I agree. This is the number one thing that has kept my guild afloat. In most guilds the turnover rate is huge. When you don't have enough members on at raid time, and you have to call it, the moral hits rock bottom. Progression crawls to a stop and people start leaving. The guild recruitment forums are crap. You have to go through every single post as they fly by and hope that you find a player that fits your needs. While you bump your thread, hoping that someone finds it.

I wasted hours upon hours doing the above, having little to no result, until I snapped. That is when I started Looking For Guild

I had no web design experience at all, and zero programing skills, but I knew what I wanted. I pulled this off from pure anger and had the help of a VERY cool guild leader. (Herdis) You can search guilds by and players by: Server, Server Type, Faction, Time Zone, Raid Start Time, and Raid End Time. It is everything that the guild recruitment forums should be. The ads expire unless they are updated, so that means that they are almost always current.

It has taken several months but we are up to 1,200 ish guilds with ads up currently, and about 450 players looking for guilds with ads up. All highly searchabe. This has freed up countless hours bumping threads, and scouring the forums, and found the guild a lot of great players and new friends.

Great site. Are you foreseeing to add something for us Euros as well?

Thanks, I am thinking about it. Marketing is hard for me as I have never done it before, and it would be even more difficult for me to spread the word on that side of the ocean.

First of all hello since its the first time i am posting on these forums and thanks a lot for the interesting article! I will not waste your time by saying how my guild started,all i will say is that it was wrong from the start. With 2 level 60s back then and aiming to do pre TBC end game,you can all imagine how frustrating it was. For a variety of reasons we decided to keep it going and not disband but through TBC we encountered several problems :

1) Raiding ability : Yes i admit it we had no clue on how to raid back then! We weren't raiders and we struggled really much in order to realise how a proper raid is done and what it takes

2)People using the guild as a stepping stone,get in,get gear from the content we were farming (Kara back then),apply to more progressed guilds and leave us back to the start missing key classes like tanks and healers

3)Defining a guild as casual but raiding was a mistake because most people thought that appearing once per week for a raid would be all that it takes for it to happen.

4)Lack of proper leadership. Being over friendly,having too many officers,not being strict enough when resolving problems leads to messes and messes lead to people leaving and a guild that is about to disband.

5)Mass recruiting at some point lead us into getting all sorts of people that unfortunately at points caused more harm than good. Yes we did make the numbers for a raid but we didnt make the mentality or the effort needed for a raid to be successful.

Point of this rant? Yes making a raiding guild takes time,effort and lots of odds that u have to beat. Yes it is possible if u have a stubborn GM,a core group of people determined to make it work no matter what,you don't get discouraged by people leaving,raids failing and so on. I would honestly advice everyone willing to make a raiding guild from scratch to define that guild properly with a correct identity which will not cause you to end up with all sorts of people and players.Focus on your goals,keep trying till u achieve them and make sure that the people u mostly count on will not turn their backs on you as soon as a better guild opens recruitment. Set realistic goals and dont believe that you can get into SWP after karazhan in a month,just focus on something possible and make it happen.Last but not least do not make our (or better say my) mistake of counting too much on a specific tank or a specific healer...real life happens and u cannot predict that!

When I started out as classleader-officer in other guilds and had to start recruiting players that wasnt my own class I had to read up alot on different classes and specs. Frankly, dont really have the time for that. So when I found the classthread for restoshamans here on elitistjerks I was jumping with joy. Now when we started a new guild I have to recruit almost everything myself and cant really depend on other officers/gm/classleaders to make the final decision, restoshamans is the only class I feel certain with. whats so special with the restoshamanclasstread that I havnt found in the others?
The
part is whats making me keeping my head and have some hum about what stats they should have.
I hate to put a question in here, but I havnt found better summary of gear on any site or thread. Is it possible that someone with more knowledge than me sums the classes up for us officers/gms that doesnt have a lvl 70 alt of every class.

When I do a basic gear check, I use the website Be Imba! - the online Character Auditor for World of Warcraft. It analyzes people's gear and estimates in what tier of progression they are likely to get beneficial upgrades and in what tier they would be expected to perform well. You can also use it on your existing guildies for reference/comparison.

In our guild, folks who are obviously too low geared to meaningfully contribute without being dragged through the raid are usually immediately denied, while folks with gear scores that are similar/in range of what our current guildies are at are looked at more closely.

