OzzymandiasKJ

I know that there are several discussions regarding recruitment on these boards but very few (if any) of them specifically talk about starting a new guild from scratch. So my apologies if this article is redundant.

Establishing a hardcore raiding guild this day in age is likely one of the hardest feats in the game. Most raiders are either already involved in a well grounded guild or have their eyes set (and applications in to) rather well known guilds.

I'm writing this article because lately I've been thinking back to about six months ago when I was stuck in a rut. Back when the top guilds were clearing Hyjal there was a very large gap on the Kil'Jaeden server between the top guilds and the mediocre guilds. The guilds that I wanted to be in were attempting Vashj, but I couldn't qualify due to lack of gear/experience. Which left me to the rest of the guilds on the server who were still trying to figure out how to kill Moroes. There literally was an entier tier between the good guilds and the other ones. I was at a standstill, I didn't want to be stuck in Karazhan all my life.

So I thought "What if I start my own guild?"

Some of you might remember that I came to EJ for advice and the response was rather negative. Just about anyone can see the intense struggle that is starting a new guild, from scratch, and striving to set up a good core group of raiders.

Most of you probably remember one month later when I came here and (respectfully) gloated that the job was done. Within a month I had a guild consisting of 30+ active raiders that cleared all the way from Attumen to Vashj.

Ultimately the reason why I'm writing this article is because I often see the same old "How do you recruit good raiders" question pop up, and knowing how hard of a struggle it is to establish a core team. I figured I'd share my experience of building an entire guild from the ground up well after TBC was released.

Now I'm going to start off by assuming that you can get at least five people interested in starting a new guild. But your goal here is to go from five to twenty five. So you need to get into some heavy recruitment. Before you hit the message boards, take the following into consideration.

Recruiting mass members is a full time job. I literally spent hours each day on the WoW recruitment boards just scouring the top 10 pages for specific classes that were PVP server-transfer ready. Even if the players in question were beyond my guild's progression I would attempt to contact them with a dynamic appeal.

What I mean by that is I never copy/pasted the same old routine for each person. It's tacky and on my first day alone I found several recruiters doing this. If I could notice it then I'm sure as hell that people who are actively looking for a new guild would notice it. It's disrespectful, in most cases the information that was copy/pasted by the recruiter would clash with the requests of the recruitee so it was blatently obvious that the recruiter didn't even read the player's post.

Don't be disrespectful. Read the player's post. Respond with a well thought out appeal. There may be cases where the person in question doesn't meet your requirements (or you don't meet theirs), but they might have a friend who's willing to join your guild. I think my courtesy was what awarded me the person's extra effort to go tell their friends about my guild.

Have an edge. This especially applies to a guild that's starting from scratch. Say you only have five people, and therefore all you can run at the moment are heroics but you want to recruit five more for Karazhan/ZA. Well you better have a damn reason why people should apply to your guild instead of the countless others that have killed Illidan. Think about the kind of players you want in your guild and then find an edge that would appeal to them.

For me it was simple. I wanted good raiders that could compete with the better guilds of my server. So competition was my edge. Like I said before, most guilds on my server were still stuck on plateau bosses in Karazhan. So when I recruited my initial ten raiders our goal was to defeat Karazhan ASAP. Two runs later we had Prince down. This was huge news at the time because I didn't really advertise my guild just yet. I was waiting for an edge.

Once we killed prince I hit the message boards, both the recruitment boards and my realm forums. "New Guild Kills Prince in First Week of Raiding. Now Recruiting for Gruul's". We stood out. And guess what, our applications board started getting some activity.

Today you can't really pull that kind of thing off since there are PUGs for Kara. But you can find another edge. Maybe you want to advertise your guild as a guild that wants to beat all of TBC from scratch before WoTLK comes out. This might appeal to people who believe in ideas like progression servers. My point (I'll just beat you over the head with it this one last time) is find an edge. Your guild needs to stand out or else you're just another run-of-the-mill guild and you're only going to get run-of-the-mill players interested.

Don't give up on raids unless you have to. On our first scheduled Maulgar night we had about 20 people show up. It was heartbreaking. I felt that I had worked very hard to create a group of 25 raiders but getting them all online at the same time felt impossible. In my anger I decided to continue on with the raid. People thought I was joking at first but I told them to form up in front of Gruul's Lair and that we were going to at least learn the pull if nothing else.

Several hours later we were standing on top of Maulgar's dead body with a group of 22. This was a huge victory for the guild and a stepping stone as well. We killed a boss on schedule, we killed a boss with a less-than-optimal group and we killed our first 25 man raid boss. We were extatic. And I can only imagine how bummed out we would have been had we not attempted the boss and just gave up on the raid.

