Apologies for the long-winded title; it’s actually quite hard to find a subject that gets right to the point. This isn’t about triggering a particular emotion in gamers — not directly, at least. It’s also not about how ‘emotional’ gaming can be — we already know that playing games can be an intense experience that can warrant a massive gamut of emotions.

This entry’s about your avatar — your character, the model that represents you — and the emotions that it can, or as the case may be, cannot display.

Emotions have long played a vital role in communication and human interaction. We smile and raise our shoulders a little when we’re happy; we frown and slump when we’re sad — these emotional keys are a form of communication in their own right: body language!

Beyond subtle muscle shifts we also have emotive reactions that we’re less aware of: we blush when we’re embarrassed or caught lying; we raise our voice in anger or petulance. Most importantly though are the muscles groups on our face: the flaring or contraction of our lips and eyes, the furrowing or raising of the brow — each of these actions, or reactions, are ‘programmed in’ genetically and almost impossible to alter. It’s these same minute movements that we’re (often unconsciously) reading in the face of whoever we’re talking to. It’s these tiny twitches in someone else’s face or body language that can trigger our own involuntary responses: that momentary curl of the lip might be all the indication you need to run away quickly.

This ‘hunt for emotion’ as we communicate with other people is so ingrained that online communication has always felt a little… distant. Internet veterans are cautious, aware that without body language their words can easily be misconstrued. Newbies often blunder, forgetting that no one can see the ironic smile on their face. There’s a reason emoticons , *asterisks*, CAPSLOCK and _underscores_ exist: to convey emotion! It’s clunky and slow compared to body language or facial expressions but it’s the best that we have.

Why, twenty years after the first text-based world, are we still communicating with such basic tools? Some early games like LegendMUD had ways to inflect mood into your conversation through expansion of the verb sets (’say alts’) but since then… nothing. In graphical virtual worlds a couple of games have tried to incorporate moods (notably Star Wars: Galaxies and EverQuest2) but still they were still primarily low-tech text-only executions, toggles: /angry, /sad, /afraid, or parsing exclamations and queries.

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars? In single-player games it’s almost the state of the art, the bleeding edge! ‘More realistic than ever before!’ the developers cry. What makes the games more realistic? Interaction with the game world: physics and realistic NPCs, or in the case of virtual worlds, other player avatars. You only need to look at the success of LittleBigPlanet — a very simple platformer with oodles of delicious detail and bucket loads of charm and a very diverse emotion system.

For a market segment that generates almost all of its appeal (and revenue) from the immersive quality of virtual worlds it’s amazing that there isn’t yet a virtual world that has the power to model emotions through various facial expressions and body poses. You could even go one step further from the toggle system and parse complex emotions like sadness, apprehension and lust out of chat. Then there’s the character state itself: in battle your avatar would grimace upon being hit; a healer would smile upon saving a party member.

Are we simply being held back by World of Warcraft’s ancient graphics engine? Surely it’s time for realistic, immersive emotions in virtual worlds.

Further Reading

• Some work into avatar puppeteering in Second Life which, unlike WoW, actually has some built-in facial expressions
• Bob Moore’s presentation from the Austin GDC 2008 has a more-scientific, sociological look at it under the header ‘Challenges in Avatar-Mediated Interaction’

There is one common trait among all guilds, of every size and all descriptions: players quit. They can suffer burnout, or perhaps start a new job that prevents them from playing, but at the end of the day the result is the same: you’ve lost a member of the community, and perhaps the raid team too. In this article, I’ll try to explain the main cause of players quitting, and how to prevent it from happening in the first place!

Obviously, you can’t prevent players from ever quitting (though that would be nice!). The only way to counteract such losses is through recruitment (at least until we can have virtual children…) The method of recruitment will vary from guild to guild and server to server, but I hope to cover most of the basics in this article; I’ll even try to throw in a few ‘veteran tips’ that might give your guild a slight advantage over the rest!

Quitters

Eventually, everyone quits. Awfully philosophical, I know. At some stage, whether it’s tomorrow, or 50 years from now, the game ceases to be a game, and you quit. Humans aren’t very good at playing ‘non games’ for long: there has to be some kind of tangible improvement, some kind of fun. Without a game, what’s the point? Without some kind of competition, or some end goal to strive towards, why bother?

The real life equivalent would probably be suicide, which thankfully isn’t as prevalent as people quitting an online game: Interpersonal ties, those ties that keep you going and striving for success, are much stronger when you see and talk to someone face-to-face. There are also a much larger abundance of games to play in real life; a much vaster range of challenges and aspirations that you might one day achieve.

This is where MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, suffer: they have a finite number of games; a limited number of possibilities. In the case of WoW, the world might be very large indeed, with a lot of possible developer- and player-created games, but at the end of the day you are still bound to the world created by Blizzard. In real life, there are almost no limitations — if you see the top of a mountain, you can almost certainly go there, even if it takes years of training. In a game, you can only go there if the designer hasn’t placed an invisible wall in the way. Ultimately, you have to play the game they want you to play.

Inevitably, when all of the content is exhausted (or you have exhausted everything that is fun), you quit.

You’re not going to stop everyone from quitting, but there are certainly some steps you can take to lessen the chances of it happening.

You must have fun

This is to both the players, and the guild leaders. You, as a player, must find the game fun. You, you grumpy, tyrannical guild leader, must make the game fun for the members of your guild! When the game stops being fun, you can guarantee that people will start quitting. It might be a slow trickle at first, but without any significant changes, that trickle will fast become a torrent of quitters.

MMOs in general, and WoW in specific tend to be fun — they are games after all! The problems normally arise when you’ve cleared all of the content and you’re eagerly awaiting the next patch from the developer. Sometimes, though, fun can be destroyed simply by wiping too much on a boss, or being demoted too many times by a power mad guild leader. I’ll break down the most common ways of destroying fun:

• Wiping is bad — I’m sure this comes as no surprise to any of you. Wiping is awfully testing on morale. As humans, we don’t mind repetitive actions, but there has to be observable progress over a span of a few wipes, or in the case of harder bosses, a few raids. Depending on the kind of guild or raid group, the average player tolerance to wipes will vary a lot, but in general wiping is very, very bad.
• Stagnation is bad – In the same vein as wiping repetitively without progress, stagnation is another huge cause of discontent. When the guild or raid is so static, so devoid of progress or simply without communication, it stagnates. People stop logging in, guild chat becomes quiet, and raids become just ‘yet another farm run’. Stagnation in itself isn’t entirely crippling, but it just happens to be the breeding ground of the next fun-destroying element:
• Drama – One of the most-used phrases thrown around in MMORPGs today is ‘drama’. Drama, in online games, is usually defined as the ‘aggravation of a situation’ and it’s often pointless, baseless aggravation too. As I was saying, stagnation is normally the cause of drama: dramatic players thrive in a stagnated (or simply stressed) guild environment. If you imagine a dark, lifeless pond, and then stir it around with a stick… that’s what drama often feels like in a guild. Smelly and nasty — and you can’t help but feel it was better to leave the pond unstirred.

These are the common causes of a drop in morale, the following discontent, and ultimately quitters. As with most things, it falls to the guild leader (or officers) to try and avoid such situations. The solutions are fairly simple:

• Reduce the impact of wipe-fests – Probably the best way to prevent player burnout is by making the hours spent wiping slightly less painful. You could introduce breaks every two hours, or you could promise only one wipe raid a week. Most guilds now provide repair funds and consumables for their raiders which reduces the strain of raiding by a huge amount. The only real cause of burnout today is ‘hard’ bosses — but if you play WoW, it sure seems Blizzard are trying to prevent the effect C’thun and Kael’thas had on hardcore raiding guilds. This article of mine has more detailed information on the topic of raiding, wiping and progressing.
• Stir things up before the drama queens can — In my previous example of a stagnated, dead pond being stirred, it was a dramatic player doing the stirring. They were adding their own bias to situations, and perhaps catching you, the guild leader, off-balance. The key here is to stir things up before the guild stagnates. Change the raiding schedule, or remove some of the raiders that have been holding you back! Perhaps organise a raid as level 1 gnomes on another server, or arrange a foot-race from Undercity to Booty Bay? It is nearly always the job of the guild leader to keep things fresh and interesting, so do it!
• Control the drama – Drama isn’t always bad! The wrong drama, at the wrong time, is bad. A bit of good drama never did a strong guild any harm, though! Depending on the ‘community level‘ of your guild, it might vary from guild to guild what you can actually get away with, but inspiring the members of your guild to discuss interesting topics can do a lot to develop the community, and at the same time is fun! Be careful with censorship too; obviously heavy anti-guild sentiment might need to be controlled, but also you might find that the rest of the guild gangs up on the drama queen — and there’s almost nothing more fun than coming together as a community to play ‘defeat the anti-guild forum troll’!Worth noting is that drama involving other guilds is always a good thing. If you heard about another guild having problems with a particular encounter, or with a troublesome raider, tell your guild! It’ll be great for morale, especially if you’ve been wiping on a boss for hours.

