One thing I didn't mention when talking with Digo that seems so obvious I didn't bring up but someone touched on:
NEVER, EVER make rules you either can not or will not enforce, it will do absolutely jack shit except eat at your authority.
That includes being prepared for laziness - if it's a minor disciplinary issue that would create a lot of work for the officers online, you will probably see very patchy enforcement (only the one whose pet project it is bothers with it, when he/she isn't online...), which will just make the officers present that much less of a solid front. It's the same problem as parents face if they don't coordinate their stances on issues - you will just make sure members that get said 'no' to will ask around until they get a 'yes'.
Obviously officers can't coordinate with EVERYTHING, since the whole nature of the thing is that new issues emerge pretty much non stop. At that point it's down to how well the leader has ingrained the guild philosophy/vision (like someone mentioned, if you just sort of randomly pick people from pve/pvp and hardcore/softcore axis, you will never have anything like that). Either the officer naturally does it the <Enter Random Guild> way or they do not, the latter basically implying a problem that is probably the leaders fault.
Ascent used to operate very much on loot and pure competitive instict. In EQ we very pointedly set ourselves to be the benevolent (toward those that acknowledged they couldn't compete that is) rulers of the Rodcet Nife server, where we'd crush any opposition as ruthlessly as we could (we literally killed the Emperor in Ssra temple 24/7 to keep others from catching up to us... even the Koreans never got shots at him, no matter when he spawned). Everyone liked this arrangement, and then we could compete on the serverwide level against a rather well defined set of guilds. The whole no-instancing pretty much guaranteed that there'd be a limited amount of "uberguilds" (a term that has been so inflated by WoW that it's next to meaningless)... a single server didn't have the spawns to equip more than 1 guild well enough for the next expansion (and that loot also mattered way, way, way more than in WoW).
Enter WoW.
Same goals pretty much: rule the server, get serverwide firsts and help guildmates gain massive power through gear.
"Rule the server" sort of worked even with Fury on alliance side (due to their very pointed lack of interest in competing with us in this field), but it was so bloody hollow. Yes people liked co-operating with us and doing what we suggested, but the real impact of that was felt pretty much exclusively in outdoor pvp (until the AQ Gates event, for which we were incredibly well set on the political side) which ended up dying off. Everyone and their grandmother visited the same zones we did. Kazzak and Azuregos were fun additions, and racing to them was quite a bit of fun. Emerald Dragons came a bit later, and they caused another problem I'll comment on.
"Get worldwide firsts" of course was a huge thing, and Ragnaros and AQ Gates were probably most fun I've had with WoW. However, WoW is not a hard game, so getting a worldwide first in a 40man dungeon is pretty much a test of willpower and available time. Or you start with the 2000 Nefarian killing guilds, drop the lazy ones (down to 1000), drop the ones with truly uninspired leadership that just reads guides (down to 100) and then drop the ones who don't have really good tactical skill (down to 80 or 90, I suspect most of these already have). Then it's a question of you farming more potions and training the encounter longer. Or is someone here arrogant to believe that their tactical skills are truly unique in a crowd of 5 million? Add to the mix that going for world firsts also means you deal with the shittiest fucking bugs available, it's not all that fun anymore. They need something different that can NOT be competed by a pool of 1000-5000 guilds... having the servers compete with the gates was extremely nice, though I'll admit that the "winner takes it all" nature (in the sense that if your server was 90th on the third day, none would bother picking a damn thing) and the type of event were bit so-so planned, but the idea was downright brilliant.
Then there's the gearing up. This was already causing problems in MC, where our rogues just plain refused to loot the original tier1 stuff using dkp (since blue gear was so often superior). It was a rather new problem for us, since in EQ the upgrades were so big that people were always more than happy to loot stuff. To this very day, pretty much everyone finds loot extremely uninspiring as a goal in WoW... even the fun of competing for outdoor spawns is undermined when you're DEing items off first kills (those Emerald Dragons)
There's no reasonable goal except the timesink of worldwide firsts, and those tend to be so uninspired (or even extremely ruthlessly cockblocked a la C'Thun) that it's hard to imagine a point for trying while working (During AQ Gates I think I managed to be online over 80h a week even while working).