I hope this is not so severely off-topic, but just recently I was asked by our GM to make a new guild website (we are a raiding guild), with dkp plugin and forum, raid calendar, sign up and all that. I was wondering is there any written software packages that I can use to get the website up and running quickly?

wowstead

My guild Mannel used to be pretty hardcore pre-tbc but fell apart when Gm vent to curse etc.
Much later i get contacted by an old guild mate saying that they are startÃ*ng up the guild again but more casual.
We cleared kara with our rag-tag group of green/blues. Got some more of the old peeps in to level up to 70 and the rest as they say is history.
Found this timeline on our forum.

30 Mar: First 25 man, Gruul and TK
06 Apr: First SSC
10 Apr: First MH
20 Apr: First BT
29 Apr: Archimonde Kill
08 May: Kael'thas Sunstrider Kill
11 May: Lady Vashj Kill
10 Jun: Illidan Stormrage Kill
03 Jul: Kalecgos
15 Jul: Brutallus
28 Jul: Felmyst

Greetings from a lurker. It is 5 AM and I can't sleep because I have been reading boss strategies and now I want to go do our last raid over. Instead, I thought I'd share the highlights of what happens when you let a marketing manager help design a guild.

Four of us chose to transfer from an RPPVP server to a PVP server where we knew no one, wanting to make PVE progression while only raiding 8-12 three times a week. We started by defining our business model - what we wanted to accomplish and how we intended to do it - before we even chose a guild name. This helped us identify our ideal customer: people who wanted to raid but couldn't afford the hardcore guilds' schedules because of family, school, or professional commitments.

At that point, we designed our business practice (dkp, attendance rules, etc) around satisfying our ideal customer. After we defined our business practices, we started our marketing, most of which ideas are covered in posts above.

Do we have a guild full of only our ideal customers? No. Sometimes we get people who are a bit more driven; sometimes we get people who aren't as goal-oriented. For about the first 9 months, we were considered a feeder guild for the more hardcore guilds on the server. A dubious honor and frustrating situation. But we survived. And because our practices are designed for our ideal customer, we are finding that the extreme ends of the spectrum weed themselves out or adjust to the mean. Now we take down bosses like real raiders.

Always keep your business model in mind when building your policies and practices, and always build to suit your ideal guildmember, because if they're happy, you're in business. Now, if you don't have the right customers, you won't be happy running the business. If you're not happy, something is wrong. Try tweaking your practices. If that doesn't work, you will need to take a hard look at your business model. Maybe your focus has changed. Be willing to change to accommodate new ideas, be willing to accept criticism where it's due, and be willing to make the tough calls to protect your most valuable asset - the people you want with you when you get your "wins."

Thank you for reading my post and have a good morning.

We made a different approach. We founded a new raid lately and made very high requirements for the recruits except on gear. Also we decided to ban any WotLK spoilers from our forums and start to develop our own tactics. The posts named "spoiler-free raid with skilled players" attracted some thousand hits in non-recruitment forums as we made the recruitment post look like a discussion about spoiler free raiding and the requirements.

Our forum traffic increased by an amount of ten or more within hours (which still isn't a lot but seriously more than we used to have). A lot of players that didn't play for some time and didn't have the gear or 2000+ non druid/rogue arena players answered our recruitment post and we started raiding in Hyial with completly undergeared players partially. Up until now all the recruits looked really fine and we have the strongest team I have ever raided with.

We are still a casual lore-based RP-Raid, but it's just so much more fun if noone is around that really sucks. Most likely everyone of our raid still sucks compaired to any good guild, but the idea to put skill requirements way up und not use gear requirements at all worked out really fine for us.

I am working on forming a new raid guild for WotLK. I feel that the parallel progression paths (10 and 25) makes this task far easier. In TBC, you could gather up 10 players and knock out Kara (and ZA once it was released) but if you wanted to do any "real" raiding, you had to find another 15 solid players.

With 10-man being a full progression path, I can gather my friends and other SOLID players and continue to progress while finding people for those other 15 spots that don't force us to lower our standards.

25-mans are my ultimate goal as I find them more fun, however I no longer have to compromise the skill level of my recruits to fill my roster, as running 10-mans is a fully viable progression alternative.

I'll try to toss updates as this process ramps up. Site soon.