Once we learned that we were capable of breaking these kind of boundries we began a trend of mis-matched raid groups killing bosses. 8 Man Karazhan, 20 man Gruul, we killed Illhoof before his big nerf without any warlocks (big news at the time). All of these feats turned into marketing campaigns on the message boards, and they all had positive returns.

So if you're having trouble building up your guild. Don't think that it's impossible. Work hard at it, recruiting is a long and hard job. Be respectful and you'll attract respectful players. And most importantly, dont be run-of-the-mill. Find an edge. If accomplishments aren't your guild's strong side then maybe advertise how great of a community your guild is. Just find something other than "LF HUNTER STARTING KARA WE HAVE A TABARD LOL" to represent your guild. Good luck.

P.S. It's also best to avoid spamming about your new-forged guild in general or trade chat. I used to be in a guild that did that and when I made my new guild I asked people why they wouldn't apply for that previous guild but are giving my new guild a shot. Their answer usually was that my new guild seemed a lot more "serious" simply because we didn't spam trade chat with stupid macros. Let word-of-mouth advertise your guild in-game. Use message boards for direct advertising.

 

Celandro

I think the biggest thing at this point is to have some reason for existance that stands you out from the rest of the server. in my own case, there were no 25 man 8pm start time raid guilds on Cenarius, but a ton of 5-7pm start time guilds and then some 10pm-2am aussie guilds. The guild was created to fill that void in the raid start times. Any good player trying to start a guild at this point NEEDS a reason why existing guilds will not work. In my case, i wanted a 2 day a week 8pm raid guild that would progress through 25 mans and neither criteria existed at the time.

If you are going to run such a limited play time guild, you have quite a few things working against you. People will want to run smaller raids on off nights. You will not have a lot of time to learn fights. Overcoming this is extremely difficult. In fact, I added a 3rd night just to speed up progression. You will need to recruit constantly. The second you stop recruiting, people stop showing up or leave for higher tier guilds which leads to..

Don't be afraid to pug to fill in slots. During a particularly slow time, we had to pug almost half a raid but things still got done. It's painful and frustrating, but if you don't pug on those nights, the guild will fall apart. You'd be amazed how many reasonably good players will fill out your SSC or Hyjal run. These players are also an excellent source of recruitment. Try to make them have a reasonable chance at gear and they may end up one of your core players in the long run.

Accept that your guild may never catch up to the top tier guilds, but that doesn't mean you can't push forward. Watching your wowjutsu rating move from 100 to 30 can be its own sense of accomplishment. Beating a boss for the first time is always a sense of accomplishment, no matter how much easier it is for you than the first guilds who killed the boss.

 

Fenks

So what happened to your guild?

 

• Nurru

Did you happen to have a character named "Igni" in the past?

19:31 <@Zyla> I fuck like a gorilla
19:31 <@Zyla> wait
19:31 <@Zyla> wrong chat room

 

Nezralix

Frankly, it's nice to see a new post on something other than boss strategies. I think it's a good thing when people try to share their experiences with difficult topics in a clear, helpful manner.

 

Dynalisia

While I love threads like this to exchange experiences and discuss common ails, I'm not sure about the idea of a 'sweet informational thread' on the topic of guild management if that was the idea. Guild management generally tends to amount to dealing with so many little things in the right way, that if someone doesn't have an natural sense to get those things right in one way or another and would have to rely on a best practices guide, they would have a hard time lasting in the long run. Especially since circumstances will differ considerably between guilds, servers and even continents. Not to mention that a big part of it would probably come down to stuff you could find in general business literature if you were really looking for it.

 

• Groglox

Sounds like a best practices to me.

 

Dynalisia

I think I was off the mark anyway, as he clearly said the topic was guild creation, not guild continuation or management,

 

Tirin

You're right about finding and holding your edge. If you're looking to progress fast, don't accept subpar candidates just to bulk up your raid roster. Not doing Kara doesn't hurt as badly as wiping on Huntsman because your people were idiots. If you want to have a community, the uber-geared jerk should be rejected immediately. Whatever you want your guild to stand out for, hold firm to it.

Prevent drama by stopping the bad seeds at the door.
Don't lower your standards just to get the guild started. I've seen too much guild drama caused by a guy who wouldn't be allowed in under current standards, but was basically grandfathered in because he was there from the beginning. Yeah, you want to get started on Karazhan, you want to have the numbers for Gruuls, you want some good tanks for ZA, whatever. But in the long run, it causes a lot less drama to reject Bob the incredibly annoying jerk than it is to kick Bob, "highest dps rogue in the guild, and he's been here forever!", and the two stooges he got invited.

 

OzzymandiasKJ

Sorry I should have been a little more clear with my objective in creating this thread. I'm hoping that people can provide tips and advice regarding guild creation and building a guild from the ground up using their own experiences. Its also interesting to see how unique of an experience some guilds must have had when they were built up; for instance, I believe Elitist Jerks originally consisted of a very large group of friends, didn't it?