So as far as I can see when it comes to inspiring the guild in current WoW, I just don't know. The game really doesn't work that well with our original mindset.
Oh but here's a tip: if your opinion of the game resembles, logging in for random stuff out of a sense of duty probably does more harm than good :P
From my experience, the single , most important factors, that lead to a guild's sucess and stability are:
-Most people enjoy their companies, and have fun playing together as a group, 3-4 people that "just don't get along" provide negative mood between guildmembers, and in the end, even if it lasts months, it's just a time-bomb waiting to blow up.
-As mentioned, people that share common interests in the game, be it PvP\PvE or just plain "hanging around" in WoW.
-Maturity.... jackasses and 12 year olds are just time-bombs that will hurt your guild, sure, you can have jackasses here and there, but if they adhere to the first 2 factors and when it's time to get serious, they get serious, it's safe to say they're ok.
Of course, building that playerbase is the hardest part of it all as many have said, however, imo it depends a lot on luck.. why luck?
-luck of finding people that fit those 3 factors to sucess
-luck of finding people within the playerbase of your server
-luck of identifying the qualities and attributes in a player that you're actually looking for your guild
As kaubel said , he was surprised how EJ turned out, and i'm pretty sure most out-of-the "new" succesful guilds, were too. Why?, because there is NO secret formula for sucess, you adopt certain integrity for your guild and you build the foundations and fundamentals of the guild you want, and after that, it's out of your hands, it's out of your hands because you don't know if you'll find the adequate people that will join your ship or jump ship mid-trip.
In the end, it's all about how you build basis of the guild, i perfectly believe Xi in what he says how they run their guild, because if you have a group of guys that respects each other, and value each other's contribution while also not being hand-carried by anyone and putting up 100% of their contribution to the guild, they don't need a "boss figure" , in fact, a boss figure usually leads to bad things, unless everyone in the guilds thinks that the boss is awesome , which is a sorta rare sight, specially in a video game :P .
Server Transfers, as someone already said, will help guilds a lot when it comes to rounding up their roster with people that fit their playing style, of course, it will have it's negatives as well. Reasons why Server transfers will help is because there's so many good and quality players out there, that simply haven't found the guild for them within their server, because either
a) doesn't fit their schedule
b) don't like any guilds on their faction for X reason (loot system, leadership etc..)
c) their class isn't needed\wanted
there's so many reasons i could go on as to why there's a lot of quality players displaced on servers without a guild for many reasons (some listed above) , and those players simply wouldn't roll on guilds they "knew" would fit them because they get so discouraged with having to grind to 60, and pretty much try and catch up in gear (which takes a long time if you dont have a guild helping ironically), then there's the "i don't even know if i'll get in" factor, so people just don't want to even consider re-rolling on an older server looking for guilds.
This is the reason why you see so many people re-roll on brand-new server, in the hopes of trying to get into the "top-guild" or a guild that would fit them from the start, something deemed impossible to them by re-rolling on older servers.
I think I can chime in with a bit of praise for my guildleader and guild spirit as well, considering our circumstances atm.
Yesterday after an excruciating night of two <30% wipes due to Giant Eyeball Spawns chaining 15 of a full raid down, we finally killed C'thun. I suppose to most of you here this is somewhat old news, but for my little server, and for us, it was a landmark. I say that because we're the second guild on our server to do so and the first Horde guild. The first kill was done by one of Europe's best Alliance guilds (I think they were world 8th as well or something, but don't pin me down on it) on our server and while I don't believe we differ much in individual playerskill we really have no hope of ever actively competing with them, not in the least because of they have a better economy, a bigger playerpool and let's face it, slightly easier raiding capabilities.
The first half of this year was a bit of a mess for us. We had recently migrated from a server where we were the top dogs in general, altho the balance shifted back and forth at times. We ended up on what is basically a dead piece of rock called Genjuros.