If you take these steps to make the game fun again — or even prevent the game from becoming boring in the first place! — you should have a lot less problems with quitters, which means you won’t need the next section quite so much!

Recruitment

Whether you’re a casual, raiding or hardcore guild, the bread and butter of your survival is recruitment. Recruitment is the only way you will continue to have fun and progress, and as such it is vital you understand how to control the ‘newbie hose’ of recruitment. You need to know which direction to spray it in, and when turn it on, or off.

It isn’t purely the role of the guild leader or officers to manage recruitment: it is something for every member to keep in mind. When your guild needs a replacement, before next week, chances are someone in the guild knows a suitable replacement. Of course, it’s ideal if each class leader knows every possible recruit, but that rarely happens (if you have a class leader that does know every possible recruit, look after them!)

Let’s start with the basics of recruitment.

When should you recruit?

Most guilds make the big mistake of waiting until too late to recruit; waiting one more day might make the difference between the life and death of your guild! Whether you’re a casual or raiding guild, it’s important to recruit before you lose the ‘critical mass’ of players — whatever that number of players might be!

A casual guild is probably even more fickle than their raiding or hardcore counterparts. If shit hits the fan in a casual guild, there’s usually very little to prevent players from just jumping ship and heading to another guild. In raiding-oriented guilds there is usually the soft, velvet-gloved, addictive allure of epics that keeps players hanging on for a little longer — but rest assured, people will pack their bags and run away; they’ll run very fast indeed if they think the guild has begun its dying throes.

When is it best to recruit then? Early.Very, very early. I’ve already written a bit on the size and attendance of raiding groups, and the best way to manage recruitment is to keep a very close eye on attendance. As soon as a player starts dipping below the desired percentage (80%) you should be looking for possible replacements. You should be incredibly cautious of ‘repeat offenders’ — those players that, seemingly by magic, skip raids over and over (usually due to real life commitments). These players will likely never be reliable, and in serious raiding guilds should be replaced!

In general, recruitment is a lot about gut instinct. After a while, you should be able to predict the ebb and flow of players: the inevitable loss of a few players after you finish an instance; the handful of players that you will always lose after the summer holiday. The start of the school year is another common event which will force you to recruit — but no matter the occasion, do it sooner, rather than later! If you’ve had to cancel a few raids, you were too slow!

Who should you recruit?

If we’re being WoW-specific, this question is quite easy to answer: you can recruit almost anyone. Other games might be harder (in fact, they’re probably all harder than WoW), so the recruitment criteria might be a little more stringent. With WoW though,  you should almost always recruit first and consider their actual abilities afterward.

The following is the order of importance for desirable traits in new recruits:

1. Not a dick
2. Can attend your guild’s raiding schedule (or whatever kind of schedule your guild has)
3. Relevant experience
4. Gear (or whether they have the right tools for the task)

Top guilds will obviously be a lot more choosy in who they pick up, but they also have a huge pool of possible recruits available to them. Most guilds can not pick and choose; they just have to take what they’re given. Most guilds should stick to recruiting friends of other members, which is often a sure-fire way to find non-dicky players and also work on the feeling of community and inclusion the same time. It’s not uncommon for top guilds to be made up entirely of groups of real life friends for this reason! Personal recommendation goes a long way; not having to rely on relatively-unknown forum applicants is highly desirable.

As I’ve said quite a few times now, WoW is an easy game. The number one reason for not succeeding, progressing or surviving is: not having enough players. Don’t fall into the same trap that so many other guilds have tried to work around in vain. You really can recruit just about anyone — as long as they’re not a dick!

Finally, how do you recruit?

This is the step that most guilds stumble on. You know you’re struggling and you can feel progress and morale slipping away. You know what kind of player would fit into your guild, but… there are no applications! Why aren’t people APPLYING? Don’t people know that we need a new mage? Don’t people know that we could be the best guild on the server if we just picked up the right tank?

