Filed under: Officers' Quarters (Guild Leadership)

From the start one of our members started to complain about the guild at the start of raiding early cata. However the officers and GM has brush it off as him being annoyed at the game because he hated the expansion. Things went from bad to worst when we started Firelands.

He started to make plans to overthrow the GM of the guild and made fun behind him. He complains the GM is never there supporting the guild because he took a month off due to work reasons. He made fun of our progression even though we manage to get at least 1 heroic mode down. When we got to dragon soul he stop raiding with us all together. Which is fine because our guild is a casual raiding guild and members are free to choose to raid or not. However he complains even more that people in the guild are stupid and we won't ever progress. It got to the point where we kicked him from the guild but the problem didn't stop there.

Hello Scott,

I hope you had a great holiday season. I am an officer in a small guild of around sixty people... Of the sixty members many are alts or inactive with only a handful of active people (around ten). I came to the guild looking for an escape from the sheer number of people I had to deal with in my last two guilds that had 400+ members.

For a while everything worked just fine, but in the last few weeks some members have began making requests for recruitment. With the small amount of active players being on at odd hours some new members feel a bit alone and put off and end up leaving. We have a strong desire to make a 10 man raid team but don't have enough geared/leveled/interested people. We are just short of the perfect storm needed to raid with our current members so recruitment seems to be the only answer. The issue is that while I may be all for it, the other active players have issues with recruitment.

Hi Scott:

When Starwars: The Old Republic launches I will be jumping in with both feet, and plan on forming a guild within a week.

I currently have a couple friends on board, a good name that is not taken, and most of a guild charter written up. Officers' Quarters has been an invaluable assent over the past weeks in pulling everything together, but a sticking point is hammering out the fine details of the Unacceptable Behavior section. What actions do you think warrant a guild kick, supposing the full story is known?

Thank you,

Prepared for Everything

Hi Scott:

I'm the guild leader for a medium sized guild. The guild is about 9 months old at this point, and we've had our share of raid member turnaround. Through each generation though, we've gotten stronger. Now that the team is pretty solid and showing up on schedule weekly, a problem has reared its ugly head, and its name is Dragon Soul.

You see, because of the constant turnaround, we were stuck in tier 11 longer than we should have been, and are only now at the point that going 6/7 in Firelands can be done in a couple of hours. We still don't have a Rag kill under our belts. Compounded with that, our Legendary recipient is only in the second collection phase.

But with the new dungeons dropping 378's and Deathwing taunting us, some members of the raid group have voiced in interest in raiding Dragon Soul. One member (who got a Rag kill with another team a couple weeks ago) said he can't wait to kill Rag so we "never have to go to Firelands again." That really REALLY aggravated me, but I kept my cool in Guild Chat.

Hey Scott--

We lost three of our core raiders yesterday, and may be losing more.

The girlfriend of the Raider Leader/MT in our casual 10m decided to start an "alt" guild. Not a big deal in its own right, myself and the other GM were a bit concerned about her underlying intentions; she'd been a core raider up until about three weeks prior to her founding this new guild. Myself and the other GM are not sure why the girlfriend stopped raiding with us; it was a choice of hers, and when we inquired as to whether everything was all right, we were always assured it was.

Co-GM and I noticed that to start her alt-guild, she'd recruited several members from our guild: mostly alts, but what concerned us was the handful of mains that left us to join the alt guild. Slightly annoyed that we, the leadership, hadn't been notified of her intentions, we spoke amongst ourselves with how to best handle this; if it's truly an alt guild, we should not have to worry about our ranks thinning. We weren't going to reprimand her, demote her, or remove her remaining character from the guild. We're not like that. She, along with her boyfriend, had been kind and helpful in the past.

Late the other night, I saw that the boyfriend, along with the another core raid dps who I'd been particularly close with, had left the guild to join up with the girlfriend's alt guild. I was crushed.

Scott,

Recently I transferred servers and joined a new guild to get a fresh start after a 3 month break from the game. My goal upon arriving at my new server was to find the right guild, I spent weeks searching for the perfect guild (it would be only my 3rd guild in 6 years) a place that had a little of everything. After much searching I found that guild. It was a community, a family that does tons of things together, a place that isn't only about the progression but about doing things together. It's an atmosphere I love.

Shortly after joining the guild, two long time friends from my previous guild returned to the game. I have become very close with these two people and enjoy playing with them, so I convinced them to server transfer. These friends had been hardcore raiders since vanilla and GM and officer of our previous guild before taking break. I had some reservations about them joining my new home because I knew their reactions from lack of power (due to a failed guild merger) but they are really nice people and I really wanted to play with them again.

A week or so after they joined the complaining started.

So I am at a crossroads. The guild I am currently in as an officer is 6/7 on FL norm. The raid schedule we currently have is a friday/saturday night. Unfortunately though due to real life scheduling soon I will not be able to raid on friday nights. I do not wish to leave this guild that I am currently in. I have 4 level 85s in the guild and I have developed a lot of friendships. I know if my guild leader finds out that i have left the guild she will understand but not be happy. I would like to find a guild who has a more flexible raid schedule, but I don't want to leave the guild I am in and loose my position of officer. I have no idea how to go about this situation.

Please help,

Much Confusion

Hi Scott,

I've been reading your blog for a little while because I'm a Cata baby and I want to make sure I'm able to navigate the sticky culture of guilds. I've gone through several guilds on my hunter main, trying to find a consistent raid group with real progression. After leaving a couple of guilds because progression just wasn't happening, I was recruited as a DPS for my current guild's Group Two.

The first few weeks of raiding were rocky, because the raid leader is not very articulate and is bad at explaining fights. He also takes criticism very personally and for the first couple weeks his DPS was (no other way to put it) terribad. One of the group's healers basically overrode him in voice chat and effectively took over management of the raid group, although the original raid lead was still party leader and loot master. However, several of the group members had a problem with the way the healer ran the group and the way he spoke to other party members. Despite the fact that Group 2 was now getting real progression and players were earning great gear, tension still mounted.

This is sort of long and rather complicated. I'm currently in a guild that I like but has had a leadership problem. In late Wrath/early Cata, we had a medium-sized, friendly guild who aspired to be a casual raiding guild. It was run by a guy we'll call X. X was a pretty good guild leader -- he sponsored events and would sometimes run dungeons. We were, for the most part, a great little guild with potential to be a great little raiding guild.

This all changed when X went to another server. At first he left leadership to Y, but Y soon left and leadership ended up all of a sudden in the hands of Z. Z was not a level 85 and rarely participated in the guild. He would not log on for weeks and this made it difficult to have a functional guild. As a result, people left in droves, many of whom had been important parts of the guild before the leadership change.

Two of the most active players who logged on regularly were myself and my sister, B. We tried to do things as a guild but we didn't have enough active players to regularly form a guild group, even with just 3 people. Sometimes Z would log on after 29 days, just in time to prevent us from kicking him. After a few months, we finally did take back leadership and B became GM.