So in one of the last blogs I talked about recruitment, well once you have recruited and have enough for a raid team, you need to make sure that the team you send in is capable of dropping fights. A major part of this is sending in the right makeup. Now it is nice to have every single buff out there available. However as my guild have found no matter how many people you have available, there are only rare times that you have every buff available to you. Once thing to remember is that you can get the scrolls of intellect and drums of the wild and drums of forgotten kings. These are all valid choices if you are looking for that extra edge and have nobody in the raid to buff them.
After a long discussion, (yes I set up a team of around 4 raid leaders so it was a loooong discussion,) my raid leading team came up with what we call a basic and an optimum team build. For a basic build we look to have one paladin one druid and a priest, possibly a mage as well. (Obviously this is for a 10 man raid.) For the rest of the buffs you can use the drums and scrolls available. For an optimum build we decided on 2 paladins, one to do kings and the other to do wisdom or might, 2 druids, one for mark of the wild and one for the moonkin buff, 1 priest, stam and spirit buffs, 1 mage, intellect and focus magic, 1 shaman, totem buffs and of course what everyone knows why shammies were really brought into the game.... Heroism :p, 1 death knight, will give either a melle or ranged buff, 1 hunter, true shot aura and a warlock depending what spec he is will give various buffs.
Now as I said it is only on rare occasions that we can have the optimal build so most of the time we settle for something in between. Obviously in 25 man raids it should be rare that you don't have every buff known to man. but when you have that point... go in anyway, its fun :p.
Sometimes you will have the perfect team buff-wise, however before you send the team in the call has to be made if the people that are in the team can cope with the boss fights they are going to do. There is absolutely no point in sending people in to ICC if they are only geared for lower raids, so each guild must be flexible. Having a team of raid leaders helps as each one will be able to input opinions and build a larger picture.
Having said all this to be successful buffs are not everything, you will find people that are more flexible than others, and there will always be those that need longer to get used to a fight than others. Sometimes it is necessary to leave people out, not because they are bad players but because there are other people that suit the fight better. It may be that one person do's a huge amount of dps for instance, but they cant move as well as someone that do's lower dps. As a raid leader you have to weigh up the pro's and con's.
Thanks to my team we have been able to balance our teams well and have players in the guild that are always trying to improve. Bear in mind that everything I have said in my blog so far comes from seeing how the people in the guild have meshed and have supported myself and the officer team to make this possible. Those that get left out of a team don't mind as they understand that we are doing everything for the guilds sake and not our own.
That is one of the most important points in WOW. If you want a strong guild, you need a balanced team, individuals play a huge part, but as long as everyone works together you will succeed.
Thanks for listening to my ramblings again see you next time :)
Thursday 29 July 2010
Friday 23 July 2010
Day six - Recruitment and what kind of members are good for a guild
One of any guilds major problems is recruitment. The thing is we found it to be kind of split into a few different problems. First off for any raiding guild is to get enough people in to your guild to have a solid raiding team. Secondly is how do you balance the different class's that you bring into the guild. Finally is how do you vet and decide who you want to keep as a member.
Well for us it took a while as an officer team to hit this problem, as we already had a good team of people raiding with us. However when we decided to expand to 25 man raiding we had to start to recruit new members. I would strongly recommend for anyone starting up a guild to set a 10 man team up first as you can (as we thankfully got left) as once you have that core of players in you can take your time to then build up to a 25 man team. This is an extremely delicate time for an expanding guild as you can well imagine as this is the point where raiders start to get rotated out and fewer raids while you build up to a 25 man run. However I digress.
For the second problem that comes with recruitment you need to know that you have enough people signing up to raid while at the same time being able to send in a balanced team. this means that you have to set a limit on how many of each class you have in the guild.
After much discussion we hit on the number of active tanks we have in the guild to be 7. taking into account rotation and days that people can and cant raid. for the same reasons we capped the amount of healers we have at between 8 and 10 healers. (NB: this also means that you should be able to take two ten man teams raiding a week as long as you have enough dps of course.) And for the dps class's we capped it at a maximum of between 3 to 5 of each class. this then more or less meant that the different class's balanced themselves out within a very short amount of time.
Finally we come to how we vet our new members and decide who to keep and who not to. Now if you run a Hardcore raiding guild this mainly boils down to how well you perform in raids and how much dps you put out and how well acquainted you are with your class. With ourselves we decided that while we want to keep steady progress we still wanted to keep a fun feel to the guild. We decided therefore that we wanted to see how new members interacted with the guild and also look at how well they fit into it as players. In order to see this we give each new member a 2 week probationary period where we don't just look at how they perform in a raid but also how they interact in guild chat, if they do random dungeons, if they are active on the website forums etc etc... At the same time so as to be able to keep guild progress moving we set a minimum gear level ( taken from the website wow-heros.com) for applicants that is a must. this enables us to take them into a raid and judge how well they are doing as we then know what numbers they should be turning out for that level of gear. However one of the most important things for us, is that they fit into the guild. There is no point in bringing in someone that is an absolutely amazing raider but has no social skills what so ever as this would only cause arguments and could end up splitting a guild apart.
