Saturday, July 14, 2007

"Dear God Why Does Everyone Keep Bugging Me," or "On being a Guild Leader"

So I'm a bit of an odd bird. Most guild leaders are tanks, which can make sense. Tanks are often the ones with the attitude (*coughegocough*) to be guild leaders and tanks are usually the ones marking up pulls, leading the raid, etc.

Balance druids at endgame are pretty rare. I honestly don't know of any other Balance Druid leading a guild that's downed anything in Karazhan at all. Granted, I'm sure there's probably one or two on some other realm somewhere, but still, not common.

So, since I've had at least moderate success at building a casual raiding guild, here are some of the things that I think are required.

1) Be absolutely up front with people about your goals and what you expect to be doing. For example, I tell all new recruits up front that we're raiding, but not as often as many guilds, because we have outside lives. If you're going to be hardcore at raiding and expect strict attendance, let people know that. There's no point to someone joining only to leave because you're not for them, and being honest and up front with people gets you brownie points with them to boot.

2) Have a loot system ready, make it as fair as possible, and make it transparent. 90% of guild drama and breakups are caused by loot and the distribution thereof. Whatever you use, make sure everyone understands the rules when they start joining the raiding.

3) Get some good people to back you up. Running a guild alone is impossible. Make sure you have at least a few good people you trust as officers.

4) Be persistent. It's probably going to take a little while, maybe weeks, maybe months. You're probably going to have setbacks, but push through them. Eventually, you'll get things going the way you need them.

Yeah, somewhat generalized information, but it was in my head, so into words it goes.

4 comments:

Mera said...

MORE!

Anonymous said...

I run a guild as a boomkin leader, just wanted to say hey and good luck with raiding =). I finally got to 25 mans recently. Enjoying reading your stuff so far.

inkgrrl said...

Slacker and slow here... I'm also a boomkin GL (Cybella of DragonChow on Baelgun). We're finally getting some of our stragglers and folks who got burnt on raiding pre-TBC interested in Kara, so are starting to get keyed as a group for that. At the rate we're going maybe sometime next year we'll be through Black Morass ;-) Did I mention we're verra casual? Guess slacker and slow kinda says it all.

Anonymous said...

This is great info to know.