I found the post by Nork in the Guild, Arena Teams, etc thread interesting, but didn't want to derail the thread.
(http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...hp?id=9605&p=3)

On the effects and importance of guild reputation:
How important do you consider guild reputation for guilds of various levels of progress, content focus and general mentality?
Do different kinds of guilds benefit from different kinds of reputation, perhaps even to the level where what might be detrimental to some is advantageous to others?
Does one need to look at several different reputation scales, where the importance of the various scales differ between guilds?

On causes of guild reputation:
What sort of actions would you say are (most) effective in building or ruining reputation in various forms?

This is actually an interesting concept. The guild I'm in now is relatively newly formed (it's been around forever as a PvP offshoot, however only recently has it decided to 'recruit' and strive to be a force in tBC) - and the current debate is about allowing friends and family members. Initial reaction from the majority of responses is to not allow F&F, as the majority of the purpose they'd get from being tagged can be garnered via custom channels.

The concern is to try and maintain a reputation as a core, tight knit group of good players - which is diminished when/if your F&F members run off and PUG UBRS and wipe the group - or some such business.

IMO it basically comes down to what your guilds mission is. In our case we want to keep it small, have a focus on PvP, but also be aggressive in our pursuit of raiding goals. With those goals in mind, we've decided it's important to try and maintain our reputation server wide - which means controlling who gets in.

That being said, there are some very progressed guilds on our server who couldn't care less what everyone else thinks of them - and most of the time go out of their way to antagonize a lot of the server, yet they still get quality players apping left and right, due to the fact that they are very progressed in PvE and have a solid PvP group - hence they have a reputation for quality play.

Not going to give out guildnames, but there was once a guild on my server that had a large collection of ninja looters. Their leadership even participated in this and laughed at people that brought it to them as an issue. They were a successful high end raiding guild. When AQ40 was released, they formed the Silithus Police to do everything possible to slow down the AQ Gate opening. They also used the invite bug to knock people out of a raid.

Now, after they've broken up, their members still have issues getting into other guilds.

I think the simplest metric for reputation is PvE progression. When someone is thinking about transferring to a server, they make a level 1 alt and ask someone in Org/Ironforge, "Hey, what's the top guild on this server?" They don't ask "who's the #6 guild?" For a guild that relies on recruiting to survive, maintaining a high profile to keep the applications pouring in is obviously crucial.

In the grand scheme of things, though, reputation in WoW matters very little. World bosses and the one-time AQ opening event are the only situations I can recall it ever making a difference. If you have your little insular core of players, you can do your thing, and no matter how reviled you are, it matters little. Yes, there's something to be said for having an opposite-faction group allow you to down a world boss unmolested after wiping a different guild that has a worse reputation. But WoW never really requires people to rely on others on any broad level, and thus social pressure tends to have less of an effect than it might.

On effects:
I'd say that reputation is very important for any guild that wants to survive the attrition of MMORPGs, since you will eventually need new recruits, and reputation affects the quality and fit of those recruits. Reputation also decreases attrition if it coincides with the members' values and wishes, since members will be proud of their guild and reluctant to move on.
I'd also say that there are definitely different forms of reputation, and that different guilds can benefit in opposite ways from them. An example of reputation scales:

- General fame/visibility
Increasing this will probably be beneficial to most guilds. The more well known you are, the higher the chance of getting applications, since people don't apply to guilds they don't know exist. This scale is interesting in that it multiplies the effect of all the other scales, and as such can be regarded as a sort of master scale. Generally, the higher your attrition, the higher the need for a high level of fame, since you need a higher volume of recruits. Extremely progress focused guilds like Nihilum probably benefit the most from topping this scale.

- Bad guys/Good guys
In general, most guilds will benefit from appearing to be "good guys", helping others on their way and generally acting friendly. There are however guilds that draw benefit from approaching the "bad guys" end of the scale. There are many examples of guilds that take pride in acting like assholes towards the rest of the population, taking an "us against the world" position. These are often guilds with a history in pure PvP games like Shadowbane, and attract players of similar attitude. They do have a significantly lower application base, since fewer players want to play like this, but the members they do get are often a good fit with the guild and stay due to the strong guild association.
It should also be noted that for non-family guilds, there is possibly a sweet spot that isn't quite to the maximum of the good guys end of the scale. A reputation that you won't take shit from anyone or give up on opportunities due to dubious gentleman's rules may be more attractive to competetive players, even if they generally enjoy hanging with "good guys". Good guys finish last, as the saying goes.

