Guilds « Rawrcast

We are at just the beginning of what I like to call the Great Funk of 2010. Summer is upon us, which is always a big transition for raiding guilds as some people can raid more while others either stop raiding entirely or ease up, but summer is a minor worry for raid leaders compared to the glut of content and the daily news coming out of the Cataclysm Alpha then Beta. Keeping people interested in Wrath content will be a growing challenge over the next few months. Raid leaders know that if they are not prepared to survive the summer and early fall with a stable group of raiders, they will be behind when Cataclysm comes out.

So how do you recruit?

The short answer is.. well, it depends on your guild and focus.

Many guilds are lax on recruitment. Most famously, AIE on the Earthen Ring server recruits new members at the beginning of each month and there are no requirements other than filling out a basic form. They are able to recruit so many people this way, their needs are always taken care of. Ensidia and Premonition, although they do actively recruit, have such high regard that they will always have enough people willing to join them that they can be extremely selective and still survive the funk.

These guilds have very different recruitment models and both can be successful. But for the vast majority of raiding guilds, it is not so simple. Open recruiting waters your talent and personality base down and can cause your better players to defect, while super selective recruiting can result in a negative growth. In many ways, as the pressure to recruit builds, you can feel like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Remember that recruiting the right people is more important than just recruiting people. A guild comprised of many casual raiders, if you are not a casual raiding guild, will cause your committed raiders to leave and vice-versa.

It doesn’t have to be like that

Recruitment is time consuming, it requires the help of everyone in your guild, and it can be humbling. Everyone focuses on the easiest, but essential, recruiting method: Guild recruitment threads on the Blizzard forums. That is a given, you should always do that, but it is only the start and it is the least effective way to recruit.

Shotgun thread method

Instead of just posting on the blizzard forums, make sure you post on every available forum including: mmo-champion, tankspot, wow.com, curse forums, and any other WoW-related forums you can think of. Keep your wowprogress.com guild recruitment profile updated. Raiders who might be looking for new servers or even new guilds on their current servers tend to look at wow-progress at each guild to see what they are recruiting, their raid schedule, and a link to their forums/website.

Using the WoW Guild Recruitment Forums to Actively Recruit

One of the absolute best ways to recruit is to use the Guild Recruitment forums on the official WoW forums. You would be amazed to see the number of people who post threads there looking for guilds. In fact, so many posts occur in that forum in a single day that it is worth digging several pages in. Need a Shadow Priest to fill a core raid spot? Chances are you will have 2 or 3 candidates in a single day.

Recruiting is work. It is one of the most important functions of guild leadership in a raiding guild. Do it well and your guild will prosper!

A quick introduction before we jump in. One day I was casually talking to a coworker about our favorite game experiences and I shared a few of my favorite raiding moments. Jack got a paranoid look in his eye, gave a quick look around the room and started to tell me about his time as a GM. I found the conversation, and his experiences in Vanilla WoW, very interesting so I decided to do an interview. Hope you enjoy!

Plec: Before we get started, lets get a brief synopsis on your history in WoW. You spent a long time as a Guild Leader on the Llane server in Vanilla WoW? What type of guild did you start and what was being a guild leader like back in the time of 40 man raid content?

Jack: That’s right, a few friends and I founded the Irate Pirates on Llane the week the game opened. There was five or six of us to start and we had to bribe people on the bridge into Stormwind to sign our charter. I think we were paying something like 10 silver per signature because that is all we could afford. We didn’t really know what kind of guild we wanted to be, we didnt really have any clue what the end game would look like at that point. All we knew is that we wanted a guild that felt like a friendly place. We didnt put restrictions on levels or gear back then. The one rule we had was basically “don’t be a dick”. Read more…

When I say ‘chewing glass’, I’m referring to the activity of trying something very difficult over and over and over until you get it right. The hope is that once you are successful, you will be better able to repeat the success the next time you try.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

– Albert Einstein

We have all been in the situation. You wipe on a boss, head back in, and start over again real quick. The inclination is that you hop right back in and try again and hope it goes better. There may have been a chance occurrence that caused you to fail in the previous attempt and people say “just get better”. You may also feel that because you are limited by time you need to get as many “attempts” in as you possibly can so that you get more experience. For example, say it is already getting late and your raid is going to end in 30 minutes so you group up and buff as fast as you can and try again. Read more…

This will serve as the first in a series of interviews with Officers and Guild Masters from different servers. My intention for these articles is to cast a wide net to cover all of the different approaches to guild management and to shine a light on some of the ordinary guilds that may not be catching the spot light with World or Sever Firsts.

Today’s interview is with my old GM and good friend, NateArizona. Nate is the former GM for the Alliance Proudmoore guild, Pansy Division and also the co-host of the critically acclaimed podcast Proudmoore Pansies!

Plec: Time to go for the jugular Geraldo style! Just joking…but not really. You were recently the GM of Pansy Division and you decided to hand over the reigns of leadership after several months in charge. Most officers see guild management as a part of the meta-game offered by WoW, something that is as integral to their experience in game as raiding or PVP. Did you perceive Guild Management in a similar fashion? Why did you eventually hand over leadership? Read more…

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.

allakhazam.com

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.