What happened was that we ended up with around 70% of both the Italian, and the Greek WoW community. Now I don't think you US guys experience something similar during your migrations, but it's been explained in this thread already; compare it to ending up on a server full of Mexicans that go "Que paso! Hablo espagnol?" and refuse to or are simply unable to speak proper English. While the server was A-OK in all technical aspects as opposed to our old server (which was lovingly dubbed "Lagfist" with newly discovered terms such as "Hah you got Bladefisted!" being thrown around to victims of mishap), recruitment, PUG's and the AH came to a screeching halt.
In between that, we had several setbacks: Several of our core members quit in a matter of weeks. By that I mean we basically lost all 3 of our pimped out hunters, a Guild Master, several officers and several highly contributing members including our first Thunderfury. Some went out in style, basically a bit fed up with raiding in general and they still hang around our boards, comms and irc channels enjoying the chats and news. Others made a big drama thread usually bringing up lootwhines and stuff, or just plainly quit on the spot without a word and rerolled on a better server (which is Magtheridon for us EU guys, basically; hi Bal!)
Our first Guild Master is still a great guy, good sense of humour, ability to motivate but very strict on the other hand and very, very selective on new recruits. Him and the core originated from the UK FPS scene which was quite a tight bunch of friends and I think that has been and will be the strongest foundation our guild is based on. His replacement is equally impressive looking back on his track record these past months. We were always a little guild, in the sense that we have around 45-50 people in our guild with a highly active core of around 25-30. This meant filling raids could be a challenge on the hard days (which is basically a euphemism for "learn and wipe" raids) and I think a lot of people including myself have been on the brink of a "Fuck this" moment along the road. He was the one that kept us together without ever giving in to recruiting more just for the sake of always having enough on, to keep the guild's integrity intact and always work to improve our DKP system and refine our tactics. I think one of the biggest steps was that our DKP site got hacked into with that recent discovered leak and we had to do loot by memory and sort of a loot council thing, and nobody complained about people getting loot they may or may not have deserved based on points. Hell, people passed for others when they weren't sure because it was more of an upgrade to the other person.
I like loot, I will always strive to improve my character because it is one of the little addictive things about this kind of game, but it should never be the leading factor in a guild. We literally have new guilds spawning on our server all the time, advertising they will do ENDGAME ZG MC AND BWL, basically maintaining a perpetual cycle of lootwhores bouncing around in a different guild each week. It is not the way to create and hold a group of people together, but these people will never learn I fear :/
Which is the most addicting about this game for me tho is not the loot, it's not the instances, it's not the virtual world around me; it's my guild and the people that are in it. We're a hoot on comms with little bits of music being played, funny sound clips at opportune times but also cracks at each other and balls being broken every day. For those of you who recognize this, I bet you'll smile; for those that don't, you have no idea what you're missing :)
Killing C'thun pretty much culminated in an cheerful outburst of cropped up frustration that derived from 2 continual weeks of making virtually no progress, due to some retards in our guild that just didn't get it. Recognizing Dark Glare, knowing what to do when this happens as well as simply farming and bringing a crapload of consumables, they were just terrible at it.
Now for most guilds this is grounds for removal/replacement, but for us, on the above described server, Horde side, it really wasn't an option: 99% certain the replacement would be an even bigger tard, only this one would be entirely unfamilair with us, our tactics, our habits as well as usually being grossly under-equipped and lacking the ability to string coherent English sentences together. So instead we stepped up and slapped them in their place, which seemed to help because our progress yesterday was bigger than the entire two weeks before it and we finally killed C'thun.
Maybe it's the euphoria of yesterday's kill talking, but I am ever so glad that my guild has remained what it has always been, and a lot of that has been due to our officers and GM(s). In fact, looking back on my rambling, I will probably post this on my guild's forum as well :)
i'm ging to pick up on the underling idea presented by jaeger and delheru. I'll be honest, over a year ago when Ragnaros was first killed by Ascent, i like many others was incredibly excited. At the time, people had been claiming it'd take months for people to make any prgress on a 40 man dungeon, and MC was the first of its kind in any game released. It was groundbreaking as a gaming experiance, and i remember reading a lot of the sycophantic posts on Ascent's forums (the type you get whenever your guild does a world or server first).