At the same time I have to admit that we do prefer to have family and close friends to be within the guild as this binds people into the guild and gives more of a family social atmosphere to the guild. People show more respect to those they already know as opposed to complete strangers and we believe that this is one of the reasons we have a very high rate of keeping those we recruit into the guild.
Now the recruitment process we have devised is by no means perfect and we constantly have to keep tweaking it, but I feel that the fact wow is just months away from a new expansion and we are in the middle of summer, yet as a guild we still are able to field three 25 man runs a week with an alts run and at least one ten man run (that is generally two 10 man teams at once) within the same week, shows that we are close to the perfect recruitment policy.
As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment and or ask any questions.
Well for us it took a while as an officer team to hit this problem, as we already had a good team of people raiding with us. However when we decided to expand to 25 man raiding we had to start to recruit new members. I would strongly recommend for anyone starting up a guild to set a 10 man team up first as you can (as we thankfully got left) as once you have that core of players in you can take your time to then build up to a 25 man team. This is an extremely delicate time for an expanding guild as you can well imagine as this is the point where raiders start to get rotated out and fewer raids while you build up to a 25 man run. However I digress.
For the second problem that comes with recruitment you need to know that you have enough people signing up to raid while at the same time being able to send in a balanced team. this means that you have to set a limit on how many of each class you have in the guild.
After much discussion we hit on the number of active tanks we have in the guild to be 7. taking into account rotation and days that people can and cant raid. for the same reasons we capped the amount of healers we have at between 8 and 10 healers. (NB: this also means that you should be able to take two ten man teams raiding a week as long as you have enough dps of course.) And for the dps class's we capped it at a maximum of between 3 to 5 of each class. this then more or less meant that the different class's balanced themselves out within a very short amount of time.
Finally we come to how we vet our new members and decide who to keep and who not to. Now if you run a Hardcore raiding guild this mainly boils down to how well you perform in raids and how much dps you put out and how well acquainted you are with your class. With ourselves we decided that while we want to keep steady progress we still wanted to keep a fun feel to the guild. We decided therefore that we wanted to see how new members interacted with the guild and also look at how well they fit into it as players. In order to see this we give each new member a 2 week probationary period where we don't just look at how they perform in a raid but also how they interact in guild chat, if they do random dungeons, if they are active on the website forums etc etc... At the same time so as to be able to keep guild progress moving we set a minimum gear level ( taken from the website wow-heros.com) for applicants that is a must. this enables us to take them into a raid and judge how well they are doing as we then know what numbers they should be turning out for that level of gear. However one of the most important things for us, is that they fit into the guild. There is no point in bringing in someone that is an absolutely amazing raider but has no social skills what so ever as this would only cause arguments and could end up splitting a guild apart.
At the same time I have to admit that we do prefer to have family and close friends to be within the guild as this binds people into the guild and gives more of a family social atmosphere to the guild. People show more respect to those they already know as opposed to complete strangers and we believe that this is one of the reasons we have a very high rate of keeping those we recruit into the guild.
Now the recruitment process we have devised is by no means perfect and we constantly have to keep tweaking it, but I feel that the fact wow is just months away from a new expansion and we are in the middle of summer, yet as a guild we still are able to field three 25 man runs a week with an alts run and at least one ten man run (that is generally two 10 man teams at once) within the same week, shows that we are close to the perfect recruitment policy.
As always thank you for reading and please feel free to comment and or ask any questions.
Wednesday 21 July 2010
Day five - DKP
Hey again guys welcome back to my twaddle, I don't know why but I'm getting quite used to this blogging thingy :p Anyway as promised this post is going to be about DKP and how my guild has evolved it to do what we want for us.
Now there are many different ways of running dkp and to be honest I don't know much about most of them, I have heard tell of an EQ DKP system and also a Zero sum DKP system. To be honest to me its all so much Bollocks. When I was handed the guild there was already a simple dkp system in place. You earned dkp, you spent it, about all I can remember about it was that you earned for attending raids and boss's downed and had the opportunity to earn up to 5dkp a week through contributions to the guild bank and there was a minimum spend of 10dkp per item. However we only used this on 25 man runs. And as we dropped down to only being able to run ten man runs the dkp system kind of got put on the back-burner.