Fortunately, all of these questions are probably caused by the same, easily-fixed problem: you are unknown. Yep, that’s why no one has applied to your awesome guild — no one knows that you’re recruiting. Rectifying this rather sizable issue is thankfully very simple: spam.

I know, I know, everyone hates trade-channel spam, but it really is your best tool to get the word out there that you need recruits. Make some macros and use them regularly (a few times an hour is enough!) For extra potency, send the macros to other people in your guild too! Assuming you have a good reputation, you should quickly notice a burst of fresh applications. (The exception to this rule is congested or dead servers, but I won’t go into that here.)

If the idea of spamming trade chat doesn’t appeal (and some guilds might fancy themselves slightly more ‘upper class’), you could also encourage all of your guild members to talk to their friends and poke them to join. If talking and poking isn’t enough, get them to start emotionally blackmailing those same friends — eventually they’ll crack and apply, trust me!

Posting on your realm’s forum is also a good idea (but I’m sure you’ve already done that, right?) Make sure to include all of the perks that members of your guild get, such as repair funds, raiding consumables, a forum, voice communications… and whether you have a tabard or not!

Tips & Tricks

Consider this section as ‘extra reading’, or a ‘bonus feature’. Either way, what you’ve read so far is more than enough to keep a casual or raiding guild alive and healthy. What follows is a few tips that might be of use to hardcore guilds, or for guild leaders that enjoy the politics of the game as much as, or more, than the actual raiding. These are also almost entirely for guild leaders, and probably won’t be very useful to the members of a guild.

• Maintain friends in other guilds – Being inherently social games, most MMORPG players like to make friends: buddies they can talk to when the going gets rough, or ask for advice on particular encounters. There’s no reason for your friends to all be from your own guild! Make friends with the officers and raiders of other guilds — or even other guild leaders!
• Similarly, keep communication channels open – Always keep your ear to the ground. Listen to what your guild members have to say, no matter how mundane it might seem to be. The web of player interconnections in MMOs like WoW  is so vast that most players are only ever 2 degrees of separation apart. This means that there is a strong chance that even if you are not friends with a possible recruit, someone in your guild probably is. Utilise and leverage those relationships to get the right players into your guild.
• Politics, and the knife in the back – I’m starting to get into territory that will no doubt cause a little uneasiness, which is no surprise as I am now talking about the wholesale slaughter of other guilds! Turning one guild’s misfortune into your own fortuitous windfall! I am of course talking about poaching important players from other guilds.Poaching itself is nothing special — almost everyone you recruit will be from another guild! — but I’m talking here about poaching a key player in another guild: their main tank, or perhaps an important social figure.  This requires a combination of having good friends, keeping an eye on ‘current affairs’, and being charismatic enough to lure someone into your guild; someone that is likely very loyal to their current guild.I’m not going to go into the details of poaching as it’s a topic best-suited to an article on the sociological and psychological stresses on the denizens of virtual worlds, and how to manipulate them.

At the end of the day, you must remember that as a guild leader, you are in a unique position. You are at the top of a pyramid: the end-point of all activity and communication below you. It is your job as guild leader to sift through the thousands of pieces of data available to you and find the important bits; it’s your job to differentiate between the pimples of harmless whining, and those little blackheads that will eventually develop into nasty, pussy spots that’ll make your life hell.

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Time and time again I see driven and excited people come together as a guild or clan, progress well but ultimately fizzle out and die.

Whether it’s because of loot drama or a tyrannical guild leader, the main thing stopping a guild from becoming successful is survival. As I’ve touched on before, World of Warcraft is an easy game. The thing holding you back from that elusive Server First is not player skills; it’s teamwork and logistics.

Now, teamwork and logistics are huge topics for another day. What I want to talk about today is something that you will need to develop and foster while your raid team or guild starts to coalesce. Alongside the implementation of a DKP system and a good raid schedule, you must also develop your community.

A good community is perhaps the main thing that holds back many new guilds. Many old guilds also take it for granted, letting it gradually waste away; a community can not be just left to hang, it must be gently cultivated, nurtured and looked after!

So, perhaps we should start with the definition of the term, and go from there:

What is a community?