 

Pants

I think it's interesting to hear about different guild experiences, though I'd say that holding a guild together is a lot harder than starting a new one, and that not all the advice in the OP can be generalized to all guilds.

The point of having "an edge" is important though. For instance, my guild has a few edges that we push during recruitment and retention:

1) Last of the native day 1 guilds on our server. Stable as a rock.
2) No foul language, racism, sexism, gay-bashing or intolerance in chat, forums and vent.
3) No minimum raid attendance (members regularly take breaks for weeks or months)
4) No core raid team, no set raid composition
5) We abide by the rule of law: we have a constitution, a 2-house legislature, rules of conduct and voting, and a checked/balanced guild leader. (For example, the guild leader does not have the power to invite or gkick people and would be in serious trouble if he did).

As you can imagine, this makes it hard to progress at the same rate as core guilds--but we keep picking up new recruits who are attracted to a guild that values real life > play or have been previously burned by abuse of officer / star power.

 

• DeeNogger

Thems fightin words!

I write things The word of DeeNogger

 

Pants

Apologies, alliance side. I didn't know KF was that old. /respect. Goon squad is day one too, but their edge is a never-ending supply of fresh goons. I'm a SA member myself, but I wouldn't call goon guilds "stable."

 

killakast

QFT,

I always told my officers/recruiting officers, While recruiting we are not looking for friends.. after we evaluated players and realize that they are compatible with the guilds needs becoming friends comes easily. Since we are a raiding guild it would be nice to partner up with raiders =)

 

Shavnir

Goon Squad is stable like an asylum is. As a building it is unlikely to move however the interior's sanity is sometimes questionable :v

 

Caryna

@OzzymandiasKJ:

Recently I have been going through (as in experienced it myself) what you wrote in your previous post some months ago and this new post. Your posts have given me some inspiration and ideas for what I am up to now.

Three weeks ago we merged two small and casual guilds who ran Karazhan and ZA together for a long time already. I became GM and RL. Instead of having to start from scratch we had the advantage of having a base of ~14 people who have been playing together for a while. We then went through our friends list and paid more attention to random people we met on heroic runs to get some more people on board. By now we have the ability to run two groups in Karazhan which clear it in ~3 hours and 4/6 in ZA (two timed chests if we don't mess up and Hex Lord to 14% on the first ever pull).

Last week I decided it's about time to gauge what our people are actually capable of, so I just went ahead and put up a Mount Hyjal run for the weekend, basically skipping all T5 and some T4 content. Most people were very excited to see something new and of course some were skeptical. So, last night we went in there with a less than optimal group. We took 3 people from outside the guild to get the numbers and one of our feral cats just dinged 70 about 24 hours earlier.

What happened? We did better than most expected, managed to reach the 8th wave a few times, got our jewelcrafters to friendly rep, banked a few hearts and quite some marks as well as a melee dps necklace and a blacksmithing plan from trash.

The result? The raid group is now highly motivated after seeing that they actually can do hard stuff and eager to do more 25 people content. The general feedback was that no-one expected to get past wave 3-4 and all were more than happy with the evening, even if we died some horrible deaths.

Morale of the story? If you are starting a new (raiding) guild, don't be afraid to take them to some extremes or "impossible" things from time to time. People are very eager to see new things and will do their best. And never give up a raid unless you really have no choice. 2-3 people short? Not the desired classes around? So what! Chances are that you can still pull it off with some creative thinking and don't be like the GM/RL in my first guild who wouldn't set a foot into Onyxia's lair if we only had 38 people online instead of 40 while learning her.

You know that you play too much WoW if you partners pants become a rare drop.

 

Pand

In the past 3 weeks or so, I've managed to build a top raiding guild from scratch after taking a break from raiding for over 1 1/2 years.

Building a guild is sort of like a job, requires tons of effort but the idea that you're sourcing your own union with your own means does have its sentimental rewards.

Although my circumstances came from mostly networking and community advocates, our guild managed to take mostly PvPers who haven't done raid content in TBC and clear T6 content in less then 2 weeks.

How did we do it? Luck and prosperity. Before TBC I happened to be a former guild leader / raid leader turned PvP arena addict, after sourcing all the arena players I could we built up a decent 30 man base to build our guild around and via point selling gold, we were able to build the gear required to do BT and Hyjal.

I guess it takes having resources to progress, but it isn't impossible.

 

Halle

[a little bit off topic]

Reading posts like this and my experiences as both a managing director for my own business and in an officer position in my guild make me realise just how business minded guilds need to be in order succeed these days.

Recruitment for top guilds is becoming more and more like the kind of process you find in everyday work environments. From the application form to a trial period and in some cases even regular performance assessments. Penalties for lack of attendance and in severe cases even getting 'fired'.

