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.
Monday, 5 April 2010
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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