A community is often defined as a group of people living in the same locality, governed by the same laws or rules. It could be as small as a group of friends that meet up at the same place and have their own ‘house rules’, or it could be as large as international ‘gaming community’ (although communities that span the globe don’t tend to have the same rules as localised ones). For the sake of this article I’m going to be talking about community sizes you often find in contemporary online games and virtual worlds; in clans, guilds and corporations.

Online communities tend to consist of 5 to 100 people. While some communities are larger, they often splinter into ‘cliques’ – groups of friends that stick very much together and don’t really add anything to the community itself. Generally, I wouldn’t recommend trying to run a online community that has more than 100 members, but if you’ve successfully grown a community and you see no reason to stop… see what you can do!

A community, then, in an online game, is a group of gamers that come together in the same place (albeit virtual, it’s still a place!) and live by the same rules, as laid down by the leader of the community (at the start, anyway!)

Creating a place for the community to exist

For an online community to come together, the members need somewhere to hang out! For an online game it’s obviously guild chat or a forum. For smaller clans it might be an IRC room, or a mailing list. As I already said, these are virtual places, but they are still places; places where thoughts and emotions can exist and run wild. A community needs a place where its members can be. It is vitally important if a thought needs sharing, or a question posed, that a place exists for that interchange.

Creating a place for the community to exist is as simple as creating a guild or chat room. A forum is also incredibly useful for the sharing of thoughts in larger communities (I’ve listed a few free forum providers at the end of this article).

The rules of the community

Once you’ve created a place, the next step is to define some common rules that everyone adheres to. I’m not talking here about draconian commandments, but I am talking about rules that add flavour, or define who you are. Perhaps a roleplaying guild might require all of its members to stay ‘in character’. Maybe you’re a player-killing clan that only has one rule: kill anything that breathes. It might just be as simple as ‘play your best and aim for server number one’.

It’s these rules that will bring your community together. Through common rites, rules and goals you will begin to trust each other; it’s only with that implicit trust and security that the community can continue its growth and become a ‘true community’.

The levels of community

M. Scott Peck was an American psychologist that had a huge body of work, but most importantly for this article, he focused a lot on communities, their characteristics, and how the phases they go through in their development.

He proposes 4 distinct stages that a community goes through (hopefully they make it to the end!):

• Pseudocommunity – As the name suggests, this isn’t really a community. Members often cover up their differences, for the sake of survival, or a common goal. This is very much a community of ’survival’; a group of players see an opportunity to improve their survival, so they group up!
• Chaos – When the psuedocommunity ultimately fails (and it will, given enough drama), the members start to go to each other for help, or guidance, or to vent their differences or grievances. This is the first stage of bonding, and trust-building! It goes beyond plain survival here — the members are trying to improve their survival!
• Emptiness – Eventually, differences are laid aside. Egos, or ego-related issues are suppressed. This is where the strong individual urges are destroyed and the community is actually born.
• True community – After making it through all of the previous stages, the members of the community are in complete empathy with one another. Arguments will arise, but they will be settled in a timely fashion without things becoming too heated. Motives are never called into question in a true community – it’s way beyond that point! – any members of the community that made it to this point are in it for the long run, perhaps until the day they die (or quit!)

These stages are very easily mapped onto online communities. Using World of Wacraft guilds as a base for the examples:

• Stage 1 – A guild forms. The leader has normally chosen a purpose for the guild’s existence, but that’s the only thing keeping the guild together. ‘A place to farm easy epics!’ or ‘Become number one on the server!’ are two common goals for a guild at this stage
• Stage 2 – It’s the guild leader’s job to get the guild to this stage as soon as possible! Stage 1 is quite destructive (and some guilds never leave it), and real progress and melding as a group can only occur once there is discourse and argument about how best to do things. Most WoW guilds that get to this stage can survive for a long time; simply getting the members to care enough and discuss issues or boss strategies is an achievement!
• Stage 3 – Once the rampant egos have been squashed, or removed, a guild might make it to this stage. This is when people start sharing real life issues and empathy starts popping up. People earnestly care for each other. It’s around this stage that people start turning up for every raid – and if they don’t, they’re very apologetic about it. Being let down by a member of the community is rare at this stage.
• Stage 4 – Often referred to as ‘spiritual community’, this is a stage that very few guilds will reach. This is where you start finishing each other’s sentences. There is an overwhelming feeling of inclusivity, commitment and consensus in a true community. A single leader also becomes less important at this stage; the community tends to govern itself through rational discussion that can only occur in a truly safe environment.

