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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-10-2008 @ 1:18PM
kenney said...
Seeing a new guild title over someone's head a few days after leaving isn't an indicator of them getting "poached". People don't like to stay guildless, and I imagine that before the /gquit ever happens, they have some sense of where they would like to go.
The best advice I can give is to figure out what about your current guild structure is causing you to hemorrhage members. Some loss is natural, but if it is 1 a week, then there is an issue. If you aren't in kara yet, I'm guessing that may be a big part of the issue- that you have a guild that is set up to be good for leveling to 70 in, but doesn't offer anything when you hit 70.
Here's the best advice I can think of:
1) Be consistent. Set up scheduled guild stuffs, keep the schedules, learn from every failure.
2) Nurture a guild culture. If you don't have web forums, get them now. Provide incentive to use them (raid/instance signups are a good start)
3) Be friendly and professional when people leave. Tell them that you have been losing a lot of people lately, and while you wish them well, you would appreciate it if they could give you some advice on how to make your guild more attractive to someone like them.
4) IF it turns out raiding is the issue (and I bet it is a big part), think about guild-seeded kara pugs, and/or an alliance with another small guild to start having a few cracks at gruul.
5) Know what your objectives are, and make sure you run your guild in a way that makes sense for those objectives. If you have a bunch of random pre-70s, and your goal is to be raiding black temple 4 nights a week- there is a serious disconnect between where you are and where you want to go, and you will be lucky to have 1 person in your current membership who wants to commit to the level of dedication required to hit that objective.
I don't know what keeps some people in some guilds, and other guilds fall apart. I think a lot of it has to do with consistency and fairness from the leadership. Whenever I see bitterness about players being "poached", I feel like I see a big part of the problem right there: the guild leadership feels a sense of ownership of its' members.
I think #5 is a really important point. We almost never lose anyone in our guild, and when we do, it is usually because they want to be in a different kind of guild than we are running (usually they leave to join a guild that raids on a more hardcore schedule than we do). I think that when people come to us, they know what they are getting, and we deliver it. It makes it hard to poach from us. I suspect pretty much all of our "raider" statused members already know a number of guilds that would welcome them, but that isn't a bad thing, that just makes them feel good about themselves.
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