amount of time in WoW is an unbelievable accomplishment. People and personalities always seem to get in the way, drama takes over the guild and keeping everyone happy seems to take an extraordinary amount of effort. If you are looking for a guild, you know, one of the good ones, then it pays to do your homework. Here are a couple of tips to finding a guild that fits your personality.

“When the student is ready, he will find his master.” It is not the other way around. Good guilds usually are not in trade channel recruiting. So when you see a guild spamming trade channel or you get a random whisper inviting you to a guild, my advice is to steer clear. The worst (and rudest) way to get an invite is to have the window pop up on your screen, “Mstrbater wants to invite you to the guild, ‘Purple headed yogurt spewers.’” Steer clear of these invites and follow up with a nice /rasp for their efforts. Read more…

Hello Rawrcast readers and listeners. My apologies go out to all of you since this is my first column in two weeks. I have been swamped with work and family and was unable to find the time to sit down and write. Today, however, I am back at it. My life has slowed down and that means more columns to come.

Today, I am leaving my normal topic of leveling and addressing something that I have been dealing with in my game play; guild drama. Stomp has always said to her listeners and to her friends that this is your $15.00 a month and you have to be happy with what you are doing in game. Well, I have experienced a few different types of guild drama and I thought I would take a moment to enlighten the readers.

One of the worst things to happen in guilds and in WOW at large is the development of guild cliques. It is like high school all over again, where the cool, in-people get the runs and the uncool people are left in the cold. I was never in the geek, nerd group in high school, but at the same time I was never part of the in-crowd. I knew them and called a few friends thanks to years of baseball, football, and other sports, but my friends and I were more the middle group. Read more…

Today was a gorgeous day here in North Texas. One of the many tasks I had set before me was to have my car’s oil changed. Rather than hanging around inside the stuffy waiting room filled with outdated magazines and blatantly obvious infomercials, I decided to park myself on a bench outside of the service station. Soaking up the afternoon air I made small talk with a gentleman also enjoying the breeze. When all of the sudden, down the road a stretch about 200 yards from the station a little blue Subaru came to a hazardous stop in the middle of traffic. With lights flashing, I could make out the frantic flipping and flopping of hair in the driver side seat of the car. I gently motioned to the gentleman waiting beside me and said, “Looks like she is having car issues.” He agreed and went back inside.

As a guild master myself, and having seen Stomp and Haf recently setup their own guild, ‘Bound’, I decided it would be a good idea to jot up some thoughts on how to go about setting up your own guild. I’m sure many of you are budding GMs with a passion for the game and a want to run things in a particular way. Setting up a guild is the best way of getting from the game exactly what you want, provided you find enough like-minded people to support your goals. So if you are on the verge of setting up a guild, or if the idea has tugged at the back of your mind but you’ve been concerned with just how to pull together the details to make a decent go at guild management then I hope this article proves some use.

Read more…

Guilds, what are they and why do I need one?
For the first 30 levels I soloed without a guild. There was no need. I was not running instances and for me it was a solitary game, not a true social game that MMORPG’s are meant to be. The fact that this way of thinking was wrong in so many ways was only evident to me after I had found a good, interactive guild in which to be a part.

A Guild is a group of people who are like-minded in their play style, their in-game goals and their attitudes towards the game as well as, many times, their life. You tend to find people in a guild that have similar personalities or similar approaches to the game.

The idea of a guild originates in society from the earliest days of ancient history. Guilds were formed to bind workers in a specific field, such as stone cutting or leather working, to each other and their profession. They were intended to be a source of support in the market and under the political leadership of the day they needed the support. The thought was that an individual could easily be pushed around in the market or by the more powerful politicians of the day, but if they grouped together they might have more power and influence.

As guilds continued through history many developed a means of educating and training future members by creating apprenticeships and different levels within the guild such as artisan, craftsman, master and/or grandmaster. It became a method to pass on the knowledge of their field, while at the same time, keeping certain members in power.

Today, there are associations that act as guilds once did and the idea of a union is a guild of a sort. These groups and associations, even in today’s society, provide some of the same benefits to their own group as they once did. They stabilize power; provide influence in the market and in society. In most cases, they are successful in putting people together for a common goal. (Bored with your history lesson, yet?)