However when we made the decision to restart 25 man runs, it was obvious that we needed a fair system to distribute loot. Remember that at the time we were still very much a social raiding guild so not that many were high geared raiding wise. The aim was quite literally to find a system that as well as rewarding people also ensured that we geared up together thus making progress easier. We researched into the current dkp systems and after looking at all the different types of system we decided to basically create one of our own. We decided to stick with certain aspects of the system that we were left so kept the guild bank contributions 5dkp max. at the same time we decided to award dkp for signing up, something that very few guilds offer. We abolished a minimum spend and said that if ppl wanted it it was how much that item was worth to them. At the same time we decided that each 25 man raid should award a minimum amount of dkp. This was set at 4dkp broken down as follows. 1dkp is earned for being on time and available to raid. 1 dkp for being there at the start of the raid. 1 dkp for being there at the end of the raid and finally 1 dkp for being there for the full duration of the raid. At the same time we decided that progress boss's would award 3 dkp.
Now please remember we did not decide all of this in one go. The system has evolved over maby a year and we are still tweaking the system. For instance we found that sign ups were slowing down so we decided that if someone signs up every day that we are due to raid then we award them with a weekly bonus of 3 dkp.... just for taking 2 min to click a box on the website. But that isn't all you get the bonus if you sign to say you can raid and if you sign to say you cant :O.
The basic ethos behind the system is that everyone has the same opportunity to gain dkp, no matter if they get picked to run or not.
So many people then say to us "well how do you stop people building up silly amounts of dkp and then just out-bidding everyone else?" the answer is that we don't have to. Because we run a blind bidding system people bid what each item is worth to them. It may mean that people wait for a while for certain items but due to the members we have in the guild and the fact that we are able to still (yes even in summer) offer a minimum of three 25 man runs a week the items will drop again and it is generally not long before their turn for a certain piece of loot comes around.
Also because bids stay at about the same level for items we tend to find that we have a very Even spread of loot through out the guild meaning that we all progress at around the same rate.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post again and if you have any questions about the dkp system we have set up that are not answered in this post ask away and I will try to explain and also give reasons behind the system we have set up.
Now there are many different ways of running dkp and to be honest I don't know much about most of them, I have heard tell of an EQ DKP system and also a Zero sum DKP system. To be honest to me its all so much Bollocks. When I was handed the guild there was already a simple dkp system in place. You earned dkp, you spent it, about all I can remember about it was that you earned for attending raids and boss's downed and had the opportunity to earn up to 5dkp a week through contributions to the guild bank and there was a minimum spend of 10dkp per item. However we only used this on 25 man runs. And as we dropped down to only being able to run ten man runs the dkp system kind of got put on the back-burner.
However when we made the decision to restart 25 man runs, it was obvious that we needed a fair system to distribute loot. Remember that at the time we were still very much a social raiding guild so not that many were high geared raiding wise. The aim was quite literally to find a system that as well as rewarding people also ensured that we geared up together thus making progress easier. We researched into the current dkp systems and after looking at all the different types of system we decided to basically create one of our own. We decided to stick with certain aspects of the system that we were left so kept the guild bank contributions 5dkp max. at the same time we decided to award dkp for signing up, something that very few guilds offer. We abolished a minimum spend and said that if ppl wanted it it was how much that item was worth to them. At the same time we decided that each 25 man raid should award a minimum amount of dkp. This was set at 4dkp broken down as follows. 1dkp is earned for being on time and available to raid. 1 dkp for being there at the start of the raid. 1 dkp for being there at the end of the raid and finally 1 dkp for being there for the full duration of the raid. At the same time we decided that progress boss's would award 3 dkp.
Now please remember we did not decide all of this in one go. The system has evolved over maby a year and we are still tweaking the system. For instance we found that sign ups were slowing down so we decided that if someone signs up every day that we are due to raid then we award them with a weekly bonus of 3 dkp.... just for taking 2 min to click a box on the website. But that isn't all you get the bonus if you sign to say you can raid and if you sign to say you cant :O.
The basic ethos behind the system is that everyone has the same opportunity to gain dkp, no matter if they get picked to run or not.
So many people then say to us "well how do you stop people building up silly amounts of dkp and then just out-bidding everyone else?" the answer is that we don't have to. Because we run a blind bidding system people bid what each item is worth to them. It may mean that people wait for a while for certain items but due to the members we have in the guild and the fact that we are able to still (yes even in summer) offer a minimum of three 25 man runs a week the items will drop again and it is generally not long before their turn for a certain piece of loot comes around.
Also because bids stay at about the same level for items we tend to find that we have a very Even spread of loot through out the guild meaning that we all progress at around the same rate.
