Unnamed Podcast: Episode #2 - "Tangental"

This week we talk about "Starting a raiding guild from scratch", an extension of our conversation last week, and "How we run our guild banks". We also spend a good deal of time at the beginning of the podcast about ourselves so that you, the listener, can get to know us better.

After learning some things from episode #1 we've made some improvements to our recording. As always, we would love to hear from you any feedback, be it positive or negative. We will be moving to a new website as well as getting the podcast up on Itunes for the next episode. The new website will allow us to use an audio RSS feed as well. Be sure to enter the podcast naming contest for your chance to win a spectral prize (courtesy of Sweeties Sweeps.com).

Enjoy!

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=00cf10fa5f6e70865a3d773badf21430e04e75f6e8ebb871

Show Links

None this week

E-mail your comments, suggestions, or snide remarks to Kreeoni(at)gmail(dot)cot or contact him on Twitter!

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Starting a Guild: The Basics

A little while ago I asked for some motivation and I got a good response from Ravenandrose who wanted to know:

How about how to expand a guild? My guildie/significant other is leaving the game, leaving me with a guild bank full of mats and nothing to do with them.

How to properly start a guild, or at least your ideas on it, would be good too.

First, I apologize for the delayed response to your suggestion. With 3.1 coming out things got a little bit busy and I kept finding other things to write about so this kept getting pushed up on my list until today when I said ok, too much, need to write it.

I know I have written on this subject before but it is still good to revisit it as time goes on.

My first suggestion would be to come up with a plan. What do you want the guild to be? Raiding? Casual? PvP? Starting off with a good plan lets you make some tough decisions up front instead of having to deal with them later once they come up.

Once you come up with a basic goal for the guild then you build upon it. Appoint officers and create policies.

Policies can be done a few ways and can be very detailed or very vague, depending on the group you are working with. You mentioned you had a guild bank full of mats. Your first policy should be how the guild bank is handled. If you don't make the decision then people with access to the guild bank are just going to use it as they see fit and it will never have much of a purpose. Some policies can of course be made by yourself before you start, but sometimes others may be best to make with the help of your officers and/or general members. Not setting policies at all will make your guild just fall into the casual guild that people are in because they have nothing else better to be in. That's not much of a direction, but if that is your choice then there you go but generally those guilds don't end up with many members and don't last very long.

Remember, guilds are volunteer organizations and people are with you for a plethora of reasons. You want to maintain their loyalty or your guild will falter. Also keep in mind that 95% of the people that play the game play it to have fun and being in your guild is part of that fun. Find out what that fun is and try to build your guild off of it. It is of course just as true in-game as out that you can never please everyone all the time, but you can please most of the people most of the time and that is your goal.

Good luck on starting the guild. If you need any other help feel free to e-mail me at Kreeoni (at) gmail (dot) com or get me on twitter.

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WoW Officers: Promotions

The art of picking officers can be a tough one(even Chuck Norris needs to it seems). No Vacancy is currently in the hunt for a new officer(or two) in preperation of the expansion and intent of our guild to get much larger as we recruit like madmen to raid at 80. But how do you go about picking these people that will be your right hand men(or women) in the fun that is leading a guild?

There are a bunch of different ways of going about this, ranging from the simple to the complicated. The more complicated it gets the longer it takes.

The simplest of all styles of choosing is to have your guild do it. Hold a large vote and whomever gains the popular vote wins! The only problem with this is that it becomes a pageant and people who may be a bad leader end up getting to be an officer because they have more friends in the guild.

The next process is to complicate it a little bit by assigning certain qualifications for a person to be voted upon(Ie- they must be on the raid team, or must have been in the guild 6 months, etc..). This cuts down the possible candidates a little bit but still can leave out newer people who are, in the end, your best possible candidates.

You can keep complicating that until you get to the point where it becomes your own decision based on a wide range of requirements and too much input from too many people both in-game and out.

The best way of doing it(in my opinion of course) is to find a happy medium of qualifying a candidate and making it so that your guild mates are happy with the person chosen.

No Vacancy has had different ways of chosing officers in the past, and we haven't chosen a specific one this time around yet. Mainly because each time we need a new officer we are at a different place in our progression as a guild, which means a different set of criteria is needed each time. A free for all democratic system may work at the beginnign when you just need people to start but when you need a raid leader you need to choose based on specific qualifications.

What process does your guild use? We're still trying to decide which form to use for this set of promotions and I would love to hear input about possible ideas. I'll post the criteria we decided upon in a post once we've decided upon it as well.

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What is Your WoW Endgame?

