Little over a month ago I came to the Elitist Jerks forums in search for advice from more accomplished players about a touchy yet all-too-common subject regarding the nature in which we treat this game. I was enrolled in a guild that was terrible at progression. We were stuck on the same boss in Karazhan for well over a month and every night there would be no sign of relief. Feeling left in the dust after reading the accomplishments of guilds like Nihilum, or EJ (wink), I was very dissatisfied with how my time, energy and money was being spent.

However, I felt an obligation to my guild as well. I had befriended many people over the years of being in that guild and to leave them just to shoot fake fireballs at some AI didn’t seem right. It’s interesting, any critic of e-society would find my situation laughable – these are people who I only know by their fake names and SpeechX encoded voices, but they’re friends nonetheless.

The advice that I was given catered towards servicing my desires to progress, but just about everyone empathized with my commitment to these people. So I took a gamble and asked my friends to come with me. I started a new guild with a roster of around 14 raiders that quickly eroded down to about 10. It seemed like a dire and pointless effort to keep the new guild going. Morale was hanging on by a thread and our first raid wasn’t even able to get up to Maiden. I was warned about how hard it would be to try and create a guild from scratch, but this was just a blow to the nuts. But for some unexplainable reason I didn’t think about giving up. From the EJ forums and talks with experienced GMs to fortune cookies and horoscopes, the same lesson was being preached: “Your task will only be accomplished with the utmost commitment”, I think that’s what the cookie said.

I kept at it. I went to the WoW forums to recruit. I approached some well known guilds and players and promoted my guild. I enforced a policy of maintaining a good image and only portrayed our guild in the best light possible - without ever having to lie or bend the truth. Meanwhile in-game I pushed my raiders. The only way we could attract people was to succeed and to be determined to get through the dirt and grind to win. We would treat wipes as a tool of progression and consciously evaluated everything we did. Sooner than later we began adding new bosses to our chalkboard. Slowly but surely the roster went from 10 to 11, and then from 11 to 12. We grew, we progressed and we never looked back.

Now the guild sits at a healthy roster of around 40 raiders. We’re farming out Karazhan with two solid groups that can clear it in one sitting while learning brand new 25 man encounters within hours. Looking back at everything I went through to get from where we were, wiping on Aran, to where we are now; I can fully appreciate the greatness of this game. There’s so much more to it than collecting loot and strategizing against boss encounters and I can only hope that the rest of my career in this game will feel as rewarding as this experience has been.

Grats Ozzy, you guys have earned it. Keep it up for the "middle-of-the-road" KJ guilds.

I do enjoy reading a good success story every now and then. Congrats =)

As long as you remember that it is a game and it is just pushing pixels around, then you've likely gotten more satisfaction and sense of accomplishment than most people who play the game.

You didn't name yourselves the "Dropbears of Funk." You will /gdisband in a month!

I salute your efforts and your accomplishments.

Hurray!

Congratulations from my end as well.

Ever since we've formed our guild it has been one growing pain after another. But we are persevering. And I've learned first hand what it means to be GM, because I had to step up to the plate after our first GM got hit with real life issues. To illustrate it a bit: from dealing with rumours of guild splitting into two guilds (because 2 groups were clearing Karazhan) to lately dealing with PVP spec players who want to raid...

Its a game and its supposed to be fun dammit.

Congratulations none the less.

Congratulations, you beat WoW

In all seriousness, you win. Getting to where you want on your terms and having a good time is success, no? We need more stories like this.

My guild is a casual raiding guild. We're slower but not slow. We respect each other, learn and work at things in a limited amount of time. And every damn time we take a boss down I realize I just beat WoW.

/salute

Congratulations on your many successes.

Not to be a parade rainer, but there will be other challenges, every guild faces them. Enjoy!

Congrats...

And keep the attitude moving forward!

As a guild master since my days in UO (1996) I've learned a few things that are constants in any game like this...

You will lose your best players. This is a fact, sooner or later your best *class* will quit the game, quit the guild, move on to a new game, loose interest, start a new job, or some other thing... to fight this make sure you don't put too much faith in one persons ability to do a job... have two main tanks, have all your off tanks aspiring to learn to MT... have your healers take turns assigning healer duty, etc etc... It's not the end of the world, someone else can fill the slot.

You will lose their friends when they go. This is another fact, sooner or later that one guy will quit, and that one buddy of his won't have a reason to hang out anymore. Look for clicks in the guild, don't try to break them up, thats pointless... but if you have a warrior who's buddies with the best shaman, make sure you have a shaman who can replace just like the warrior who can replace. Staff a little over, point out that in doing this you ensure that while a few people sit out each raid, a few people can take a day off for whatever reason and you can still raid!

You will have crushing defeats but you will need to turn them (as you said) into learning experiences. Find out where you went wrong, don't try to lay blame, try to identify the fault and learn from it. After two and a half years of wow, my guild knows that when I ask who fucked that up, I'm not trying to bust their balls, I'm trying to find out what we can do to make that not happen again... sometimes it's as simple as someone saying "I crossed the big ring of fire, I wont do it again..." and other times it's a lot more complex... and it wasn't one person, but it ends up being 3 people were giving 95% of their focus to the right thing, and that other 5% wiped us... Don't let it be a down, let it be a learning experience.

You will be slandered by others on the server/community... and then, and not before, but then you know... you have made it to the end game. Once someone slanders your guild (note: slander means it's not true) then you are really successful... you have made someone jealous!