Yet one thing which struck me (and at the time i'd only just started my own little guild with my priest) was how there was both a guild leader and a second in command. that n the Ascent forum profiles Jager has 2i/c below his name is very stirking. In a guild which at the time had achieved what many r+d forum campers had thought impossible, there was a clear cmmand structure: the general, the lieutenant, then other officers, before the bulk of the guild playerbase.
after that, i stopped travelling to the Ascent forum, instead admiring the pictures of a tauren shaman in your guild wih a spinal reaper on allakhazam. Then, 4 or so months ago, i came back as to no surprise what i thought might happen did: Magtheridon-US was the first server in the world to complete the AQ event.
Magtheridon is a high pop server (it is in Europe to), but it isn't the most high pop. At the time, it wasn't the realm with the most nef killing guilds in America. But it was the one with the most organised and efficient guild. Something Jaeger said in one of the many posts was how success was down to working with other guilds, and for an event like AQ undoubeedly this is the case.
So, back on Ragnaros-EU, my own guild Shadow Moon (at the time i had no idea there was another server/lore related organisation by the same name) was steadily growing. As guildmaster i made a lot of mistakes, recruiting anyone who applied regardless of their calibur or experiance. At the time i was entirely new to MMOs and hence very nieve. But one thing i had learnt (from Ascent and my own experiances in game), was that in no way wouldn i be able to run the guild alone. I was very fortunate that out of the 100 or so members of the guild, 50 were genuinely nice people who all played and leveled together, and i knew there were 8 or so i could trust to be in charge whilst i was away (i wasn't a 24/7 player back then).
So you can imagine my surprise, when as my small guild slowly leveled up and had fun, the guilds billed as the MC conquering BWL aspirees filled with level 60s began slowly to fall apart, one after another. an exception to this in addition to my own guild were 2 other guilds which had followed the same principle of keeping a close knit community that have always played together and recruited friendly people who showed a desire to learn and work with others (whilst being very active in the evenings). Looking at the situation today, these same 3 guilds are the top horde guilds on the server. MoX just killed the Twin Emperors yesterday after weeks of working on them, Invictus (Mainly made up of Shadow Moon without me) killed Nefarian a month ago and are on Sartura, and Hate transferred to Frostmane but are still together.
What this suggests to me, at least on the smaller less renowned realms, is that playing together with people you know, can laugh with and enjoy yourself with, is the key to general stability and progress in a guild (no matter how slow that progress is). Its for this reason i have effectively retired my priest and started a mage on Ravenholdt-EU having been asked by friends from a warhammer website Da Warpath to start an Alliance guild with them. I don't know these people irl, but i've known them for 3 years and have wrked with them during a world wide campaign about 2 years ago. We know how the others think, and we have the sme interests. Our guild on Ravenholdt has 95 members, and the server is fresh at being 6 weeks old with no transfers to it. And already, the bigger guilds billing themselves directly as MC Raiders (never wise on an rp-pvp server but meh) have fallen apart or have started to recruit every level 60 under the sun. Our guild's highest member is 55 and has been in the guild from day one, so for 6 weeks we have gotten to know each other without rushing ahead, with everyone in the guild knowing that in a few months we will be screaming down vent when the first Molten Giants die. But whats most unique about this guild is that the 3 guild leaders have equal rights, and we usually have a 3 way vote over any differences. But we've known each other for 3 years, and with 3 guild leaders, 2 Senior Officers and 7 class leaders, we know there is always somebody online who can answer a difficult problem or inspire.
'You have to walk before you can run' in WoW means knowing the people you are with before going raiding.
Whatever you do, dont do anything I do. Im a sucky guild leader, but for some reason people still follow me.