There are probably more scales. One could include such things as content focus (PvE or PvP), guild style (play to win, or "family guild" style) or activity level (hardcore vs casual), but I'm not sure those are reputation scales as much as just general traits with the guild. Of course, one should make sure outsiders know where your guild sits on those subjects.

On causes:
General fame and visibility can be increased in a multitude of ways. Through high activity in public zones in game, active forum use, notable accomplishments (anything from bosskills to arranging a 500-man zombie run from Undercity to Ironforge, or blocking the entrance to BRM for a full night), and other things, the guild moves up on this scale. The more unique the accomplishment, the further the reach of the fame. Some things will only go as far as the faction, other things are known to the whole server, and yet other things are known to the whole gamewide playerbase.
Some of the things that are most helpful towards building fame across servers, is the release of well edited or unique videos, and maintaining a good web site. Videos raise the attention of the general public, and the website builds their interest by informing them who this guild is, what they do, and what their values are.

The Bad Guys/Good Guys scale can be affected in obvious ways. Acting like idiots, flaming on message boards, ganking for hours on end are all things that will move your guild left on the scale. Helping lowbies, arranging public raids with favourable loot conditions and offering advice on forums will move the guild right.

I thought that was an interesting post as well. In my experience, reputation is extremely important. It may not seem so in the short term, but in the long run a guild's reputation affects the number and quality of recruits it gets.

Our guild had a splintering event last spring in which we lost perhaps 20 people overall, including our raid leader and literally our entire tanking corps -- every single warrior we had with any kind of gear left the guild. That's the sort of thing that's almost always a fatal blow. What saved our asses in the end was our reputation. When another guild on the server disbanded a few weeks later, we had a surge of quality applicants that helped us rebuild -- and now we're the only Alliance guild on our server that can kill C'thun.

Conversely, there was a guild on our server that was at the top of the progression race throughout MC, BWL, and AQ. Things were great for them for a long time, but their leader was unfortunately not a very nice person, and the things he did -- and the things the guild did under his leadership -- led to them becoming pretty strongly disliked by a large portion of the server population. Gradually as time went on and they had member turnover, their recruiting pool dried up. In the end they had to transfer servers simply to escape the bad reputation they'd generated. (The leader has since left the game, and I understand things are looking much better for them.)

The AQ event especially called on all walks of WoW to band together for a common goal. The problem was, that common goal was opening the the next 40 man zone for the "hardcore" raiders. No matter what assurances anyone could make that the 20 man would be accessable to all, people seemed to hold disdain for the more progressed groups. I know we had a horrible time trying to get the AQ turn-ins done, simply because at the time, we were the only guild killing nefarian, so no one else was interested in opening the gates while they still had work to do in BWL, or would get no benifit from AQ40.

I tend to agree that the end all is really your progression though. If you have top server progression, although you may be more or less liked by people, you will have a solid reputation for at least being "effective".

From a player by player standpoint, i dont think its as big a deal. With the availability to sell accounts, transfer servers on a whim, etc, its simply better to just give someone a shot and take their character and ability for face value. So and so may have been in some ninja-looting guild, but instantly condemning everyone you meet is a bad practice based on their past. Who i consider one of our best pallies was suspected of Ebaying, go figure.

An additional concept to be considered is that of reputation towards target groups that aren't necessarily made up of people of similar attitude. In our case, we are a single-nationality euro guild. I'd say that we are probably the most well known guild of our nationality, due to early and strong progression and certain unique activities being discussed on national WoW forums. While our reputation with that group is significantly larger than with the game as a whole, it is rather irrelevant, since only players of that target group are potential recruits anyway. There are probably other groups like this that a guild can target directly or indirectly, gaining a greater effect than if one targets the population as a whole.

Guild history for background:
Guild #1 - Zerg recruited to get MC off the ground. Had ~25 always there, prepared, and awesome players. Also have ~150x "fluff" or "filler" members. Around the time of downing domo there was so much drama over spots in the raid (all the loot whores that didn't want to wipe, now demanding to be brought in over the veterans) that we either had to boot out everyone, or reform. We chose to reform into guild #2, took ~30 people with us to start off.

