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.