How do we start a guild?
by Amanda Dean 
May 18th 2009 at 10:10PM
I'd like to take a moment to address another reader email. In this post I kind of skirt the direct issues of recruiting and establishing a guild bank. I offer my best advice on the absolute basics of starting a guild. Please ignore spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors in the reader's email, and direct all of your ire toward mine.heya,
me and my friend want to start up our own to guild working towards raid progression. We have both done all pre 3.1 content on other characters on different servers and on moving to a new server have found it hard to find a guild that meets our needs/scheduale; thus we want to form our own guild. However neither of us has any experience in doing so, and would appreciate some tips on how best to start ie. how to recruit, how developed the guild bank needs to be etc
thanks
Before you get started making your guild, I'd like to let you in on a little secret. Some of the most painful experiences in my life include boiling the skin off the back of my right hand with scalding water from a steam iron (you wouldn't notice the scar unless I pointed it out, but even 22 years later I use it to tell left from right), the massive hangover I had on 1/1/2000- three days after I got my tongue pierced (and working a double shift), and starting a guild with a handful of friends. My best advice is that unless there is a real need for a guild, don't do it. You and your friend may want to look for a guild that meets your needs, our readers have posted many that are looking for members.
If you are still keen on starting your own guild you're going to face alto of challenges. For today, let's start with the very basics: Assessing the need for a finding your niche and establishing your mission. What is it that you want your guild to do? Do you want to foster hardcore raiding, or cater to casuals? Are you going to focus on leveling, role play, or PvP? Pitch your idea to some of your realm mates and see if there's an interest in your guild idea. You should begin planning for your guild before you even purchase your charter.
Once you have established the need for your guild, consider your potential membership. Who do you want to attract to your guild. Remember that the guild name can be a turn on or turn off for potential members. What do you want your guild culture to be? Some guilds cater to mature players- that doesn't necessarily mean old and stuffy, but a behavioral expectation. Other guild are focused around a goofier atmosphere where anything goes.
Begin to consider your rules and expectations. What's a deal breaker in a potential guildie? Will you have structured guild ranks? How will you deal with personality and mechanical conflicts? If you prepare yourself for some of these, you'll save yourself from dealing with drama in the future.
We'll talk about recruiting in a future post. Starting a guild is a pretty tough row to hoe, but there's great potential if you're willing to work through the growing pains of your guild's early months. Read through Scott Andrew's weekly column Officer's Quarters to better understand more of what you're up against. Also you'll find comfort and solace in the Guild Relations forum on the WoW page.
Good luck, and may The Force be with you.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Instances
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Ryan May 18th 2009 10:13PM
"Starting a guild is a pretty tough row to hoe." Nice.
Task May 18th 2009 10:21PM
I second that comment.. lol ^
Cat May 18th 2009 10:33PM
If it's a guild for you and your mates, knock yourselves out and have a fat time.
If you plan to recruit and build it into something, you owe it to your future members to do the following:
- Clearly post your guild aims, rules and principles where everyone can see them. Don't mislead recruits.
- Make sure everyone, including officers and the GM, stick to the rules. If you make exceptions for "the inner circle" you deserve to have everyone else ditch you and rubbish your guild's name in public.
- Define your loot rules, publish them and stick to them (this includes rules for pugs in guild runs)
- Respect your members, and don't be afraid to make the hard decisions. Whatever decisions you make though, make them consistent with your published charter.
Good luck.
Aedilhild May 18th 2009 11:34PM
Agreed. Casual players who are real-life friends can very easily use a guild as an provisioning hangout.
kotaku May 18th 2009 10:37PM
so this is all it takes to get mandy to post.. a server outage ;]-
Terethall May 18th 2009 10:37PM
I'm not sure why, but ever since you posted that QQ piece about dirty jokes where you mentioned that you prefer to spell your name with a lowercase 'm', I have been unable to take seriously anything you've written. Your entertainment posts are usually at least bearable, such as your "Forum post of the day: Sorting out the BADS", but really, all you do in that sort of article is direct the reader's attention to another person's content.