Guild #2 - Absolutely despised by members of guild #1. Guild #1 pretty much disbanded not to long after (after claiming the moral high ground saying they would never leave, get back into mc and "show us".. figure). Forum keyboard commando's proceed to bash us at every post. We respond in downing rag our first raiding week and flying through BWL catching up to the 2x top guilds horde side. AQ40 eventually hit, downed huhu. Attendance and lack of enthuisiasm for AQ started to take its toll and we were again left with 25-30 great talented people and another 25-30 that weren't so much(not as bad as guild #1 of course). After conversation with one of our rival guilds, discovered they had the exact same problems. Naxx had been out for ~2 months, our members wanted to see it. Would never happen as our guilds were. We took our best and brightest 30 players and their best 30 players and reformed into Guild #3 (current one).

Guild #3 - All the forum nazi's of guild #1 as well as some we've never even heard of come crawling out of the walls bashing us as much as humanly possible. "You'll fall apart in a week", "you're all loot whores abandoning your friends", ect and the like. We responded with downing Razuvious first raid and clearing out BWL. Following week downed C'thun and 2 more naxx bosses, been progressing steadily ever since.



Ok now that all that background is laid out, suffice it to say that there are people that try to make our realm forum an ever lasting Echelon bash fest. For the most part we completely ignore them and keep doing what we love to do, downing as much of naxx as we can. The members of our guild for the most part are the best our server has to offer hordeside in terms of raiders. Aside from the forum nazi's, everyone loves us and completely ignores them. We put Eldre hordeside on the map somewhat and are the only active guild in naxx. I get tells asking for movies and such of our encounters, how we're doing, grats on X boss, omg can I join your guild, and so forth.

We have a great success with our BWL/Onyxia sell runs every other week. Its great PR as we offer our epics from prices of ~150g for T2 bracers to 450g for T2 chest to 450g for a good 1h melee wep to 700g for ashkandi. We don't make a killing, but we make what we need to keep our naxx raids functioning. Being the only guild on the server offering this we could charge whatever we want and could still have people wanting in, but we chose to price it to where many people could afford to come and to the point that would pay for our flasks and such, making anywhere from 2k-4k every other week.

I'm kind of with gurg in that, you could be satan incarnate(ok, maybe not that far) but if your guild is steadily making progress and its members are happy there won't be any problems. We've always had our constant antagonists, but we love proving their rants wrong.

I find reputation to be absolutely critical, but my guild is where it is on my server in part due to reputation.

We recruited as a "no drama alternative to X" for months. We specifically took applicants for good personality fit and had a generally unspoken rule that in guild drama was KEPT in guild. No server forum disasters, no being a total jerk to other people.

When the other guild collapsed and we stepped in, we got floods of applicants and we've generally maintained our good reputation on server. We still recruit for no drama and maintain our policy about being low key and generally positive on the server forums. Hell, we had a recruitment notice on the skywall forums hijacked by a handful of trolls and we had people I'd never met, heard of, or played with coming to our defense. 20 pages, lol.

That said, other guilds accomplish the same thing in the opposite way. Nightwind got tons of applicants who knew them from forum drama and didn't care. Other guilds on server hijack world bosses and generally break the unspoken rules and they still get plenty of apps.

I think guild image and reputation really helps determine what KIND of apps you get though. It's pretty rare of us to get an app that goes to trials and has to be turned down because they don't know how to behave in a semi social fashion. (leetspeak, talking trash, etc)

And Yeah, different types of guilds benefit differently. Our reputation wouldn't hold up in a pure PvP cut-throat guild. We're generally nice guys. We like to keep a low profile. We're a little too carebear to survive as a pvp guild- we simply don't attract very many pvpers. We just don't care enough about PvP to make it life and death. (Hence being a pve guild on a pve server).

Building a good rep is hard. Destroying your rep is easy.

People have long memories fro stupid crap. Defiance on our servers till gets crap over griefing on green dragons months ago and is generally regarded as a guild of assholes because they had a few loudmouthed folks who don't know when to quit. Even if none of them have bothered posting in months, the reputation is still there, hanging around like a smelly pair of socks.

But building a good rep takes a ton of time or really good PR managers. Honestly, we ride our rep right now from back when the server started. There aren't any server first posts- why bother when we've gotten them all since Twin Emps... We don't do a ton of server charity although we've had member run MC/Ony pugs in their own time and we've offered to give forum space for organized groups if they form. Our members don't really run many 5/10man pugs. 3 of our officers were major forum trolls when the server started and laid a solid groundwork for our guild name. We recruited a few other trolls along the way... each generally positive or funny troll helps. One of our members runs the guild progress thread.

