My guild, Unhinged destruction (horde) on Gorgonash, actually went through a very productive guild merge. before it happened, we had about 20 level 60s that could run well on the weekend, and we were doing guild ZG runs. We merged with another guild (Knights of Shadows) which was about our size (20 steady lvl 60's) and it worked out great to the point where we have taken down Sulfuron in MC. As far as the lessons learned on the merge dealing with the original article, I give the list below:

1)Best guilds to merge are "Good" guilds that just don't have the population.

Like I said, we had a core of 20 60's. not enough to do anything more than ZG (AQ was not open on our server at that time). The merger really was a joining of two equal guilds, not the aquisition of one guild by another. In this way we were very fortunate.

2) before the merge work out everything between the two guild leadership groups.

I'm not one of the leaders, but they were hashing out exactly what was going to happen when the merge took place. This not only considered who was guild leader and the officers, but the non-WoW properties as well. In our case, KoS moved to our web-site/forum, and all of the UHD people moved to their Ventrillo server. If you don't work this out, you start the new guild on a fonduation of mistrust and confusion; not a good way to go.


3)Stuff will change, FAST, get ready for a wild ride.

We went from a casual/barely-weekend-raiding guild to a major raiding guild overnight (I think we are 5th to 8th on the server right now). and because of this we needed to make our loot rules for guild raids, as well as clamping down on recruitment because we could suddenly do MC raids. For a week or two we actually closed recruitment entirely, just so we could all play with each other and let things settle down.


In many ways, a merger of guilds is like a merger of companies in real life. you have to have a good reason to merge, and a merging for a bad reason (i.e. AOL/Time Warner) can mess up both groups. Due diligance is needed, things will be confusing enough. Finally, beware of too much sucess, it can be just as dangerous as not enough.

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