Better as one o the asshats in my raid why they put up with me ;)
One area I probably have a little more experience than others is cross-guild raiding alliances. Our little group of raiders is now dying happily on Twin emperors, and approaching our first anniversary. I would break this type of leading into the following parts:
1) Individual skill
If people dont respect your ability as a player, they will not respect you as a leader more often than not. You dont have to be the best player ever, but you need to at least be competant.
2) Knowledge of other classess
You will not gain the respect of your raid by asking druids to ress people after a wipe, telling priests to remove curses, or asking your rogues to pull the first giant pair in MC.
3) Analytical mind
When you raid, you die.
Alot.
The ability to say toy our raid "Dont worry guys, that was actually a decent run, all that went wrong was XYZ", goes along way when learning content, compared to saying "OMG WTF, Well what the hell happened you all suck FFS".
4) Strong will
I had to deal with 8 guild leaders when I started, thats alot of head-butting. Make sure the rules are clear from the start, and they are adhered to. Dont let people talk over or talk down to you, and dont be afraid to stamp your authority all over trouble makers, and dont be afraid to eject anyone who is more trouble than they are worth.
Good leading is hard to pin down. Im just glad Im doing somthing right (no idea what it is), and that the community that has built up around us is stll going strong when more "elite" guilds have crumbled.
Edit: Seperate question: A thing I'm personally very curious about is what attributes guild officers in charge of recruitment look for. By having had BWL and MC on farm for quite a while now, we have the luxury of recruiting based on eagerness to learn, commitment and (unique to european servers I guess) the ability to speak English, rather than based on gear and previous raiding experience.
We recruti on the ability to listen and personality.
The best player in the world wont get in our raid with a bad attitude. We also take the opinion that we can gear up a new player in around 2-3 weeks given the amount of epics we shard, therefore attitude and ability are more important than gear to us.
We would consider ourselves to be the Alliance couterpart's to Rane's mentioned guild although we have always been slightly behind them in terms of success.
Basically we started on Bladefist(EU), probably one of the servers in the EU with the largest playerbases from the UK due to much our wide-ranging CS community rolling on there. This server (we came to realise later) was ideal in terms of playerbase but was the victim of its own popularity and soon became full and notorious as one of the most disasterously laggy servers in europe. Therefore when we were offered a migration to Genjuros we saw it as an excellent opportunity.
Now what we didn't realise when we migrated was that we were moving to what was to become a stronghold for the greek/italian wow community. As the game has moved on many of our core english and scandanavian members have stopped playing, due to the obvious reasons, thus leaving us with a playerbase of greeks/italians basically to recruit from. The main problem here being that greeks and italians (on the whole) do not speak english well at all, and have no choice but to play on english speaking servers, usually congregating together on certain servers (such as our own).
Recently we took in about 20 members from an Italian guild that was folding in order to bolster our numbers and basically prevent our guild from dying due to people seemingly quitting the game or taking a break every week. This has meant that from a core communicative group of people we've turned into a much larger guild, about a quarter/third of which has serious problems speaking/understanding english.
This coincided with the loss of our founder/mentor/guild leader leaving the rest of our officers with an almost impossible task: saving the guild from disaster while having a particularly unsatisfactory playerbase to recruit from, this situation at the moment just seems to be getting worse as the nature of this unsatisfactory situation, as well as it being 'exam season' at the moment just means more and more people quitting/taking breaks.
We're on C'Thun at the moment and it seems almost impossible when there seems to be about 10 people in every raid who seem to have no clue at all about what they're doing, considering how much this fight is about communication and teamwork. We've even had to resort to Italian transations on ventrilo in certain situations in order for everyone to understand what to do.
It seems therefore in contrast to Affliction the guild Rane is talking about we are failing, burdened by a server with an unsatisfactory playerbase for our needs and the state of the game itself which is losing its appeal for 'endgame' raiders in its current state.
Anyway, i'm not sure quite how much relevance this actually has to the topic but seeing Rane's post i was inspired to write about our current guild's situation, i'd definately like to know if anyone has similar issues with communication, or is this not really an issue at all on US servers?
Edit: Seperate question: A thing I'm personally very curious about is what attributes guild officers in charge of recruitment look for. By having had BWL and MC on farm for quite a while now, we have the luxury of recruiting based on eagerness to learn, commitment and (unique to european servers I guess) the ability to speak English, rather than based on gear and previous raiding experience.
We also take the opinio that we can gear up a new player in around 2-3 weeks givent he amount of epics we shard, therefore attitude and ability are more important than gear to us.
/shrug. This is an interesting debate the further we get along in WoW's content. How long does it take to gear someone? The answer is pretty much infinity. You can never tell how long it will take to gear someone because it's based on pure luck, from MC/BWL. Now by the time we get Naxx to farm, and can do the instance with 35, or 30, or whatever it will be a different story because of the molds producing class specific armor, but at this point, we really don't recruit anyone who isn't first and foremost well geared.
the only problem for american servers (i presume) are the time zone differences. In europe, everyone is within 2 hours of each other, normally one. that and fortunately the majority of the player base is from england or scandinavia (english servers), so in a raid nearly everyone can understand what it going on.
I was flicking through the american forums earlier, people requesting oceanic time servers. bear in mind not only is there an east/west coast time difference, but also a lot of Australian players mixed into the balance to.
Well, when pay-per-trasfers come out, you guys will be able to move out of Genjuros.
Leadership is all about personnel, adaptability, and respect...generally in that order. Not even the world's greatest leader can reliably motivate half-assed troops. Plenty of exceptional leaders throughout history (video game guild or otherwise) land as footnotes due to a crappy personnel base surrounding them at the time they were in power. Plenty of people who show as good leaders were only noted because of the insanely stacked crew of people they happened to land in charge of. First you need decent people. Not great people (though that's awesome), but simply decent and willing. If you can figure out what it takes to properly motivate them and what their limitations are, you can earn their respect and make the best out of what you have. The mark of a good leader is that they can work almost as well with sub-optimal people as they can with their choice picks. An average leader will do great with good people around them, and become nothing when surrounded by anything less than the elite.
Gaining, maintaining, and commanding respect among those who follow you is the meat of leadership, and it is entirely different from group to group. You can get away with a lot of things in certain groups of people that would never fly in others without shattering your guild or core units. If a good leader is anything, they are adaptable and observant. You have to know your people and know how far you can push them. You have to learn how to push them. The most effective of leaders is generally "friendly to" their people without ever actually being their "friends" so to speak. A certain degree of detachment enables you to hold a bit of impartiality and authority on almost all issues. (And admittedly makes it a tad easier to send someone knowingly to their death.) When people stop seeing you as "authority figure" and start seeing you as "friend", your respect level sometimes slips and things can begin to go crossways on you very quickly.
As to respect, that's the difficult part. No two groups of people will ever be the same, so there's no "be all and end all" of what makes a good leader. A good leader is, at best, situational. Someone with leadership potential who also posesses the key qualities of "people reading" and "adaptation" will generally do well in most any environment. Good leaders of any sort will always be decent in motivating or commanding respect among people, but they'll only truely shine when immersed in an element made for their particular style and while surrounded by people worth their salt. There are a few core traits or abilities, but a great deal of it remains very situational in the end.
Can you clarify the first point, I'd like to respond, but I don't exactly understand what you mean.
What I was getting at essentially, was this: The way you described your guild structure, it seems to me like it would cause a lot of negativity and disputes. First of all there's just figuring out who "deserves" the raid slots more. Second, I believe giving people the feeling that killing X was something we couldn't have accomplished without them will boost their morale and increase the effort they put into future stuff. To summarize: You're not just fighting boss X, you're also competing with your guildies to get to raid in the first place.
As I mentioned, though, it's apparent that it's working well for you guys, I was just very surprised.
When people stop seeing you as "authority figure" and start seeing you as "friend", your respect level sometimes slips and things can begin to go crossways on you very quickly.