Eh, it takes time and a solid foundation. A few server firsts or major charity works (Christmas MC run last year by Nightwind, brought something like 20 people from various guilds and gave away all the loot. Resurrection gave away a chunk of their ventrillo server for the holidays since they boosted it up to 100 people for a tournament but didn't need that much themselves) doesn't hurt. but basically keeping your nose totally clean is the first step, at least if you're trying to get a good rep =P It can take months though.

I went on a scholomance pug earlier this week- needed a skin of shadows for my libram and couldn't get a guild run. I had no idea who the people were, but I expected some annoyance at showing up in shadowform and in my pvp gear (although I had my healing gear in the bag, Faith is a little bit of an overkill for scholo). Instead I got "lol I feel safe now.. nice gear." and the other guy "Ain't gotta look at her gear, just look at her tag..."

Reputation is nice to have =)

Theres definetely something to be said for filling the good guy quota; probobly not to the exclusion of raw progress, but its still a factor. I know its a false dichotomy to assume that the two are mutually exclusive, but public respectability has really made us the go to guys even when another horde guild on our server caught up to us. Of course, if we'd kept our undisputed #1, that probobly wouldn't have been an issue, but hey, shit happens. With transfers closed or closing on high pop servers, you have to go back to appealing to the player base at home, and most of them really don't want to get /spit on when they run around Org, especially considering the social dislocation thats already going to come from jumping guilds. A good guy rep gets people treated well, and can keep you in the long haul if things get bumpy.

Being a 'bad guy' guild can be both a good and bad thing (as mentioned) we had a guild called Silvan Rangers (horde) which was notorious for being forum asses to trashtalk, rasict depending on who you talk to and everything in between, they were in the mentality that reputation either mattered very little or not at all. They would get recruits who matched their 'style' but to say they got any respect from other guilds would be a long shot. They eventually splintered apart a few months ago.

My guilds mentality is we want to be the 'good guys' that doesn't mean we're always super nice, but our members drama does reflect back on the guild and forum flamming and general chat in raid instances are frowned upon (think barrens chat). For me it's a nice fit and I belive we've managed to uphold this 'look'.

While I've seen bad rep destroy three guilds on my server, I will admit that it only happened because in every case they were competing for recruitment against guilds with similar progression and better PR squads. Still, any guild that might need to recruit and doesn't have the advantage of a globally known guild name (EJ, DnT, etc...) will have to maintain an okay reputation if they want to thrive.

People have been focusing on the effects of bad rep, but good reputation is worthwhile in it's own right. Good rep is the difference between paying 1000g each for elementium ore or having someone just walk up to you and hand you the ore because the whole server wants your guild to get a Thunderfury. This happened to <The Tribe> on Aggramar, because the guild leader, Ayup, is one of the classiest people the world has ever seen.

Now, a guild like EJ is in an odd spot because they have a hopelessly good reputation. At this point, EJ could probably post a pic on their front page of Kaubel strangling a prostitute while dressed in a French maid outfit, and the guild's reputation would survive (as long as he did a /flex afterward). At that point it's hard to see the appeal of reputation. However, when you're in a mediocre guild and see people chose your guild over a 'better' guild because the other guild has a bad rep, that's when you start to appreciate making friends with your fellow WoW players.

We do this too.

Apps with quality gear and playing skill but with drama baggage attached are always tempting, especially if they're of a class you're short on. There's a large short-term benefit in being able to plug these people into your raid. But the downsides of bringing such people into your guild only take effect over the long term.

Reputation often works like that: There's something to gain in the short run by taking a questionable app that fills a gap in your raid, or being a little too aggressive in tapping a world spawn so you can get its loot. But the world spawn leaves a bad taste in people's mouths that lingers for months after the event, and the questionable player you took become a problem 3 months later when he unleashes a boatload of forum drama on you.

Maintaining a good reputation requires a constant eye toward the long-term good of your guild, and a fair degree of self-discipline. You have to be able to say "This would be good for us now, but in the long run it's not worth it."

After one of our warriors got his binding months ago we stopped running MC and never really went back as a DKP event. He began organizing late night raids after our main raid to try to get this binding. He would invite any guildies that wanted to go on mains or alts then just pug the rest in lfg channel. After a while he started getting usually 5-10 people that would go everytime he ran it so we started a new rank in our guild called a "No raid hat" They got priority on our MC runs but anything worth DKP they would not get priority on. If they started drama they would be booted on the spot and they were all aware of this. So far I don't think we've kicked a single person for drama and a couple of the No raid hats have moved up to raider status because they were always on and available. It's been a good system for us.