Thank you for taking the time to read my post again and if you have any questions about the dkp system we have set up that are not answered in this post ask away and I will try to explain and also give reasons behind the system we have set up.
Tuesday 20 July 2010
Day Um four?
Today I will be talking about raid leading. Now all guilds will raid at some point or other and there are many different approaches to how guilds do this. Some guilds have 2 or 3 people sharing the responsibility's others have worked as a team for so long that all the team have input, but by far the most common way to raids is to have one person appointed as Raid Leader to direct and help the other raiders thru the fights.
Personally I set a system in place that combines this to a certain point. Within the guild we run we have four raid leaders. for each raid one of these leaders will be appointed to lead the raid and make the final decisions, with other raid leaders having input throughout. each Raid leader... RL for short, will be watching out and looking at how the team is moving. they then feed that info to the one in overall charge for that raid and this helps to build a fuller picture from a fight.
However raid leading doesn't just start when invites go out. A good raid leading team will meet up in some way, be it on a voice server or just in a party in game, before the raid is due to start and will go through the available sign ups and choose the best balanced team to take that day. for our guild it tends to be anything up to an hour before raid invites go out as this gives us time to review the fights we will be doing and what team is best to take into them. It also helps to deal with late cancellations and enables us to share info from the previous raids if need be.
Now I'm sure that you will have seen many posts on how hard being a RL can be. Well tbh don't just sweep them under the carpet as it is a very stressful job. The thing is that you are trying to get up to 24 other people to move and interact as seamlessly as possible, unfortunately numerous things get in the way of this, be it lag, Dc's, misinterpretation and just plain bad look. The ideal thing at these points is to keep calm if as a raid leader you stress then you will transmit that to your raiders. Don't get me wrong I am not the calmest dood in town and often get that stressed with a fight that I'm just relived I have vent set to push to talk. However there will be times that the RL boils over and takes his (or her) frustration out on the raid. This is the time for all other members to remember that these outbursts are not personal. To be perfectly frank if you start to get upset with your RL for shouting at you, remember they are not shouting at you, they are shouting at a few pixels on a PC screen. When you look at it that way it becomes quite laughable.
However the raid again do's not finish at raid end for RL's. Many guilds run some kind of DKP. (dragon kill points) I will explain this system in a later post, but basically for the moment think of dkp as money that is earned that then gets spent on items that drop from the boss's. After the raid many RL's are also responsible for keeping a record of dkp and what was earned and spent within that raid. I can still remember when that job used to take up to an hour after the raid had finished to complete. Thankfully we have got an officer that is quite happy to do this job instead of the RL's and the website we use has a built in addon to help deal with this, cutting a long job down to about ten min. however if any urgent issues, changes in strategy needs to be discussed then the RL's will still be on and talking about them.
The best advice for any budding RL's out there is, keep your cool, share the load and be prepared with knowledge of most in game class's and fight strategy's, and above all have fun.
Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my ravings and ill be back soon with a DKP post.
Personally I set a system in place that combines this to a certain point. Within the guild we run we have four raid leaders. for each raid one of these leaders will be appointed to lead the raid and make the final decisions, with other raid leaders having input throughout. each Raid leader... RL for short, will be watching out and looking at how the team is moving. they then feed that info to the one in overall charge for that raid and this helps to build a fuller picture from a fight.
However raid leading doesn't just start when invites go out. A good raid leading team will meet up in some way, be it on a voice server or just in a party in game, before the raid is due to start and will go through the available sign ups and choose the best balanced team to take that day. for our guild it tends to be anything up to an hour before raid invites go out as this gives us time to review the fights we will be doing and what team is best to take into them. It also helps to deal with late cancellations and enables us to share info from the previous raids if need be.
Now I'm sure that you will have seen many posts on how hard being a RL can be. Well tbh don't just sweep them under the carpet as it is a very stressful job. The thing is that you are trying to get up to 24 other people to move and interact as seamlessly as possible, unfortunately numerous things get in the way of this, be it lag, Dc's, misinterpretation and just plain bad look. The ideal thing at these points is to keep calm if as a raid leader you stress then you will transmit that to your raiders. Don't get me wrong I am not the calmest dood in town and often get that stressed with a fight that I'm just relived I have vent set to push to talk. However there will be times that the RL boils over and takes his (or her) frustration out on the raid. This is the time for all other members to remember that these outbursts are not personal. To be perfectly frank if you start to get upset with your RL for shouting at you, remember they are not shouting at you, they are shouting at a few pixels on a PC screen. When you look at it that way it becomes quite laughable.
