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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Exploring the Four Learning Styles

Have you been struggling with getting your raid team to learn fights? Do some members seem to grasp the concept of the Safety Dance faster than others?

It's no secret that some people learn faster than others, but maybe it's not the way they learn. Maybe it's the way you are trying to teach them. Gwaendar over at Altitis wrote a great post on "The Four Learning Styles and How They Can Help Team Progression". In this post they write about how you may have been trying to teach people the way you learn which is counterintuitive to the way others may learn.

Read up on this and then look at your own team and figure out what type of people you have and how you might be able to improve to make your team that much better.

My biggest change?

Keep your pre-encounter briefing short and to the point. The theorists and reflectors will have done their preliminary research, the pragmatists only want the telegraphic style short overview and the activists want to rush straight into battle. Long explanations will just waste everyone’s time for little concrete benefits.

I am well known to talk way too much before fights. Over time I have learned to shorten my explanation of fights and just give the key points and go.

I'm a Theorist and an Activist, What are you?

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WoW EJ's are FTL!

Now that you've decided your endgame remember that every other guild leader has made this same choice(or it was made for them due to lack of choosing). Their choices are as much correct as yours is. Do not find fault in them for making a decision that is not the same as your own. The important part of this statement lies primarily in the execution, rather than the choice.

As i mentioned at the close of yesterdays post, the direction of a guild can change at any time. A guild that is a raiding guild now could have been primarily a family guild months before. Similarly the direction of guilds are held by time and other guild member circumstances. A guild may be formed because its former self was not able to do what the leadership hoped(or the leadership was poorly executing its chosen direction).

What I am trying to get at is to warn against forming an elitist jerk attitude towards unequal guilds(even attitudes like this towards equal guilds is not positive, albeit hard to control since you are actively "competing" with these guilds).

Take for instance No Vacancy. We were formed one year after Burning Crusade launched, and we were formed out of guilds which lacked the direction we wanted. Some guilds on our server have been around well before BC and some formed well after we did. We have no right treating higher guilds with nothing less than respect and newer guilds with the same.

Just because we started late or earlier than any guild does not make us better or worse. The only time that even becomes part of the picture is when guilds are at the same location of progression)IE- Both guilds are 2/6 SSC). Then it becomes part of the whole competition that we all get into. The guild who succeeds first can claim to be better assuming all others things equal. But a guild 2/6 SSC can not claim superiority over a guild that has yet to down Gruul, unless of course both guilds started equally.

I understand that this topic is a very grey area type topic and my explanation of it is not necessarily the most eloquent but remember, the most accomplished guilds are not necessarily the best. The best guilds are the ones who humbly complete the content. Having a bad reputation as a guild is just as bad as having a reputation of a ninja as a player.

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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 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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