I'd agree with the previous posters that reputation plays a lot into your ability to recruit. My reputation and my server's willingness to attest to it allowed me to persuade people to actually transfer servers to join my brand new guild despite the fact that I had zero PvE accomplishments.

From my research, I understand that recruiting will be a constant task in maintaining the guild's fighting capacity. Establishing a reputation as a great PvP guild - as opposed to "nice guys" - is the way I hope to boost my ability to recruit. One of the ways to do this is by plugging my guild via the Arena ladder. We're going to append the letters "GM" to the end of every guild Arena-5's team name. This way, when people pull up a listing of all the top Arena team's standings, they'll see a number of teams in the top 100, 50, 25, whatever, with "GM" appended to the end of their names. And when PvPers do research on why the hell all these teams did that, they'll trace it back to us.

However, reputation is not the end all, be all. If you're so inclined and capable, you can just throw money at the problem. I'm advertising on Broken Toys, World of Raids and the Blue Tracker. I just crossed the $900 mark after three months of advertising. I haven't come across any other guild that has taken such extreme measures but I wouldn't be surprised if it became more common. There's no doubt in my mind that it has been successful.

You are best known because of the fact that I simply can't get the song "Is it Cause I'm Cool?" out of my head. Even almost a year later.

Your guild is eeeevil.

I think I've pirated all of the songs from both of their MC speedruns.

Anyway I feel that reputation is a little bit overrated, at least as far as keeping guildmembers is concerned.

You have a strong guild-member. Does his job well, rarely argumentative, knows his shit.

He says something stupid, not offensive, not horribly egregious, perhaps teasing, to a member of another, friendly, guild.

Do you: A. Discipline the person publicly. B. Let it slide and value your guildmember over the misinterpreted feelings of someone in a completely different guild on the server. C. /gremove them.

Curious to see what most guild-officers would do in that situation.

Considering I spend half my time joking and thus accidentally offending people I'm actually slightly scared by that question. I'd guess you can guess what answer I'd pick from that however. ;)

Anyway, I can personally say that reputation most certainly is a nice thing to have, and as others can confirm the memory of your average person on the internet is crazy for small little things. My guild has improved it's image a lot since it's original inception, but there's still always random trolls mentioning stuff from over a year ago at tmes. It's pretty crazy.
Luckily our image has definitely improved a lot, because we usually get people from all kinds of guilds shooting those people down.

Anyway, I've personally been responsible for a lot of the improvement in people's eyes (Or at least, I like to think I am), as we're mostly known now for the little stories I write after any of our first kills. They're fairly popular as far as I can tell, both amongst people praising them and the aforementioned trolls. I only ever post the start of the topic, and it wasn't unusual for the threads to get over 7 pages of the trolls and random people from other raiding guilds flaming each other. Lately this has decreased though, though we've certainly gone through a lot of drama... Ranging from the usual stuff around world bosses (Which probably wasn't helped by us farming them for about half a year now I think about it), to us "skipping content" by beating a few Ahn'Qiraj bosses before we ever killed Nefarian.

That type of thing you completely ignore. A guild leader isn't responsible for micromanaging player interactions.

Real issues are things like ninja-looting, ToC-violating griefing, and all out harrassment (if /ignore will solve the problem, it's not really harrassment). The guilds I was talking about in the other thread were guilds that openly endorsed these activities. I'll agree that one or two rude people mean nothing in terms of guild appeal, but the issue is when someone ninjas BoP epics he doesn't need from someone who can use them, and the ninja's guild leader defends him. Alliance on my server had that happen and the guild leader basically said "Yeah, but (ninja) is my cousin, and you're a non-guildie, so you don't count". Talk all you want about "rep doesn't matter", that guild felt reputation based aftershocks from supporting their ninja guildie.

(oh, and the item was a Headmaster's Charge that a SotSF warlock took from a healer in greens).

If they said it to another guild in game then I would not care at all, especially if it was stupid / teasing. If any officer reacted to that, they need to lighten up.

Anyway, guild reputation is most certainly overrated. Even being known as the "bad-guy" guild doesn't stop you from getting good apps, as long as your PvE progress stays at the forefront of content. Of course I could be seeing this differently than most. Our guild has never, ever, had "defectors" so I guess reputation matters much more when you have something to prove.

That's pretty easy. I'd choose:

D. Talk to the person privately and say "Hey, you can't do things like that, okay?"