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.

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?

/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.

I won't lie. I am fucking awesome. I'm probably the only reason this guild is as good as it is.

I'm going to have to agree with you on that one, Wubwub. It's true.

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.

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.


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).


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.

Wow. That's an awesome way to put it.

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.

I wish I could say that.
And my all-time favorite post in the history of EJ: