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.

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.

I like beimba yes, but its not really showing all stats. with hp and mana and stuff.

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

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 was kind of thrown into a position of power in a casual guild that wanted to get into raiding, and while I expected a fair amount of drama and growing pains, it ended up being too much work and stress for me. Luckily we had some other members able to step up and take on some of the responsibility, and we have since made it through most of the trouble. Although, now we are running into the WotLK problem of people looking forward and not wanting to concentrate on "old content." Why they have just made the realization that MH is old content is beyond me, though.

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?