I'd like to throw out for discussion the idea of a "serious" guild that only raids two nights a week with a third "soft" raid night for fun/non progression stuff like working on achievements, world PVP, guild battlegrounds etc. Two nights and serious might seem like an oxymoron, but after a couple failed "real" raiding guilds, and conversations with other players whose opinions I respect, I see no reason why a guild made up of very skilled and mature players couldn't kill every boss and clear every instance while only raiding two nights a week. They won't do it as fast as the best 5 nights a week guilds, but they would do it. All I have to do is subtract the number of wipes due to preventable individual fail from the last year of my life, and the amount of time my guilds would have needed to kill bosses would have been a mere fraction of what it actually was.

I think there are enough people who play this game who are sufficiently skilled that would be interested in a more "casual" raid schedule, people with families, school, work etc. that preclude membership in a more traditional raiding guild. I myself have a wife, a kid, college courses, and an upcoming LSAT to worry about. I'm on the verge of creating such a guild on my server with the intention to start as small as necessary, and grow as slowly as necessary to maintain the absolute highest standards. I will only recruit people who are as immune to individual fail as humanly possible while avoiding the primadonnas, flakes, lootwhores, racists/pervs and otherwise undesireable dross that permeates my and every server. Crushridge has nothing like this, and while I'm sure I could find a home on another realm, I'm looking to stay where I am due to friends and family (who in most cases wouldn't be involved in the new guild)

I also intend to make it work on Crushridge partly because the server fails as much as it does. At the moment, no guild of either faction has killed Kil'jaeden, and most of the handful of guilds in Sunwell have either been stuck on Brutallus for months, yes months, or stuck on M'uru for just as long. Raiding 5 nights a week has done nothing for these guilds besides burn out the few amazing players they had, driving many to transfer off realm.

So a truely stellar "Serious Casual" guild would really stand out on my server, clearing content at a slow pace by "world first" standards, but much faster than the terrible guilds that pass for high-end here.

Just a few nuts and bolts: I intend to recruit rerolls and transfers, using every resource available. Since the timing is great for that, especially with the refer-a-friend program and PVE --> PVP transfers, I think now is the time to get started and prepare for WotLK. I don't have any expectation of this working without a lot of players from other realms deciding that it would be something they want to be a part of. Crushridge just doesn't have the talent pool necessary to pull it off. We'll have all the things a good guild should have, a strong leader, knowledgeable officers, a well used website, fair dkp, good raid leadership, a well managed gbank etc. I hope to attract the kind of people who will want to invest themselves in something that at least on paper seems very valuable. I don't want to be a "gear up" guild, or a guild where people get in for the loot they want and then bail. I intend it to be a place where big boys and girls get together to make the most of the time they have to play a really great game, rather than a place where you feel like the only one in the room that doesn't need to put a helmet on in the morning.

so,

thoughts?

As WoW has aged, so has the population that plays it. There is a growing demand for later, less strenuous raid schedules. Long-time WoWers are now out of college or their work schedules have changed. I am actually part of a "casual" raiding guild that has taken on the task of rerolling and trying to beat Illidan. By "casual" I mean our raid schedule is (was) casual but our mindset and everything about us (recruiting standards, raid behavior, employment of measures, etc.) was hardcore. We went from T5 content in April to facing Illidan last week. Not an overly fast pace. However, the casual raid schedule quickly deteriorated as we faced end-bosses (KT, Vashj, Archi, Illidan). It's simply not possible, unless the guild members have previously all killed such bosses, to learn and execute the fights on such as lax raid schedule.

We learned this the hard way when trying to down KT after Vashj. We couldn't fit BT, MH, SSC, and KT (along with a ZA/Kara "soft" night) all into our raid schedule and we had to make a choice. Our goal all along was Illidan so we straight for him.

We also had another niche where we would raid at late-nights central time. Something our aging target "market" (who is getting out of college and working odd-hour jobs or raising families) latched onto right away.

There's lots of factors that have to go into any such guild. Strong and competent leadership, motivated members, high recruiting standards to minimize turnover, etc. It will be interesting to see how such "reroll" guilds deal with the Wrath changes. Most of us come from guilds that broke up (or we left successful guilds) because of TBC.

I agree there isn't time in 2 raid nights to clear a lot of content. My intent is to streamline the process to the point that we won't NEED a lot of time. And yeah, I think one of the things we'll have to give up is farming multiple instances every week. In BC terms, we might have to alternate weeks with SSC and TK once we start in Hyjal, and drop them altogether once we start on BT in earnest, spending one night on content we have down, and spending most of the other night learning new encounters. Eventually the content we choose to farm will be quick and efficient to the point that there will be more than enough time to chew on a new boss every few weeks.