Yea this is basically a massive danger. There are only a few people in Ascent that know I would NEVER turn on them (due to them being so close friends with me) and in general I find the insolent bastards tedious as hell at times! While I played I made a clear point of keeping some distance with pretty much everyone, even including the people I liked and thought were awesome. Several good players were spoiled when they realized how much they were appreciated... if you see that sort of shit, abuse the crap out of the ASAP so they realize they aren't quite as amazingly special as they think they are.
As to respect, that's the difficult part.
I dunno. If you're good it shouldn't be a problem, and imo a guildleader should be especially that. You can even get away with not knowing every nook and cranny, but then you have to compensate by really owning at gathering information and compiling it to meaningful wholes. In short: your IQ*playtime needs to be competitive with anyone in the guild or you're going to have a problem (I personally fail that with my 20% attendance atm, but moving guildleads was rejected).
There are a few core traits or abilities, but a great deal of it remains very situational in the end.
I think you might be exaggerating this to a degree.
What, in my experience, makes leaders is a HUGE excess of energy. I mean if you have no brain this won't help you, but I'd say most people with huge amounts of energy will do well leading whatever the situation. Never giving up and always thinking up something new. The moment you stop innovating you become useless of course, which is quite the heavy burden.
However, as long as you do keep innovating, I can't see a situation which would cause problems.
Killing C'thun pretty much culminated in an cheerful outburst of cropped up frustration that derived from 2 continual weeks of making virtually no progress, due to some retards in our guild that just didn't get it. Recognizing Dark Glare, knowing what to do when this happens as well as simply farming and bringing a crapload of consumables, they were just terrible at it.
Originally Posted by desiato
We're on C'Thun at the moment and it seems almost impossible when there seems to be about 10 people in every raid who seem to have no clue at all about what they're doing, considering how much this fight is about communication and teamwork.
We had this problem and it basically required us to blow up the guild to fix it. It took us six weeks to kill Twin Emps, and by that time, it was obvious there were two seperate groups of people in the guild --
1. Around 30-35 people with decent to excellent attendance that came to pretty much every wipe, and were frustrated and disillusioned with our progress and time required to defeat the encounter
2. The rest of the guild, with poor attendance or bad skills that had just started to "get it" after six weeks, that didn't really think anything was wrong and thought taking six weeks to kill something was completely reasonable.
We floundered around on C'Thun for a couple weeks, where we saw the group 2 people chaining eye beam and getting roasted by Dark Glare, before the group 1 people stopped showing up. Not so much physically, but mentally. We came to the raids, but we weren't all there. We'd reached the breaking point. So we finally split the guild, and we're on the rebuild right now.
Looking back on it, I really don't fault any of the leadership. This game doesn't really operate like many of us thought it would, in that gear really doesn't matter. The encounters require some gearing in order to progress, but much more so, they require a marked increase in skill. We figured having 30 good players and 10 hangers-on like we did in BWL would be fine in order to raid. After all, it worked for a year, why would it change now? Now you need a full 40 of people that are good individual players and you can't have any deadbeats. Soon, you'll need 40 people that aren't just good players, but excellent players.
I think the key to an incredible guild is either recognizing these changes before they become a serious problem and be willing to take drastic changes to combat them, or having a robust enough system in place to deal with them as they come.
Something I've been thinking about lately is Warcraft's unique population distribution and its' impact on the potential for high-end guilds. Obviously the population for this game is through the roof, but it's also highly partitioned - there are what, 200ish US/EU servers? In addition, there's the faction divide. Assuming a given (medium-small) percentage of the playing population has what it takes (mentally prepared and able to make time commitments) to be a valuable member of a strong guild, isn't it inevitable that in some servers there won't be a minimum concentration of these players for an uberguild to even form? I didn't play EQ, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the impression I get from my friends is that there weren't nearly as many servers.
Combine that with the ease of entry into WoW's endgame - getting to level cap is cake, MC is a big purple welcoming mat for anyone that can round up 40 players - and what you have is a dilution of talent across a sea of mediocrity. Finally, add in what some of the Ascent posters have mentioned about the lack of a way for many excellent guilds to really distinguish themselves as being head and shoulders above the rest, serving as a magnet for talent in their server/faction. The end result is that in many (especially Horde, lower pop and all) server/faction groups, there's either a vacuum where there is no uberguild (talented players are distributed among several guilds, pulling their guildies through content) or the uberguild that does exist isn't really that uber - there just aren't enough potentially hardcore raiders on the server to build a single strong guild.
Hopefully paid server transfers will allow the popularity/notoriety of certain guilds (even if the guilds don't entirely deserve the recognition in some cases) to serve as a lodestone for talented players across the realms.
I won't lie. I am fucking awesome. I'm probably the only reason this guild is as good as it is.
I wish I could say that.
I expect better from someone your age and (hopefully) level of maturity, but you have, I think, already proven that while you may be an officer, you're no leader. You deal with everything by putting your foot down and calling people names, and I have a hard time respecting that.
Go ahead and pull my access whenever you want, I won't be back to these forums. Several people have asked me to chill out, take a breather, and see if I still want to leave EJ, but reading your posts, Kaubel, has solidified my feelings on the whole thing.
And my all-time favorite post in the history of EJ:
How you can be an officer in a guild where 90 percent of all members hate you is beyond me. Just a pixellated extension of a real life failure. You are a nobody Kaubel, and no amount of self delusion can ever correct that. Yippee, mister piece of shit gym coach is an officer. You, deluded fuck, simply have the luck of getting an officer to stand behind your vastly uneducated decisions.
We're all impressed. I'd say actual attention whoring would be kicking someone for something you misunderstood, changing your story multiple times, and then closing the thread so you could get the last word in.
Look at yourself Kaubel. An asshole to your own guild, and an even bigger one to the rest of the server. You do nothing until A- you want something, B-you expect special treatment or C- You see the opportunity to show your ass. You've got to be the most worthless individual I have encountered in over ten years online. People, he just posted "back in the saddle again" in the public forum to slap the other guilds in the face. Is that honestly what everyone wants?
Your pretend life online will never redeem you as a failure. I'm proud to be the second in a long line to deal with you publicly. Don't be afraid of his pseudo powers, folks. You can and should speak out. I heard from so many of you on messenger yesterday, and every damn one of you was in agreement about Kaubel. Speak up and let them hear you. If you get kicked for being honest and fed up with the bullshit, then you are better off. You won't lose friends. I still have mine from EJ, and I'm about to make many more today.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Finally, add in what some of the Ascent posters have mentioned about the lack of a way for many excellent guilds to really distinguish themselves as being head and shoulders above the rest, serving as a magnet for talent in their server/faction.
One issue alot of the top end guilds from other games such as EQ had and they should have realized from the descriptions of the game was that blizzard has worked very hard to make this game casual friendly. You cant have player created cock blocks and make it truly casual friendly. And if a player cannot impede another player from moving on you will never truly have guilds stand out. One reason that the AQ world event had such a seperation was because somehow Medivh was able to work together. There were ways for players to cockblock each other and on most servers and that is exactly what happened.
If people are looking to stand out WoW is not the game for them. There is a seperation but it is like 2 huge oceans. One guild or player cannot winout through attrition in this game as you could in EQ. Will this hurt WoW in the long run? It could because the most competitive and hardest working people will eventually get tired of it and typically those were the people that stuck with MMOs.
Anyways this was off topic but I think as long as GLs live with this belief that their guild will be special they will stand amongst the hordes they will be dissapointed in WoW.
What I was getting at essentially, was this: The way you described your guild structure, it seems to me like it would cause a lot of negativity and disputes. First of all there's just figuring out who "deserves" the raid slots more.
No one deserves a raid spot in DnT, thats your misconception. Those who get to go to AQ are those who earned their spot.
Nick Yee's site is very awesome. I first saw it a few years ago when doing some research for an essay, I'll have to go back and read all the new stuff now. :)
05/16/06, 2:56 AM
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