My distaste for this particular post may also have something to do with the fact that the entire thing was you responding to a question by asking more questions after advising the person not to try. Unless I am mistaken, the person who emailed you wanted tips on specific issues, not a laundry list of the specific issues about which they wanted tips.
WoWInsider is like a roller coaster in terms of quality these days. And it seems like every time Ms. Dean posts, my stomach lurches a bit. I think perhaps the WoWInsider team should consider letting Amanda do a little more soul-searching and guild-building (although it seems that the latter is a particularly painful challenge).
Mystrana May 18th 2009 11:06PM
I do agree with you on the fact that the reader asked for advice on specific topics and she should have gone ahead and tried to answer those questions.
But, she's right to warn them on how hard it is to start and run a guild. It is a time-consuming (and often painful) process and Amanda's questions are many questions that people might not consider if it is the first time they are making a guild.
After all, the email clearly stated that they have no experience in guild-making, so it was up to her to decide what foundation to put out there.
There is a lot of stuff in this post that could be elaborated on to make a very helpful guide to starting a guild.
Bubsa May 18th 2009 11:09PM
It's really hard to disagree with this post, despite every initial inclination indicating it might be a troll post or what have you. I'd like to say, before anyone else gets on your case, that Terethall, I think you're spot on and you've constructed your case fairly.
I think I speak for us both that we really appreciate the amount of work that goes into contributing to WI on a daily basis, but I have to agree 100% that, a lot of time, when reading posts from the aforementioned author I'm either not getting an article that addresses the topic, or I'm simply getting a piece with recycled material.
It's actually more disheartening than seeing another Death Knight on the Colloseum segment every week.
Charlie May 19th 2009 7:01AM
3 Dk columbs in the last 3 months bubsa. The other fotm classes (preists and holy pallies) hate 3/4. Most others have 1/2. Get off the colloseum.
Back to the OP. As much as I agree with you, she was right to point out how incredibly hard it is to start a new guild, if you are trying for progression raiding.
The hardest part is recruitment. The chances of you getting good players is extremely low, as good players always go towards more experienced guilds. Most who have been around a long time are in the guilds who have also been around a long time (my guild was created 11-28-2004 for instance).
Also, once you start a new guild, everything you do matters. Including your name. If you name sounds like a sub-par guild, nobody will want to join it. Things that have to do with the Alliance and Horde are ussualy shot down. (See Alliance National Gaurd on Burning Blade. They even have LOLANG T-shirts on BBPug.com). But even the way you carry yourself in pugs, etc. Really really matters.
My best advice if you really want to make a new guild, pug pug pug pug pug pug pug. Pugging is the best way to find new members. Join a few pugs, then once you know what you're doig, lead guild pugs with whatever members are on.
Good luck to you, and I hope whether you join a guild, or create one, you find you're new home. Thats always the signal that you're in the right spit for me, if you feel home.
-Large/ly
Bubsa May 19th 2009 10:01AM
That DK comment was more a figure of speech Charlie, as in, I wasn't saying that there are DK segments every week, but that the post(s) would be more disheartening than a situation when there are DK segments every week, which I'm sure everyone would find disheartening...if that makes sense.
And for the most part, I think you're pretty spot on with what you said. However, I think it further supports mine and Terethall's sentiments that it took a reader like you to make those points, rather than Amanda, yet again.
Plan May 19th 2009 6:29PM
There are three or four writers on WoW Insider who regularly do a great job and post well-written, informative pieces. Holisky, Yonzon and Schramm come to mind as the ones who seem to put real effort into what they write. The rest just shovel garbage to increase their post count.
I agree, it's strange to see a brilliant post sandwiched between four or five terrible posts that look like they've come from someone's LJ, but that all falls to the editor, and Elizabeth Harper shouldn't be doing ad rewrites at a crappy weekly, let alone editing a popular blog.
Aside from Amanda Dean, there's the always-terrible Harper, the routinely misinformed Matthew Rossi (hurry up and respec if you looked to him for advice on your Shaman's talent points), and that other idiot who used to dispense bad advice about Warlock PvP.
