Just in trying to come up with a good title for this thread, I spent about five minutes. How is this relevant? Over the course of the last few months, I have been working to compile a group of friends and gamers, to create a guild for the Burning Crusade. Thus far, we have picked up several people from each class, and are working to solidify our roster and prepare for the oncoming expansion. Most have us have played together at one point or another over the last two years.

We had our first meeting, and we hit an interesting issue. We need to decide upon a guild name. Now, there are all sorts of ideas being thrown around. As of now, we're in a temporary guild that I started by the name of <Faction>.

Most of the guild members don't want to keep this name. That's cool. When I asked them for ideas, here's what I got back.

<Fluffy> (Relevance: Imagine encountering a premade, or group of Horde players that come by, rip you apart, and once they're done with you, leave. Just the image. Fluffy is intended to be ironic, but it isn't very serious. It seems to lack a fundamental meaning. Nothing to really rally around.)
<Strawberry Banana Fusion> (Relevance: I don't really know... )
<Dawn> (Relevance: A new beginning. It's what we're hoping to start.)
<Genesis> (Relevance: Same as Dawn. Just a "cooler" word for some.)


In their own right, all okay names. The issue is, what to go for? How do you satisfy everyone? How close can you get to satisfying everyone?

I'm looking for something slightly serious, since I perceive that a strong guild name helps to add to the atmosphere. We obviously want to have fun, but we also want to succeed and progress. Firetree doesn't have a lot of progression, especially on Horde side. We'd like to change that, in both PvP and PvE, come TBC.

What people don't want, is something cliché. Others are looking to have a strong, fundamental underlying meaning. Some want one word guild tags, others don't want to fit the "norm". I don't want a name that's degrading or lacks positivity. I want something we can rally around and use as motivation.

So we eventually want to get something witty, funny, AND serious.

So my final question is, how did you all eventually arrive at your guild names? Was there any process? Is it really that large of an issue? Who picked the final name? How?

Here's what we did:

1) Get 90+% of your guild members together (Forum, Ingame /g, Vent, whatever) and give everyone one 'veto' and one 'suggestion' with the requirement that they make their suggestion immediately after they veto someone else's.

2) Allow someone to suggest a moderately bad name, for free so that things get started, and let the fun begin. Any name that doesn't get vetoed in a certain amount of time, or the last name submitted, becomes the guild name.

Caveats:
-Nobody can re-suggest the same name
-Everybody should get time to think before the 'game' is started
-If a fair majority of the guild dislikes the name decided upon, it gets removed from contention and another suggestion must be made (prevents people from saving their vote until the very end so they 'win')

If you have some witty individuals and a group that gets along rather well, you may, rather randomly, stumble onto something rather interesting and unique; if not, well, you can always go with a straight up vote *shrug*. For the record, Bloodbath & Beyond was our second to last suggestion and it took, oh, an hour to come up with on vent (total time spent thinking, suggesting & vetoing, & debating over decent, but not good enough, names).

The guild name itself is largely irrelevant you can pretty much choose anything. The reputation you build up is far more important imo.

Basically every single decent 1 word name will already be in use by some other successful guild on another server. My advice choose something original but not too silly or long.

I think most guilds use this web site.

We had a hard time coming up with a name, so we pitched a really awful one that we found funny to the members and told them they'd have to come up with something everyone liked or we'd go with the awful one. Pretty quickly, someone came up with Explicit Content and noone disliked it so we went with it.

Steal a line from a movie.

Didn't Barnum say something along the lines of pleasing all the people, all the time? As in, you never will?

What's the saw about building consensus... it's always good to do, but it's always bad to get stymied by too? Ultimately, your guild name isn't going to kill RaidBossDeJour. That said, Digo's here led me to naming my previous guild in homage. (Didn't kill any raid bosses for us, either)

If I had it all to do over again, I'd just outright steal one I saw on a PVP server: Teddy Bear Tree Hug Club.

or this one.

There is a very excellent French book which illustrates that perfectly. I have no idea if you have ever read le petit prince or if that book is even known in America (it's French after all :p), but it's certenly worth the read.
In any case, there is a planet the 'petit prince' visits which is ruled by a king trying to please everyone, and by trying to do that the king lost all of his subjects. Trying to please everyone is an awful way to make decisions.

What I would do is to let everyone do a suggestion on the forum for a certain period (after which almost nobody will have done a decent suggestion, so they'll have no reason to complain later on, and if you get a decent suggestion, even for the better), and then pick a random word that doesn't sound all to bad (I had a char named 'deur' (which means door in dutch) and this char name is just hitting my keyboard repeatedly with my elbow).

We had submissions on names, we voted on 400 names, then held a runoff between the top 12 or so, and finally decided on the name we had first proposed at the start: Humility.

Derail: The Little Prince is a very well known book.