However the raid again do's not finish at raid end for RL's. Many guilds run some kind of DKP. (dragon kill points) I will explain this system in a later post, but basically for the moment think of dkp as money that is earned that then gets spent on items that drop from the boss's. After the raid many RL's are also responsible for keeping a record of dkp and what was earned and spent within that raid. I can still remember when that job used to take up to an hour after the raid had finished to complete. Thankfully we have got an officer that is quite happy to do this job instead of the RL's and the website we use has a built in addon to help deal with this, cutting a long job down to about ten min. however if any urgent issues, changes in strategy needs to be discussed then the RL's will still be on and talking about them.
The best advice for any budding RL's out there is, keep your cool, share the load and be prepared with knowledge of most in game class's and fight strategy's, and above all have fun.
Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my ravings and ill be back soon with a DKP post.
Thursday 15 July 2010
Day erm..... three?
Ok guys if you haven't realized this by now I'm not a natural blogger. Plus as I said this is about running a guild in real life. Well here is the excuses.... over the last however long as an officer team we decided to bring in some new recruits to deal with the situation that comes up every summer where you lose a silly amount of sign ups to family days out, (the selfish buggers... don't they know that WOW>life? :O ) and scantily clad women, weather they be a wife, girlfriend or that lass from down the street you are stalking with your X-ray goggles you got off E-bay. Anyway due to the recent influx of peeps it has taken a bit more work to keep the guild stable than I anticipated. Couple this with taking Driving lessons and the normal dad things you have to do, package it up into an excuse that appeals to you and accept my nearly apology's :p
To be completely honest i don't have a blog pre-prepared this time so I'm just gonna wing it. This time around I'm going to talk about rulings and what they can do for a guild.
There are several Different things a rule set can do for a guild, not least from a disciplinary point of view. However don't see this point as the only thing that rules are there for. They provide protection for your-self and your officer team and they can be used to help people out at the same time. (Now stop it, that rule, yes that one there, yes the one saying all members MUST donate 200G a day to the guild leader, is not what I meant by helping people.)
What people must realize is that even if a guild doesn't have a rule set written down, there will be rules in place to follow, and to be perfectly honest if you don't write them down, there will ALWAYS end up being someone that trys to exploit you and your guild for all that they can take from you. Its a sad fact of gaming life, but its a fact all the same. This is where the fact that rules can protect you and your guild comes into play. If a rule is written down in black and white (or any other colour if you want) and is enforced fairly across the board (yes that also means the GM's and officers,) then people cannot argue with it. If you have some kind of warning or question on your guild app form ensuring they say they have read the rules. then if people try to argue then its a simple enuff reply. Its in the rules you read em and agreed to em now deal with it :p
However remember that what seems reasonable and fair to one person isn't to another so its best if you make your rule-sets up as part of a team. Believe me when I took over the guild I run (OK OK OK sorry sorry sorry I'll tell em) ahem I've been told to tell you I HELP run it. :p Anyway when that happened I was handed a set of rulings alongside. Those were basic rulings and took a group of about six people about two months to draft agree and finalise. And we are STILL amending and adding rulings where needed. A good rule-set should be flexible and never set completely in stone. Situations will always arise that you don't expect and your rules should be able to evolve to accommodate these situations. As it is I have known new rules or amendments take up to 3 weeks of intense (I try to avoid the word argument) discussion before being finalized and put into effect, just so it is fair and reflects the aims of your guild.
After you have your rule-set in place then you MUST enforce it to every member in the guild or you will completely negate the strength that having these rules gives you as a guild. As we show in my guild when you apply all the rules to even the Guild master and the officers people are more likely to accept them as they then know (and this is the important part) that you will never ask anyone to follow a ruling that you would not yourself.
So what can rules do for a guild? Well the answer as I have tryed to show, is that if applied properly and fairly, they will help in a big way towards making a happy stable guild. (hmmmm this ending sounds slightly like it was written by a stunned choir boy I may have to edit this later.)
Anyway till I next get chance to blog Chiow for Now :)
To be completely honest i don't have a blog pre-prepared this time so I'm just gonna wing it. This time around I'm going to talk about rulings and what they can do for a guild.
There are several Different things a rule set can do for a guild, not least from a disciplinary point of view. However don't see this point as the only thing that rules are there for. They provide protection for your-self and your officer team and they can be used to help people out at the same time. (Now stop it, that rule, yes that one there, yes the one saying all members MUST donate 200G a day to the guild leader, is not what I meant by helping people.)
What people must realize is that even if a guild doesn't have a rule set written down, there will be rules in place to follow, and to be perfectly honest if you don't write them down, there will ALWAYS end up being someone that trys to exploit you and your guild for all that they can take from you. Its a sad fact of gaming life, but its a fact all the same. This is where the fact that rules can protect you and your guild comes into play. If a rule is written down in black and white (or any other colour if you want) and is enforced fairly across the board (yes that also means the GM's and officers,) then people cannot argue with it. If you have some kind of warning or question on your guild app form ensuring they say they have read the rules. then if people try to argue then its a simple enuff reply. Its in the rules you read em and agreed to em now deal with it :p
However remember that what seems reasonable and fair to one person isn't to another so its best if you make your rule-sets up as part of a team. Believe me when I took over the guild I run (OK OK OK sorry sorry sorry I'll tell em) ahem I've been told to tell you I HELP run it. :p Anyway when that happened I was handed a set of rulings alongside. Those were basic rulings and took a group of about six people about two months to draft agree and finalise. And we are STILL amending and adding rulings where needed. A good rule-set should be flexible and never set completely in stone. Situations will always arise that you don't expect and your rules should be able to evolve to accommodate these situations. As it is I have known new rules or amendments take up to 3 weeks of intense (I try to avoid the word argument) discussion before being finalized and put into effect, just so it is fair and reflects the aims of your guild.
After you have your rule-set in place then you MUST enforce it to every member in the guild or you will completely negate the strength that having these rules gives you as a guild. As we show in my guild when you apply all the rules to even the Guild master and the officers people are more likely to accept them as they then know (and this is the important part) that you will never ask anyone to follow a ruling that you would not yourself.
So what can rules do for a guild? Well the answer as I have tryed to show, is that if applied properly and fairly, they will help in a big way towards making a happy stable guild. (hmmmm this ending sounds slightly like it was written by a stunned choir boy I may have to edit this later.)
Anyway till I next get chance to blog Chiow for Now :)
Monday 5 April 2010
Day Two
Ok as you have guessed im not a everyday sort of guy, in the last post I gave a bit of background on the guild leading up to the point when I took over controll of the guild.
Now dont get me wrong there will never be a compleatly smooth handover of any guild. There will always be people that do not agree with the directions the new leaders decisions takes it in, and some people will leave. This is life, as one of our officers says "you can please most people most of the time, but you cant please everyone all of the time."
So what did I do? Firstly I took the raiding team and we started hitting content that was maby slightly above our gear and at the time skill level. This was not because I belived that the game was easy or we were the best of the best of the best, but because I belive that in order to progress we needed to have experiance on the harder boss's so that when we had the gear for them, each and every one in the raid knew exactly what was needed from movment to aggro ect. Also at the same time I decided that we needed some different officers in the team that would be in touch with the guild and could bring different talents to the running of the guild. To this end I built a team of officers who I belive have the talents that running a guild needs, be it the ability to take people to a raid and bring the best out in them, to the admin skills to keep the website running etc.
Now of course this was not smooth sailing. When you get a team of between 7 to 9 officers, not everyone will agree on certain things. To combat this it was agreed that every major decision was to be made using a majority vote. This ensured that every major change gets discussed from both the good side and the bad side of the decision. Problems can be highlighted and dealt with before they even start and this method hasnt failed yet.
After a couple of months the team at that time decided that we would progresss more by making sure that we could run 25 man raids from only guild members, and not have to pug for extra players. To do so we embarked on possibly one of the largest recruitment campaigns the guild had seen. Through the people that we accepted and then settled into the guild we now are able to run 25 man raids at least 3 times a week with the option to do so for up to 6 times if we realy needed.
One of the major decisions that pertained to this was that we would not bring in huge numbers of people at the same time. We decided to trickle people in, get them settled and to feel welcome in the guild and this has worked brilliantly. By ensuring that people are happy in the guild and have freinds around them with officers that are willing to listen and take guild opinions into account when decisions are made, we have created a raiding atmosphere that is both relaxed and fun, while at the same time we have the different class's and skill sets to progress.
To cut a long story short we now run with an average base of 40(ish) active raiders and can now expect around 30-35 signups a day for raids with at least 25-30 of those signupsbeing available to raid. One of the reasons we can count on this amount of people letting us know is due to offering incentives to people that let us know in advance if they can raid or not. Not least among these being that if you let us know if you can or cant come for each of the 6 raiding days we offer a bonus 6 dkp at the end of the week. But I digress, due to the way that we have recrited these people we have achived a very loyal core of guild members and have managed to keep a good opinion of our guild across our server.
I cannot stress enough how much that means to a guild. The guild can have the topmost players in the server and be able to drop any content that blizz throws at you. But long term guild survivability means that you will have to find new members at some point. If you dont have a good name and good things said about you then people wont want to join.