Kryxx May 20th 2009 2:23AM
In line with Terthall's comment about taking him/her seriously. It's hard to take someone seriously who says "but even 22 years later I use it to tell left from right". Really? Sill having trouble with that one that you need to look down at your hand and remember that scar = right? LoL!
Tizzy May 20th 2009 6:29PM
Oh man. You took the words right out of my mouth. I generally only like a few of the posts on WI because some of them are just kind of weird (Two Bosses Enter, anyone?), however, I kind of ignore them. Sometimes I'll see something that looks like a semi-decent read and then it feels like someone who's exploited their LJ onto the website and when I look to see who the author is it's Amanda Dean! (Excuse me, I mean mandy*) It makes me wonder at the amount expertise it takes to be able to write here. Really? Do we need to know about your scar from some kind of iron burn? No. Yes, readers like to see posts with a little humor, but sometimes she goes too far and it just becomes redundant and it makes me sigh.
*She prefers her name with lower case.
Dave May 18th 2009 10:56PM
On behalf of people in small guilds that are trying to work up to something else, PLEASE do your research before going off on your own to start a new guild.
If there's an existing guild out there, no matter how wacky and non-typical you think your requirements are, THERE REALLY IS A GUILD TRYING TO MAKE IT WORK THAT'S DOING THE SAME DAMN THING.
And it's hard to recruit people. I literally spend every single day recruiting new people. Every day. It doesn't stop. For every new person we find, someone else seems to get involved in some RL Drama and we're not douchebags about it but we have to find someone to replace them otherwise they shut us down as an entire guild and that's not fair to anyone.
So when you go off and make your own guild, you're competing against at least one other guild out there that's doing the same thing at your time with your requirements. if you're in one of those "wacky" prime times where you want people who raid on Tuesday, Friday and Monday only from 7pm to 11pm, just learn to scale your expectations around a little bit and/or consider that you'd be better off raiding 2 out of 3 days instead of 3 out of 3 days if it takes away that hassle of trying to make a new guild from scratch. It's not fun, the power does not make up for the hassle and you're going to hate the fact that you have to be on the lookout constantly for new people to replace your old people or your grumpy people or your underperforming people who are holding your entire guild back, etc etc.
You can't do it with friends and have any expectation to succeed either. You can try real hard, you can hope for the best and all that, but at some point you're going to have to make a choice between recruiting people who can get the job done and trying to be nice to everyone. Maybe you'll be the lucky snowflake and all your friends are pro raiders and you'll never have the problem at all of telling your buddy you'd rather have someone else tank since it means you'd be able to kill Mimiron tonight and not wipe 10 more times... but for the vast majority of people you have to show some tough love even to your friends to get them to perform at the level they need to perform. If you don't, and the rest of the guild is under the impression you're a progression-minded guild you're going to watch your guild slowly (or quickly!) fall to crap as you fail to down bosses and your guild can tell you're not telling your buddy how it is and how they need to step up.
And then again, that may be why you're looking for your own guild right now anyway instead of finding other people who are already trying to make it happen. Being in control rather than being told you need to change or step it up aint necessarily the paradise it might sound like.
So please, make an effort even if it's a group of 5 of you. There's almost definitely a guild out there for your entire group that's looking to get into 25-man raiding or a second 10-man team or a second 25-man team or whatever. Promise. There are far too many guilds out there right now already. Work with people, not against them.
Rob May 19th 2009 12:05AM
Agree with all this, but if you are all on a server, and no guilds that you want are recruiting, well you need to make tough choices. But generally i agree there are too many guilds for the quality recruit. That said, i want a guild for my resto druid, really well geared, where i only do 6 hrs of raiding a week. So far no luck on my server. The good guilds go for 9-16 hours a week easily, and the bad guilds are not worth your time.
Dave May 19th 2009 12:36AM
That's just it! There are lots and lots of "not bad but not good" guilds that get a much harsher "bad" rep than they get credit for being as good as they are with the limitations they have.