Even with those tougher fights like Kael, Vash, and Archi (which I don't consider hard personally), most of the time that my guilds spent wiping was because a handful of people just needed 2873 attempts to finally understand their role in the fight and what they needed to do to stay alive.

Some people only need 2-3 attempts on a boss like Archimonde before they understand perfectly what they need to do to stay alive and do their job. After that, they virtually never die. They stay alive on Council while others seem to find a way to die every attempt, leaving you 20 manning the boss. On the other hand, all but one of our tanks needed weeks of wipes, attempt after attempt, before they figured out how to dodge Illidan's eye beam. How many weeks do guilds wipe on Brutallus because of the handful of idiots that can't handle burn and end up spreading it to half the raid? Do you have people in your guild that make you PRAY they don't get marked for death on Gorfiend, because the next guy inevitably has to try and save the raid from the constructs running rampant?

I just want to see what a guild can do made up entirely of people who know their class, do their homework, understand the mechanics of the game and the boss fights in it, who come prepared to kill bosses every night. I assert that the reason some guilds need a "hardcore" raiding schedule just to struggle through content is because they are carrying people. People who need to outgear an encounter before they stand a chance of beating it. People who aren't proactive or independent enough to solve their own problems, and who rely on raid leaders and class leaders to force feed them the Hoocked awn Fonix version over the course of weeks and months. Remove those people from the equation and what do you get? Win.

And I'm ok if it takes longer to progress than it does for the best hardcore guilds. I can't be in those guilds anyway, so it's no loss for me. I just want to be able to see everything Blizzard dreams up, and have fun doing it. This all sounds elitist and jerkish (jerky?) but really, people have more fun when fail and drama caused by inequality are taken out of the picture.

Alright, I play on a server that is less than attractive, so people who are ready to trade servers don't want to spend their money to transfer servers to my terribad one to join a guild that is ready to start kara. I've got an edge, but it's not enough to make people want to switch to my server (Ursin). What do you guys at EJ think?

it was more of an example. my guild is in need of people for Vashj and BT.

So your communication failed to get across what you actually meant, while asking a very vague question, and you are saying you're trying to raid Vashj and BT at the same time. Even with a 4 night raiding schedule, 3 raid zones tends to stretch your time thin, and if you're doing Hyjal and BT, you really shouldn't need that much gear from Vashj to be honest. So, could you clarify a bit for us? What advice are you looking for, what's your guild progression, etc?

This isn't quite clear to me. Do guilds need to decide to be a 25 man raiding guild or 10 man? Will progression guilds be attempting to clear both 25 and 10 man naxx weekly? My guild raids 16 hours a week and we are unclear if both instances can be cleared in a week, or should the 10 man version be scheduled for off nights?

Any information on this is greatly appreciated. Possibly I'm not asking the right question but searching wows and ej's forums has produced few answers.

The idea is that the 10 and 25 man versions of the instances are on completely seperate progression paths. While clearing both in a week will garner a (possibly) more accelerated gearing rate, it is in no way required to progress.

We plan to keep the 25mans on our main raid nights and place the 10 man version on "ZA status," which for us means "do it on your own time with whoever you want."

This is probably a pretty stupid question. Some "casual" friends and I are trying to form a guild with the initial intention of going down the 10 man progression track. We're EST raiders on a PST server, which the main reason we're in this situation in the first place. None of us want to transfer; we've been on the server since launch and have too many good friends here.

I'd say there's a reasonable chance we'll be able to recruit 10 EST raiders from our server, but I'm wondering if it's worth trying to recruit cross server as well. Would somebody have to be crazy and/or stupid to transfer to a PST server to raid with an EST guild? How would we even market something like this?

Getting 10 players online regularly for your raids shouldn't be a hard task, even if only on your server. A lot of people work different shifts (night shifts, evenings, early mornings, depending on their timezone) and still want to be able to raid. Getting a big enough force to get those online is very plausible.

You could even get it as far as getting a large enough player base for 25 mans if you have a solid guild (though an edge is always welcome in any guild situation).

Getting people to transfer is definitely possible, as not every server hosts a progressing odd raidtime guild.