As I am sure you have figured out by now I run a guild solely concerned on end game raid progression. Although I promised to talk about guild leadership in general my experience only lies in a few types and so i will rarely, if at al, stray outside the raiding guild content.

High level raiding is what I consider to be my endgame. What do you consider to be yours? As I've mentioned before, there are many different ways a guild can define themselves and it rests primarily on the guild leaver to decide what he or she considers to be endgame content.

No answer is a wrong one but as I just mentioned it does define the direction of your guild. This does not have to be a permanent decision and it could change at any time.

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WoW Patch 3.0: Recruitment

I must admit that recruitment is one of my weaker guild management skills, however, I do about 90% of No Vacancy's recruiting.

It used to be that I needed to recruit for specific classes, but with the changed I mentioned in yesterday's post we can now recruit for the raid roles instead, broadening our prospects.

This means you can be much pickier in your recruitment, picking the best players to fill these roles, even if it means you have tons of a single class to fill in the gaps.

Tanks now all have the ability to main tank(and aoe tank), healers all have HoTs(and group/raid heals), more classes can de-buff now.  And although well played pure dps classes will still rule the meters, well played hybrid classes will no more be significantly behind. That coupled with the fact that all raids will be both 10 mans as well as 25 you can recruit for less and still do more.

Now, before the craziness of leveling re-begins, is a great time to recruit.  With the easiness of raiding that is currently BC content you can give people a taste of what raiding is somewhat like and possibly get those under-geared folks that are good players added to your roster.  It will also get people who thought they'd never have a chance excited for leveling up with your guild and raiding at 80.

It is also a great time to test out the talent, as well as your older members, and give them pointers as to how to fix something they may be lacking on in performance(spec tweaks, shot/spell rotations, etc.).  True, level 80 will have a few more talents , not to mention some people re-rolling Death Knights, but for the most part you can get your members top notched now before it starts getting hard again.

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WoW Starting a guild #4: Listen to your guild

Whether you form a dictatorship style guild or an everyone gets a say democratic type guild make sure you always listen to your guild members.

Your members will always voice their concerns and you need to listen to it if you want to keep them. Sure, there are some people who join your guild who think the know everything and just blab about how if it was their guild they would do it this way and that you should do it their way and blah blah blah. Ignore them and if it gets too bad make them leave. But everyone else, listen. If everyone wants free donut fridays then try to give it to them. Obviously, if its an unreasonable request, such as free crack fridays, then don't worry about it. I'm sure they can get their crack from another source anyways.

But in all seriousness, if you don't listen to your guild as a whole then you won't have one that does anything because everyone will go find somewhere else that will listen to them.

Remember, what your guild does is about your guild as a whole, not about what they can do for you. No matter how good you are, you will not be worshipped as a god among digital men so get off your high horse before you even start.

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WoW Starting a guild #3: Promoting Officers

Officers are your best resource to not having to be the shining beacon of leadership 24/7. If you are going to be serious about leading a guild then you must must must have officers. Officers back you up when you aren't around and serve as your representative. But most importantly, the officers help you out and serve as a life line.

Officers jobs have many functions. Aside from doing the obvious of helping out with the day to day they are the sounding board with which you get your ideas and when things are tough are the ones that keep you sane.

Because of this, make sure you pick your officers well. Picking your friends is all well and good but you need to make sure that your friends aren't stupid either. Make sure to pick people who 1)want the position and 2) are capable of filling the position. If you find people who are great at a certain thing, such as recruiting, then those are prime candidates. Also, make sure they are decent players too. Someone who has trouble grasping aspects of the game will probably have trouble grasping all of the officers responsibilities. The members look up to the leadership of the guild and assume the know everything and can answer every question posed to them so picking people who know how to get that information quickly is good.

Which leads me to another thing. Treat your officers with more respect than you treat you guild members(which should be a lot of respect anyways). Your members help you accomplish things by showing up to events but your officers do a lot of work to make things happen. In No Vacancy, my officers are equals. Yes, I make the final decision on things, but as much as possible we decide everything amongst all of us. I only make decisions without everyone else's approval if I think its something that needs to be made now or a detail we overlooked that needs fixing. And if it is a controversial topic then I will never make the decision alone. If I think the officers would approve anyways I will make the decision, if I have doubts I pass it by all of them.

Some guilds thrive on a dictatorship like leadership where the guild leader decides everything and it works. No Vacancy does a semi-democratic one and it works well. Pick your own style that works and go with it.

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WoW Starting a guild #2: Doing everything

Unless you are starting a guild with 25 other people and have a good sense of everyone and what they can do to help you lead then you are doing everything. In fact, even after you have everything to need to do whatever it is you want to do, you still end up doing everything to some extent.