Ok thats enough for today I'll waffle on at you a bit more in my next post
have fun and enjoy your games.
Now dont get me wrong there will never be a compleatly smooth handover of any guild. There will always be people that do not agree with the directions the new leaders decisions takes it in, and some people will leave. This is life, as one of our officers says "you can please most people most of the time, but you cant please everyone all of the time."
So what did I do? Firstly I took the raiding team and we started hitting content that was maby slightly above our gear and at the time skill level. This was not because I belived that the game was easy or we were the best of the best of the best, but because I belive that in order to progress we needed to have experiance on the harder boss's so that when we had the gear for them, each and every one in the raid knew exactly what was needed from movment to aggro ect. Also at the same time I decided that we needed some different officers in the team that would be in touch with the guild and could bring different talents to the running of the guild. To this end I built a team of officers who I belive have the talents that running a guild needs, be it the ability to take people to a raid and bring the best out in them, to the admin skills to keep the website running etc.
Now of course this was not smooth sailing. When you get a team of between 7 to 9 officers, not everyone will agree on certain things. To combat this it was agreed that every major decision was to be made using a majority vote. This ensured that every major change gets discussed from both the good side and the bad side of the decision. Problems can be highlighted and dealt with before they even start and this method hasnt failed yet.
After a couple of months the team at that time decided that we would progresss more by making sure that we could run 25 man raids from only guild members, and not have to pug for extra players. To do so we embarked on possibly one of the largest recruitment campaigns the guild had seen. Through the people that we accepted and then settled into the guild we now are able to run 25 man raids at least 3 times a week with the option to do so for up to 6 times if we realy needed.
One of the major decisions that pertained to this was that we would not bring in huge numbers of people at the same time. We decided to trickle people in, get them settled and to feel welcome in the guild and this has worked brilliantly. By ensuring that people are happy in the guild and have freinds around them with officers that are willing to listen and take guild opinions into account when decisions are made, we have created a raiding atmosphere that is both relaxed and fun, while at the same time we have the different class's and skill sets to progress.
To cut a long story short we now run with an average base of 40(ish) active raiders and can now expect around 30-35 signups a day for raids with at least 25-30 of those signupsbeing available to raid. One of the reasons we can count on this amount of people letting us know is due to offering incentives to people that let us know in advance if they can raid or not. Not least among these being that if you let us know if you can or cant come for each of the 6 raiding days we offer a bonus 6 dkp at the end of the week. But I digress, due to the way that we have recrited these people we have achived a very loyal core of guild members and have managed to keep a good opinion of our guild across our server.
I cannot stress enough how much that means to a guild. The guild can have the topmost players in the server and be able to drop any content that blizz throws at you. But long term guild survivability means that you will have to find new members at some point. If you dont have a good name and good things said about you then people wont want to join.
Ok thats enough for today I'll waffle on at you a bit more in my next post
have fun and enjoy your games.
Friday 2 April 2010
Day One
Hey this is the first time ever that I have done a blog so please bear with me if it seems a bit weird at first. Please feel free to leave any comments good or bad, but please leave constuctive comments so that I can learn from them.
Ok so lets get started. I thought that for this first post I would give you a little bit of history behind the guild. (ommiting guild names as this is not an advert for it ect.)This is purly to hopefully help people understand the reasons for some of the decisions that have been made etc.
The guild that I run has been through three different names and under each name it has been and still is, I feel, a happy guild. In its first incarnation the guild was a purly social leveling guild and I joined quite a while after its formation.
For those that are looking at that last sentence and wondering what the hell a social leveling guild is, here is a very brief key. Guilds in wow have many different labels they tag themselves with, and this can get very confusing even for old hacks. Broadly speaking guilds can be split into four different groups with slight differences within each category. These are: Social guilds, Social raiding guilds, Semi-hardcore raiding guilds and Hardcore raiding guilds. Social and social raiding guilds are guilds for those that play the game more for, yep you guessed it, social reasons than for the raiding side of things. Semi-hardcore and hardcore guilds still have a social aspect to their play, but they concentrait more on the raiding side of things than any other.
Phew now that bit of jargon busting diversion is out of the way, we can now pick up where I left off. Once I joined the guild I then made quite a few in-game freinds. The guild then decided to become a raiding guild and as such became a semi-hardcore raiding guild under a new name. However due to various real life pressures the guild leaders and officers made the hard decision to disband the guild untill a oppertunity presented itself to re-open and rebuild, in the process everyone went their own ways to other guilds, some to hardcore raiding guild and others like myself to social and social raiding guilds.