You're holding them back AND you're holding yourself back by considering some of the bad guilds to be bad, and by thinking the good guilds are so good.
Here's an unfortunate reality of WoW raiding: Time spent is time being "good". The best guilds raid 6 days a week for 6+hrs at a time while learning content because the reality of learning is that you are much more likely to figure it out with more time rather than less. (see: Malcom Gladwell's Outliers book which lays out the case that you only become an expert at something after around 10,000 hrs worth of doing it on average).
The best guilds are going to raid more. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part this is true. When you see a lot of "good" guilds, you're really seeing a lot of guilds that spend a lot of time raiding and they're only just dedicated. If you took all their time and divided it up into your time, you'd probably be at or around the same spot in terms of quality.
If you're really looking to only raid 6 hours a week, you're going to have to learn how to be in a "bad" guild, because a 6hr a week guild is going to literally spend weeks wiping on the same boss. You'll spend a full raid day clearing the stuff you've learned, and then spend the rest of your time wiping on whatever roadblock you're on. Other guilds would spend your 6 hours on that boss in one night and probably nail it before they're done. You'll have diminishing returns on your 6 hours, since every week you'll lose hours of that rehashing old content over and over in increasing amounts the more successful you actually are. 7 Bosses down in Ulduar? Congrats, but it's going to take you an entire day to clear up to the 8th boss. Once you down it? It's gonna take you another 20 minutes of your progression time to clear to #9. Add another 20 once you spend a couple weeks wiping on #9. So on, so forth. At some point you should be able to clear the first chunk of content faster... but the vast majority of small guilds still have to take 2 days to clear Naxx just because most guilds can't convince their people to speed clear an instance they've done 100 times and they'll spend an hour on each wing of Naxx.
The point is, the more time your guild devotes to time spent, the better off you're going to be on the whole. Plenty of guilds will love to have someone who can spend 6hrs a week raiding with them even if the guild raids for 9-12 hrs a week. If you're there for 2 days and you're solid on those two days they're happy to have you, you're in a guild that's doing successful things... and you're getting exactly what you want out of it.
Going off and doing you own thing isn't necessarily the most productive thing in the world since it takes away the power of a larger group to get things done in a better way. Yes, you might not be there for every single boss kill, but when the guild is farming the content you'll get to see it all no sweat.
Gimmlette May 18th 2009 11:00PM
When I started my guild, I had done a couple months of real soul searching and searching the guild recruitment posts on my server's forum. I knew what I wanted to do and why and when there just wasn't a guild that fit my needs and my current guild was imploding, I left and formed my guild a week after. Eighteen months later, we're still going strong and just went through a recruitment binge.
Unlike Terethall, I think the questions asked are necessary to be answered. Just what does the OP want? Raiding hours more conducive to his schedule? People who will farm the heck out of Wrath content before going into Ulduar? Only 80's and only older than 25? What is it he is going to offer people to make them consider his guild? On my server, guilds pop up 3 to 4 a week. "Hi, we're a new guild seeking to get into 10-man content. We have a tabard, a bank and Ventrilo. Pst to join." What is his guild going to offer that is different from this kind of post?
If it's just the OP and his friend, does he have a small nucleus, say 3 or 4 more people, whom he trusts so it's not just the two of them shouldering the burdens of running a guild. Nothing breaks up a friendship faster than one minor guild drama where the two of you disagree on how to handle it. I had 4 other people who liked what I was proposing. We sat down one weekend afternoon and crafted a Code of Conduct, looting rules and ranks and promotions. We have modified the looting rules as our progression has changed but the Code of Conduct has remained pretty much unchanged. It's common sense stuff, but I have had to /gkick people because they have violated the code. Surrounding yourself with more than 2 other people also ensures that if the drama involves you, you can hand off any decisions to someone you trust.
How will you handle drama? What kind of people are you looking to attract? Can you get Ventrilo/TeamSpeek up and running now? What about a web site? Who funds the bank? Do you charge dues? Are there perks for joining? What are your guild's goals? Going back to that generic post, so you have 10-man raiding, is that Kara or Ulduar? Will you interview potential guild members or stand in a capital city and spam trade, taking anyone who hollers, "I want to join a guild"? As I said, I thought about creating my own guild for a full 2 months before actually doing it.