I would love someone to put time into a study of some sorts, maybe a student could pick the subject for a paper, would be an interesting read (or maybe someone already has).

If some of the people running top end guilds can turn their focus one day away from wow to their real life achievements, they will go a long way.

Sadly half the reason for succeeding is enjoying what you do, wow has a knack of fulfilling that

Sunwell 5/6
Hyjal 5/5
Black Temple 9/9

 

Mode

Two unbrought-up points every raid guild must address at the beginning.

A. How do you decide who gets the loot? You need to pick a system early and stick to it. Officer loot sounds great in theory, but my experience is that most guilds that use it implode violently sooner rather than later. If you can manage to get 35-40 good friends, you can make it work, but it's more likely that you have a core of 10 friends and then those other people you just...hang with. If you go with DKP, you need to decide what your objectives are. Do you want to divide loot 'fairly'? Do you want it to go to the best person possible? Do you like math? Do people earn DKP or do characters?

B. What do you do about good players with worthless specs? Several specs are widely viewed as just plain worthless; specifically, balance druids at every gear level and protadins before Tier 5. Do you accept them into your guild?

 

Cosimé

Having build up my own raid with a handfull of good friends within TBC I would always recommend to take the good players over the perfect specs or better gear.

The differences between the standard raidspecs and the more exotic ones (not speaking of pure pvp-specs or something "just bad") have in my opinion become quite small. You have to use our "own" group-setup though, that makes use of the advantages you can get. Additionally, if you want to have your new people stay with your raid for a very long time, you will never know who may get hit by the nerfbat and when. Your perfect spec or perfect raidsetup may in a few months no longer be perfect.

 

OzzymandiasKJ

I believe these questions fall into the category of showing respect to the players. When you advertise your new guild you definitely want to be very clear about how your loot is distributed as well as the recruitee's reaction to your ruleset.

One thing I always did when I was recruiting full-time was that I had a personal interview with every applicant that the guild was interested in. In these interviews I made sure that the player understood how we did loot, how we behaved in raids and what kind of blemishes might exist in the guild. I never hid anything from our applicants because there's nothing worse than finally finding that kickass 100% attendance shadow priest and then to have him leave within a week because he's offended by your guild's demeanor.

Have respect for your applicants, tell them everything about your guild. Including loot rules, obviously.

As for question B:

You're talking about a sort of paradoxical player here. My image of a good player would be somebody who understands the concepts behind different specs and knows when to spec in and out of particular trees. One thing I made sure to look out for was players who played their class and not just one particular spec.

For example: When I was first starting off my guild we had a problem with a lack of Paladins. I ended up taking one in who made it clear right off the bat that he intended on playing protection spec. I was foolish enough to think that no player would be so stubborn as to not respec for the sake of a raid, but this guy wouldn't respec even when I offered to pay for it.

Suffice to say I was looking for a new Paladin the next week.

On the other hand, after our guild was better established there was a small guild that had disbanded and a lot of their senior members came to us for a new home. I wasn't looking for new players at the time, but one of them really stood out to me. He was a very well-geared mage that had several level 70 alts. At the time we had something like 6 active raiding mages, so I asked him how willing he would be to play his Shaman character seeing as we could have used another resto shaman.

The player claimed that he preferred to play his mage, but he understood the responsibility of having access to a level 70 Shaman. He spent the week gearing up his Shaman and came back to me with a ready-to-raid resto shaman. I was so impressed by his dedication that I gave him a spot in pretty much every raid from then on.

The point I'm making with these examples is that you should be clear about what you want from your applicants when you recruit them. If they're unwilling to change specs for raiding, then you need to know that going in or else your entire raid might suffer like mine did. In my second example I made perfectly clear to the applicant that I had no room for his mage but he could join the guild as a Shaman. He decided to do so and it made his raiding career a lot more fulfilling than it was before and his addition to the guild was a great one.

 

Jehane

This topic is one which is often covered on my own stomping grounds, which would be the Guild Relations section of the US WoW forums, as well as the privately moderated Chamber of Guilds/Roundtable (Roundtable ~ Chamber of Guilds: News). The focus of both those boards is directed towards solving problems common to guild managment. Roundtable in particular (thanks to Ciderhelm of Tankspot) has been working towards developing monthly presentations for guild leaders.

The general consensus has been that it is easier to start a new guild than to reform an old one; but that recruitment and reputation seem to be overwhelming barriers to inexperienced guild leaders. Our forums are full of "How do I recruit quality players?" posts from guilds at virtually every level of progression.

Confident leadership is one of the few things you can do to bolster momentum. One common factor that we have noted in failing guilds is an absent or disillusioned leadership that refuses to take charge, resolve disputes, and face new challenges. Physical or mental fatigue is often cited as the culprit.

Clear, well-enforced guild rules; appropriate