Players who move on to greener pastures are a great asset... Our main tank moved on to another end game guild, our second tank who was more hard core than we wanted to be did as well, I can't count the number of players in the past two years who have stepped through my ranks and onto a larger guild... but I can tell you the amount of tactical advice I get from them... a shitload. Never underestimate how valuable it is to have someone who's DONE the fight willing to come back and chat it up with you... they often want to brag about how good they are doing, but what you get is how they are doing so good... learn from their mistakes, improve on their tactics, and press on. Another benefit of staying on good terms is when some a-hole on the forums tries to badmouth your guild, you'll often find ex-guildies come to your defense... They know how you run the show, they know you're a good guy, you just didn't run it fast enough for them.

Anyhow, enough wall of text, keep a guild fun, progression focused, and raiding... the epix are a byproduct of that...

Awesome! Glad to see it worked out for you.

This thread really made my day. I along with a bunch of friends are in the exact same situation you are describing. Our roster is about 15 people and we have yet to decide a final name for our new guild. I have been worrying a lot lately if the decision to leave our former guild was a correct one, and if we will be able to gather enough competent people. But hearing a sucess story like yours assured me that we were doing the right thing.

congratulations!

Congratulations Ozzy.

I did the same thing myself and I can tell anyone trying to set up a guild on their own that is no easy task. It's very time consuming and in order to succeed you need very good organization and clear defined goals.

The best advice I can give someone is to be very careful when recruiting. Take your time and only pick those that you are 100% sure you would like them in your guild. Compromising just because you badly need some class will have some short term results but on the long term it will come back and haunt you.

Patience is all you need.

Threads like these really bring a smile to my face. So few people actually truly enjoy the game, so caught up in the competitive fight for progression. Progression is wonderful and so is playing with a group of skilled players, but the people make this game what it is, and I refuse to play with people I don't enjoy.

Again, I'm happy for you. Keep up the wonderful attitude and I wish you the best of luck with your new guild.

Congrats. I know how you must feel in light of your success! To me there is nothing more rewarding in this game, than seeing your hard work pay off, and in the case of being a part of the leadership in a guild, with every minor victory you feel just a glimmer of this sort of success. Building, and maintaining a guild is hard, harder still a progression guild, and harder yet a progression guild of friends. Congrats sir, and may your successes continue!

From one upstart guild leader to another - congrats! I'm pretty sure I remember your other post about Aran - glad to hear you've made it. I must admit I'm a wee bit jealous of your roster - we've only been able to break into solo (non-partnership) 25 man content after about 3 months of Kara raiding.

What's your secret to such quick growth?

Yeah, this warms even my heart; I'm impressed by your unwavering dedication to your guild and your ability to put aside personal concerns and make sacrifice for the overall good of the guild. Keep it up!

It is always nice to read success stories. This with guild management is tricky business and it seems that no matter what you do you will suffer through some very rough times now and then. So watch out for the rough times becasuse they will come and this leads me into my true purpose for making this post. Yes I had an ulterior motive and I did not want to ressurect an ancient topic or start a new one and seeing as this one is roughly about guild management I thought I would bring it up here.

Does anyone have any good advice about how to get through to your raiders that the rough patches are natural and that they will hopefully fade? Our guild have after blitzing through SSC following the big patch reached Vashj and as we expected she was kinda tough. In the following weeks we never really got anything done smoothly in SSC and we continued to struggle on all encounters so that when we finally reached Vashj it was late in the week and people were a bit worn. This is pretty natural as it takes a while to get stuff on farm and we had literally killed one new boss per night after the patch. People were getting grumpier and saw the inevitable wipes as some inherent flaw with themselves and the guild. Progress on Vashj was slow and after four-five full evenings on her we have only got her to phase 3 with a dead raid twice. To lighten things up we went and managed to kill Solarian (Void Reaver died before the attunement removal) and then bam it struck. This week we found ourselves without four of our six tanks gone due to summer holidays and computer errors. Me myself is working nights during hte summer so I am gone half the raiding nights, our GM has been swamped by RL work, two of the other officers were part of the four missing tanks which left us with one veteran officer and one enthusiastic rookie. To get the steam back up they decided to go Al'ar with a patchwork raid (respecced tree and dps warrior helping tanking). Three nights of horrible wiping of which I was only a part of one on a boss I know and everyone knows we would kill in a matter of hours with a normal set up. This was a huge blow to guild confidence and people seem to be despairing. Me myself have been around the block so the slump in itself doesnt worry me, these things happen and I know you just have to work through them but the mood even among fellow officers seems to be one of despair. I guess my question is and my reason for posting this mastodont post is if anyone have any good tips how to convince people that things are fine that as long as they keep their chins up things will look up again shortly and the only thing to fear is, as they say, fear itself? All I have been doing up to know is just telling people to chill and that these things happen especially during summer unless your guild is built up around teenagers on summer holiday. It is a daunting thing to log in and face 23 raid eager people or even 26 and tell them a few evenings in a row that nothing will be going on. Makes you feel kinda helpless and overwhelmed.

Edit: As for recruiting to solve our issues it isnt really an option. We have a rooster with multiple redudancy and using a very liberal waiting list system to always have replacements ready to go. We have basically at least two raiders for every spot and the lack of attendance is mostly due to normal summer stuff. I want to know how to keep the morale up for those guys who arent chilling on a tropical beach with a pina colada.

If people are showing signs of burnout - give them a break. A week or so with no raid usually makes people come back with an unquenchable thirst for raiding. Try it.

Or it makes them remember how much they like having free time, and they don't come back.

Of course actively discouraging people from this sort of realization probably isn't the most defensible of approaches. But if you're being pragmatic....

That's pretty pessimistic thinking though, but it is indeed a possibility. Then again, do you really want people with such an attitude in your raid?

Go run an Azerothian instance. Smash BWL, AQ40 or Naxx. Many of the fights are easily doable with 25 people, and your raiders may have fun seeing fights that they never progressed to in Vanilla and maybe even get an side/upgrade or two.