What is everything?

Recruiting, raid/pvp leading, disseminating information to everyone, handling arguments and all other forms of complaints, maintaining a website, maintaining Ventrillo server, setting rules, enforcing rules, promoting officers, demoting people, and the list goes on and on.

I have found that when starting a guild, giving everyone the ability to recruit can be a good thing. It really depends on your direction though. This is a great thing to do if you are a fledgling guild with no contacts and no raid force or a family guild. That way you can get a lot of members and then weed through the members to find the best ones to help complete your goal. Again, unless you have the contacts you are going to have to start from the beginning and work your way up. You won't find the top notched people right away unless you have something to offer.

The best way to alleviate the stresses of doing everything is of course to promote officers to help you.

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WoW Starting a guild #1b: Naming your guild

I admit, I wrote this well after some for the upcoming posts but it was something that I forgot to mention. I'm so addicted to this blogging thing that I'm already like 14 days ahead of schedule on posts lol. So keep on coming cause for the next umpteen days there are already preprogrammed posts ready to hit you in the face with useless knowledge from a game. WOOT!

Ok, so naming your guild. Back in the day when I was in a cool named guild I used to think that the name of your guild really really mattered. In the end it's more the actions of the guild than it is the name.

However, your name does have an impact on how your guild looks at the beginning until you accomplish something. In WoW you can not hide your guild tag so what people have over their head is just as important as what they are wearing. Vanity means the same thing in digital life as well as real life.

Make sure you are spelling the words correctly(or if you are incorrectly spelling them it is on purpose), guilds that have the words spelled incorrectly usually mean the leader is an idiot. But punny things like (A top guild on my server so it's TM so get your own) is a great name. Names like makes it look like you were an idiot that can't spell or didn't have the patience to pay attention to the fact that you missed a letter.

Make your name professional. Don't put your name in all caps or in all lower case. It just looks messy and once again looks like a mistake. is so much inferior to which is much better than . O yeah and don't put stupid caps just anywhere to be cool, it looks stupid().

And finally, your name doesn't need to mean squat. Sure it's great to have a cool name like but even guilds like make it to the top. But do think about recruiting, if you name your guild you damn well better be awesome. Every time you whipe/fail/suck you will be flamed hard core. Better to be a little more humble and the flaming hurts less towards your guilds image. Course I can't say much cause gets flamed all the time when we recruit. Hey it meant something when we were an alt/banking guild but doesn't have that same joie de vivre anymore.

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WoW Starting a guild: Defining your guild

So i realized that I was sort of moving away from the guild leader help things. It seems that I did more of a suggestion to the guild members as to what they should be doing. My audience went from possible guild leaders to my own guild members. Although, knowing what is out there is good so that you know what requirements you want.

But first you need to define your guild.

Any schlub can go to the guild maker dude in a major city and pick up a charter and find 9 other people to sign it. But if you don't define what you want the guild to be then that is all you are going to be, a schlub who found people to sign a charter.

So before you put together your guild you need to decide on its overall direction beforehand. Guilds fall into 4 major types;

Banker - A guild for yourself in which you use the guild bank as your personal bank.

PVP - A guild in which you spend all your time concentrating on PVP, which means running pre-made Battlegrounds, arena's, talking smack about non-PVP guilds that are inferior to your PVP guild in PVP, etc.

Alt/Leveling(also called a family guild) - You invite everyone who wants a guild, help them level up, run them through instances, etc. Some family guilds do some early raiding(Kara).

Raiding guild - You spend most of your time either preparing for raiding or actually raiding. Raiding guilds can sort of have some subtypes as well such as progression, 10-man only, T4, T5, etc.. But it interconnects sometimes too.. A T6(or even t5) guild could be called a progression guild even though the true progression guilds have completed everything there is to offer.

Define your guild based on what you are good at. Don't be like "Well I want to be a T6 raiding guild but I don't know what I'm doing, Ill just get someone else to do it." Chances are that other person that is good at it is either already doing it elsewhere or leading their own guild.

Being good at something doesn't mean you know everything. As my long time guild mates will attest to, I knew nothing about the content we were about to attempt. I did lots and lots and lots of homework and even though I ended up coming in with the same knowledge as everyone else in my guild my homework let me lead them through where we are now. But knowledge is not necessarily the way to lead a successful guild, I have had many knowledgeable people come in on the guild but their knowledge came out as cocky and condescending. You took the initiative to start this guild, now you need to take the initiative to do everything(yes I mean everything) involved with getting it to where you want to be.

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