Posts with tag rebuilding

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press.

Guilds fall apart. It happens so frequently these days that we take it as a matter of course. They can also be rebuilt, if there's a member intent on reviving them -- but is that always the wisest course of action? This week, one guild leader who refuses to disband is wondering what to do next.

Greetings, Scott!

Here's the TL;DR version: Raid Finder killed my guild. I want to resurrect it.

Here's the Paul Harvey version: A friend and I founded a guild at the outset of Burning Crusade. Our intent was to offer a place for mature people with real lives to be able to experience the raid content that at the time was mostly the domain of the hardcore players. We wanted to be serious about raiding, but more casual about attendance. ... We were never the top guild on our server, but we were fairly successful throughout Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King threw a monkey wrench into our works. It wasn't easy in BC to keep forming 25 man raids, but at least we always knew where the bar was. WotLK's split 10 and 25 man raids gave us a very tough decision to make every time we couldn't fill out a 25 man raid.

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press.

Guilds in WoW are a precarious fleet at this moment. With player activity stagnating, many guilds are like sinking ships. They survive only if their officers can bail water fast enough by replacing the players they've lost. Fickle players are quick to jump overboard and swim to a guild with fewer leaks, only to find that their new vessel isn't quite as watertight as it first appeared.

Today's email is from a guild leader whose hull has hit rock bottom. She wants to know whether to dredge up the wreck or shop around for a sturdier boat.

Hi Scott,

I am the leader of a guild that sadly has no more active members. My fiance and I started it to try out Cata raiding at our own pace with people we knew IRL but at the peak of the guild activity we could only get about 7 people together and getting everyone motivated to get their item level up high enough to attempt a raid was even tougher! I love playing a mage but found myself rolling a paladin and gearing up to be what the guild needed...tank or heals. I eventually got super burnt out with lack of effort and took a break from the game. Recently I have come back to a dead guild.

If there's one phrase that drives sports fans crazy, it's "rebuilding year." In sports, a rebuilding year is one in which expectations for the team are low, either because the team traded away aging veterans, gave starting positions to young and inexperienced players, or both. But sports fans are an impatient bunch. We don't want rebuilding years -- we want championships. Thus, teams do everything they can to deny that they are, in fact, rebuilding.

The same is true for guilds. Potential recruits don't want to hear about rebuilding -- they want to join an established organization in its prime. Thus, when your guild is in that starting-over situation, it can be very difficult to dig yourself out of the hole.

For some reason, I've received three emails about this topic over the past two weeks, so I figured I'd feature one of those emails here. I chose the one that bounced my message back when I tried to reply to it, so at least that person will know I did respond!

Dear Scott and the Officer's Quarters,

I am writing to ask for some perspective on the current state of my guild and the actions I could take to turn things around. I am the GM of a small guild on one of the older, more established WoW servers. I am told this server has been around since the early days of vanilla WoW.

As with any established server in any game, cliques are formed, reputation is king, and small guilds have a hard time flourishing when three quarters of the active player base belong to one of a few monster guilds. Our server has both monster progression guilds that field multiple 10-man raid groups in addition to 25-man groups as well as the Mega-store bargain perks blowout guilds that give every member the ability to invite new members with no real guidelines for membership.

My humble guild began as a way for a few real life friends to play together. Raiding, progression, and consistency were never a big deal for us toward the end of Wrath. Once Cataclysm came along with guild levels and the perks associated with them, our roster of casual and fun people plummeted. Some left the game completely because they were accustomed to blowing through the Wrath content without any difficulty. Others were deployed with their military units to the ends of the earth to fight real life wars. At this point we are left with the few real life friends in addition to a mere one or two other active members.

Enough of the back-story, now it is time for the point of my email:

How can a weak-roster guild survive amongst the concrete establishments of the dominant guilds? What can I do to find new members who could be beneficial to the guild and our goals of breaking into raiding without having to beg?

WoWAce is a set of libraries heavily used by developers to create many of those nifty AddOns we know and love like FuBar and Grid. Unfortunately, their Wiki site lost its data and the latest usable back up is over two months old. Everything since then has been lost.

In an effort to reconstruct the lost pages, they have pulled HTML copies of those pages from Google Cache and now they need your assistance. You can go to their Rebuilding page and help them convert the HTML into Wiki format and repost it on the site.

If you have some spare time, head on over and help them get back on their feet so they can continue to help developers create those AddOns we can't live without.