Running a guild is a labor of love. I know every guild member. I try to run something with everyone to learn who they are and what skills they have. My officer corp has grown as we have grown. People have come and gone, some more spectacularly than others. Some are still missed. Some we are so happy they left. Some days I dread logging on. "Oh what drama will I find now?" Other days, I can't wait because we're going to do something exciting that day. If the OP is prepared BEFORE he ever plunks down money for a charter, he will relish having his name as the GL.
Terethall May 19th 2009 4:38AM
I never said that the questions asked didn't need to be answered. In fact, OP pretty much implied that all of the questions Amanda asked were the questions the OP had. However, OP wanted specific answers and tips, and all Amanda did was ask questions instead of providing real and practical advice on the issues. Essentially, she merely restated the OP's questions in a more thorough and verbose fashion. But indeed, all are very good questions that will need to be answered at some point by any endgame guild.
Jyotai May 18th 2009 11:17PM
1. Recruiting
- make sure to set a plan ahead of time. You can zerg recruit and kick problem people, or you can target recruit and grow slowly with quality. Zerg recruiting will grow you very fast, but the results can be very mixed. Some people get lucky and get great guilds, some people end up with pure disasters on their hands.
To zerg recruit, try this macro:
/script n=GetNumWhoResults(); i=1; while(i
Jyotai May 18th 2009 11:20PM
1. Recruiting
- make sure to set a plan ahead of time. You can zerg recruit and kick problem people, or you can target recruit and grow slowly with quality. Zerg recruiting will grow you very fast, but the results can be very mixed. Some people get lucky and get great guilds, some people end up with pure disasters on their hands.
To zerg recruit, try this macro:
http://wowui.incgamers.com/?p=macro&m=502
Run /who and then run that macro.
Change ORCISH to whatever it is Alliance speaks if your on that side.
Change to the name of your guild.
The restuls of this are very, very, very risky. It will give you a good 100-200 people in a few days flat, but will likely get you on the ignore list of twice as many others. Expect to have to boot about 20-50% of the people you recruit, but that will still leave you with a good 100 - enough to organically grow from there.
If you want targeted recruiting for slow but quality growth, get the addon 'NazGuildRecruiter and set a recruitment message for it. Let it run for about a week - it will spam the guildrecruitment channel while in cities and general while outside. About once per hour. Have all your officers run it. After a week, post a message on your realm forums that repeats the message in the recruiter addon, and adds a little more detail.
To quality recruit, also get a website that has a forum, and start using it. Have at least one subforum open for outsiders to post welcome messages. I recommend guildlaunch.com, but there are others.
For extreme quality recruiting, and very slow growth, require people to apply to your guild using that website. This is the method I use, and it took us 2 years to hit 100 members, and another 2 months after that to hit 200 (we managed to build a name for ourselves on the server as the most honest and nicest guild around, and we've since had to even turn off website applications because we just got too big for our purpose).
My brother used the macro above for his guild. He hit 170 on day one, and by end of week one he was at 300 or so. He's down to 250 or so after booting a good 150 and letting it grow from there. I notice when we talk shop about running guilds that he has a clique in his guild that he runs with, and most of the others are strangers. Me, I can honestly say I know and like all 220 people in my guild, and most of them know each other, and while we have semi cliques, we mix it up all the time.
- But my website only method did result in an extremely small guild for a very long time. We were only barely ever able to have enough 70s during BC to run Kara. Now we run two 10-man teams and have alt members for both - but for most of our history it was extremely small. So small that I often had people leave from frustration - that hurt, but in an odd way those people who leave spoke so well of us that those who stayed never had trouble with groups and when we started growing the number one thing I heard from applicants was 'everyone talks about how cool you guys are.'
So:
Zerg spam recruit, or quality slow recruit, or some middle ground.
- plan it ahead of time, and then go for it. Each method has its costs.