We then come to the latest chapter of the guild, when the founding members of the guild decided that it was time to re-start. In the early days of the re-birth it must have been hard going for those that decided to get things going again. At this point I myself was approached and offered a slot within the reborn guild but at the time I was happy in the guild i was in. However after a while I made the decision to transfer to be with old freinds again. Happily my partner and fellow guild leader decided that she would transfer across with me. (Point to note, if your partner do's play the same game it is much easyer to run a guild etc, as they will understand certain problems that can arise when trying to balance gaming and real life.)
I wont go into the details too much but one thing lead to another and due to previous raid-leading experiance i became one of the raid leaders within the guild. We were looking to become a social raiding guild at the time and things went well. However as usual real life pressures raised their head, something all gamers will know about, meaning that our guild leaders had to take more and more time out from the game. Realising that they could not spend the time in-game that they needed to our guild leaders made the decision to pass the torch on and thereby keep the guild alive and running, this being, (as far as I am aware,) one of the main things that was regretted from the disbanding of the guild formerly. That all the time and effort spent setting up and running the guild wasnt wasted, but not kept in use so to speak. Step up yours truly and the next chapter of the guild was begun.
Now I know I have waffled on a bit in this first post but I want people to know that it was only through the hard work and effort of others before me that I had the chance to be running a guild of the size and success that I am. One of the main reasons we are so successful is due to those officers building up and maintaining a high reputation for the guild, so that our name is synonomous with a warm atmosphere and a fair and polite manner to all that either join or play alongside our guild.
In tomorrows post I aim to show the changes that started and bring you all up to date with what is going on within the guild. Stay tuned and I hope you enjoy reading about our experiances.
Ok so lets get started. I thought that for this first post I would give you a little bit of history behind the guild. (ommiting guild names as this is not an advert for it ect.)This is purly to hopefully help people understand the reasons for some of the decisions that have been made etc.
The guild that I run has been through three different names and under each name it has been and still is, I feel, a happy guild. In its first incarnation the guild was a purly social leveling guild and I joined quite a while after its formation.
For those that are looking at that last sentence and wondering what the hell a social leveling guild is, here is a very brief key. Guilds in wow have many different labels they tag themselves with, and this can get very confusing even for old hacks. Broadly speaking guilds can be split into four different groups with slight differences within each category. These are: Social guilds, Social raiding guilds, Semi-hardcore raiding guilds and Hardcore raiding guilds. Social and social raiding guilds are guilds for those that play the game more for, yep you guessed it, social reasons than for the raiding side of things. Semi-hardcore and hardcore guilds still have a social aspect to their play, but they concentrait more on the raiding side of things than any other.
Phew now that bit of jargon busting diversion is out of the way, we can now pick up where I left off. Once I joined the guild I then made quite a few in-game freinds. The guild then decided to become a raiding guild and as such became a semi-hardcore raiding guild under a new name. However due to various real life pressures the guild leaders and officers made the hard decision to disband the guild untill a oppertunity presented itself to re-open and rebuild, in the process everyone went their own ways to other guilds, some to hardcore raiding guild and others like myself to social and social raiding guilds.
We then come to the latest chapter of the guild, when the founding members of the guild decided that it was time to re-start. In the early days of the re-birth it must have been hard going for those that decided to get things going again. At this point I myself was approached and offered a slot within the reborn guild but at the time I was happy in the guild i was in. However after a while I made the decision to transfer to be with old freinds again. Happily my partner and fellow guild leader decided that she would transfer across with me. (Point to note, if your partner do's play the same game it is much easyer to run a guild etc, as they will understand certain problems that can arise when trying to balance gaming and real life.)
I wont go into the details too much but one thing lead to another and due to previous raid-leading experiance i became one of the raid leaders within the guild. We were looking to become a social raiding guild at the time and things went well. However as usual real life pressures raised their head, something all gamers will know about, meaning that our guild leaders had to take more and more time out from the game. Realising that they could not spend the time in-game that they needed to our guild leaders made the decision to pass the torch on and thereby keep the guild alive and running, this being, (as far as I am aware,) one of the main things that was regretted from the disbanding of the guild formerly. That all the time and effort spent setting up and running the guild wasnt wasted, but not kept in use so to speak. Step up yours truly and the next chapter of the guild was begun.
Now I know I have waffled on a bit in this first post but I want people to know that it was only through the hard work and effort of others before me that I had the chance to be running a guild of the size and success that I am. One of the main reasons we are so successful is due to those officers building up and maintaining a high reputation for the guild, so that our name is synonomous with a warm atmosphere and a fair and polite manner to all that either join or play alongside our guild.
In tomorrows post I aim to show the changes that started and bring you all up to date with what is going on within the guild. Stay tuned and I hope you enjoy reading about our experiances.
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