That is the same thing that happens in WOW. Guilds put people together for a mutually accepted goal, whether that is raiding, leveling, or because you’re a guild of teenagers. No matter the raison d’etre of the guild, it really only matters to members or prospective members. Guilds that are made up of people with goals or desires that do not match quickly fall apart and have constant turnover in members.

In comparison a properly managed and led guild is like have a good a combination of a workplace, home life and a group of really good friends. I say that because when you look to a guild as an overall entity you realize that it encompasses all of these factors. If you ask a good guild leader, they will tell you much the same thing.

The first and foremost thing that a guild provides you is support. The members of a guild work together to help every member of the guild accomplish what is good for both the individual character and the guild itself. A raiding guild will support its member in getting geared up so they can attack the hardest instances and raids and then raid, raid, raid. Where as a leveling guild is more focused on helping its entire group of members move up through the levels to get to 80.

This support can take many different forms. For your purposes, being a lower leveled toon, you need a leveling guild or at least a guild that is willing to take time away from raiding to assist its member’s level. A guild such as this will help to organize groups for instances so you can fully experience the game and get better gear. Also, a leveling guild will be there to help you enchant your equipment, provide necessary gear upgrades, provide materials for your professions, as well as many other functions.

Many guilds use some kind of server based means to talk to one another such as Ventrillo (aka vent). This allows the guild to support each other even more. You can use the in-game chat along with vent to ask for members’ advice on any in game issue; organize to run instances, and just chit-chat. In my two guilds, we spend more time talking about in-game and out-of-game stuff then we do for organizing or running instances. The truth of the matter is that during the day vent is filled with chit-chat and some instances, then at night when raiding is scheduled, it is primarily about raiding.

In the end however, vent is just one more tool to make WOW a form of social media, where we can interact with our friends. I have real-world friends in my guilds, I have only in-game friends in my guild and now after having joined Bound, I have some colleagues in the guild. This is probably the way that most people define their guild.

One word of caution however: some guilds do require you to apply. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The guild wants to make sure that it gets like-minded individuals into the guild. A guild needs to make sure it is compatible with its members and that the members will fit together or the guild will never be successful. In fact, most of the high level raiding guilds requires an extensive questionnaire and interview for a person to be accepted. For them, it is like interviewing for a job and you have to earn the right to be a member.

You need to find a guild that first meets your goals in the game. If you play only part-time and are taking your time leveling find a guild that supports that. If you do not like foul, dirty language then find a guild that supports those beliefs. The guild needs to be a tool for you to use and to enjoy or there is no reason for you to join a guild.

So, go find a good guild. Join and if you like it then stay, if not bail and find another. Let me give you a fortune cookie fortune from the Inquisitor: A Guild is only as good as its worst member.

Now, go level!

Inquisitor

If you have been following our raiding adventures with Insomnia on Staghelm, you will know that we recently acquired a fresh batch of recruits. At first, I was rather excited about having some fresh new faces to get our raiding steered back in the right direction.

However, this week my excitement turned to frustration, and I quickly remembered why I had started this blog in the first place. I turned to my trusty OCD Spiral O’ Thoughts and jotted down a few lessons learned from the last few days of dealing with these knuckleheads.

When you are a NEW recruit in a raiding guild….

Don’t

Talk over the raid leader.
Interrupt the raid leader.
Talk constantly.
Ask for a battle rez every time you die.
Talk constantly.
Make raid calls, that is for the raid leader to handle.
Change the raid’s strategy after the raid leader has reviewed the fight.
Expect a raid spot.
Talk constantly…. STFU

Do

Lay low and pick-up the tone of the raiding core.
Come prepared with flasks and food.
Show up on time, if not early!
Keep your constructive criticism in whispers.
Be resourceful, know the strategies before you get to the boss – in case someone asks you opinion.

Keep in mind that many raiding guilds have been around for years before you, and they probably will be around for years after you. If you don’t fit in with the tone of behavior that is expected, you won’t last long. Take some time to scope out the group and find a niche where you are comfortable. I know it is exciting to be in a new guild, but the last thing anyone wants you to do is make a bad impression right out of the gate.

Pace your excitement and contribute where it is appropriate, and you will likely be a long standing member of a reputable guild. But, if you are a spaz… Hate to see you go, but you annoy me.