On Topic:

Most guild names suck. Most suck and suck badly.

However there's a reason why so many names one word and latin rubbish and such. It's because they're innocuous.

The thing about an innocuous name is that it allows the reputation your guild has to come from the people in the guild and the way it plays not the name itself. It might seem silly at first, but after a while then name gains associations not because of the name but because of the guild itself, and it starts to mean exactly what you want it to mean.

So just pick a name, nothing too bad, and just start playing.

My Pet Peeves:

Hyperbolic "cute" or "silly" names: Super Happy BBQ Fun Time, Teddy Bear Tree Hug Club. (one exception being the guild on my server where the name is actually a teddy bear (oh art!) )

Religious: anything with Heaven, Crusaders, Satan, Devil, etc in it.

Poor English: Bad spelling, stupid capitalisation, etc.

I totally used that website for my alt guild's name.

Generally when I choose a guild name (for my many alts); I'd like to use ones that make me interested right away. Generally short and funny.

To be honest, I've always thought that <Milk and Cookies> would make a great guildname. Too bad that the rest of the world disagrees.

My guildmates vetoed <Bloodthirsty Meerkats>.

Fuckers.

I like going for references of the HHGTTG variety, but most people don't seem to see eye-to-eye with me on that. And I found, much to my disappointment, that <So Long And Thanks For All The Fish> is too long for a guild name, so I had to settle for simply <Thanks For All The Fish> (the more obvious reference guild name of <Mostly Harmless> was already taken).

I inevitably think most guild names are pretentious (anything Latin), unoriginal (any horde-side guilds which has "Moo" as the focal point of their guild name; oh, and also anything Latin), or completely devoid of any relevance (What exactly does "Echelon" by itself denote anyway? That's right, nothing).

But I don't really care too much in the end, because as someone has mentioned previously, guild names in and of itself means, well, very little.

One thing to note is that if you're taking suggestions, make sure you get alts to buy charters for the front-runners, as there's nothing more annoying that having a big vote-off for a name, then finding that you can't use the winner - or any of the other top five for that matter - anyway.

Back in the middle of last year (2005), when we merged to form Soulbound, the naming process was long, involved and arduous. It eventually culminated in one of our members saying "I'm registering <Soulbound>, join if you will." We did, and that was that. (I still like the idea of the guild name <Stratholme Home Owners Association>, even though it's way too long)

Couldn't agree more. I can't stand pretentious one-word names. Now if that guild turns around and gets a server first or something, hey, i'll listen then. The problem is lame guilds with lame names. The lameness just exponentially exponentiates... or something like that. Kinda like a rock star in a dress. Only the truly awesome can pull it off.

I also dislike guild names with WoW references in them, like say, <Alliance of Lordaeron>. And stuff like <Champions/Crusaders/Disciples/Warriors of Chaos/Light/Destiny/War>. You really can't get much lamer without resorting to Latin.

Now,
<Milk and Cookies>
That sounds like my kind of guild.

The one word latin and/or "impact" style names are far more common as you enter games where the epeen stretches much further. My experience is they tend to attract that sort of personality too.

Our guild name was originally Cuddlebears, until some spoilsports insisted on changing it. Lost Anarchy is pretty much the worst guild name imaginable - it commits the cardinal sin of guild naming(IMO) of just being a few strung-together-"cool sounding" words. It doesn't even come close to meaning anything - what would Lost Anarchy mean anyway? Found Government?

I actually put a lot of thought into guild names - when we were discussing changing our name from Lost Anarchy (back to cuddlebears or something else), I must have come up with dozens of suggestions, most of which I ended up disliking myself. I think the best guild names are either one simple yet strong word (I like Nihilium, Retribution, Rebirth, etc - my alt guild is Shock) or a short memorable word pairing/phrase - Elitist Jerks, Death and Taxes, Deus Vox. It's important that your guild name can be abbreviated effectively and doesn't share an acronym with another guild on your server (just for ease of quick identification), and it's important that it's uniquely recognizable as yours - it really sucks to be the Knights Who Say Ni from server X and have 100 guilds just like you - not just aesthetically, but practically, since x-server recruitment is much easier if your guild can be easily identified.

But Latin abbreviations are ok, right guys?


Guys?


We thought of changing the name, but we decided against it in the end because our /ginfo reads "Guild Created 11-24-2004" and we're all just a little proud of that.

Personally I don't believe anyone can come up with a name that would truly be agreed on by most that it is "Awesome".

Any guild's name should basically just be something that its members are comfortable with, as you can't really tell how dedicated, focused and oriented the guild is just by its name. Guild progress speaks infinetely louder than any name anyone could ever come up with, and other than that, it's really about how said guild's members act with the rest of the server that will truly shape how your guild is viewed by everyone else.



pS: Took you a while to come up with a thread name? I'd have gone with "Best Practices: Naming a Guild"