Peck defines true community with lots of shiny, happy terms, but the key values of a true community are: a safe place, a spirit (shared wisdom/love), and a place where everyone feels involved and included, without the fear that their feelings will be ignored, or attacked by other members.

Obviously, if an online community can reach the 4th and final stage, they’re going to be around for a long time, and perhaps span multiple games. The community transcends individual games; it becomes a lot more about the forum, voice coms, or even real-life meets!

Most guilds will only ever reach Stage 2 or 3 though, which is generally fine. A lot of progress will appear when people lay down their differences and egos, and focus on actually working together. If a community never progresses from Stage 1, you are in for a short, wild ride. There might be some progress, but it will be fleeting. Many flash-in-the-pan guilds recruit heavily, get bullied around by a guild leader, progress a bit, and ultimately dissipate to other guilds — these guilds serve a purpose though… they gear up people for other guilds with strong communities!

How to build a community — an example

Let me give you an example of a community that’s started from scratch. This could be a tiny fledgling guild started in The Barrens, or it could be a clan of Counter Strike players that bumped into each other in a random free-for-all game.

The first step is obviously to create a place to exist. This might be a forum, or a chat room, or just guild chat. It’s not hard to create a place! As long as the tools are there to facilitate communication, that’s all that matters. In general, though, a forum is the best solution for almost every kind of community — it allows real-time communication, and also threads of thought that can be answered at a later date. A forum also acts as a ‘group consciousness’, storing information from the past for future generations! Freedom of information is very important!

Once you have a place, you need some rules. This is the great part of online communities: your set of laws and rules can be incredibly flimsy, or very restrictive — whatever works! You might choose to have an almost non-existant rule set (our guild only has one rule, for example: ‘Don’t be an asshat’), or you might have a huge charter that lays down what you can and can’t do while in that community. I’ve seen roleplay guilds that have entire ‘rules of engagement’ laid out, that everyone must follow!

The most important thing is that these rules must be inclusive. Freedom of speech, as is the freedom of information. You are building a community not a tyranny. The members of the community must be able to speak their minds; they must be able to share their passions and concerns. It is only through concensus of opinion and inclusion that a community can grow upwards through the 4 stages!

The exception here is when someone (often the leader, although it could be by group agreement too) oversteps the line and needs correction, or removal. Racism is a common example of ‘excessive’ freedom of speech, as is misogyny in a community that includes girls. Religion might also be a sensitive subject in some cultures. Basically, any avenue of conversation that might push people out, rather than include. If a community reaches Stage 4 — true community — most codes of conduct are self-governing; it’s the early stages of a community that need the most hand-holding and guidance.

Once you have a place, and some rules, the community will begin to flourish. A little guidance might be necessary though! A community is nothing if it’s not used. What good is a forum, chat room or guild chat if no one actually uses it? I’ve seen WoW guilds with maybe 1 or 2 new forum posts every week; needless to say, their communities were incredibly weak — they just exist to raid, and never get past Stage 1.

It is someone’s (or everyone’s!) job to make sure the community grows. Encourage people to log into the forum and ask questions. Expect other people to assist you during your travels. If someone asks a question — answer it in a timely fashion!

You are trying to develop a group where everyone feels included, where you can put your entire soul into it without the fear that your investment won’t be returned. A community is only as strong as its members make it — if there is some rule, or some person (a tyrant!) that prevents people from dedicating themselves fully, your community may never get past Stage 1 or 2.

Notes

As with everything I’ve written, there’s always some exclusions or special cases that need mentioning. The common factor of Stage 3 and 4 communities is that they don’t have a tyrant leader — they have a shared leadership, with the members defining the rules and delivering justice. In fact, once a community progresses out of Stage 2, a leader might find himself with very little to do; problems seem to get solved on their own, and eventually problems just don’t arise!

Unfortunately, many online guilds tend to have tyrannical leaders. I’ve seen many guilds on the cusp of Stage 3 crushed by a tyrannical guild leader that’s afraid to lose his grip on control of the community. Some leaders are perhaps only playing to lead, rather than create a great and thriving community.

This isn’t to say that a leader has no place in Stage 3 or 4 communities! Their role tends to become more of a ’spiritual father’ (for want of a better term), guiding the community in times of unrest. As online communities are nearly always recruiting to replace quitters, it is also the leader’s job is to remove new members that don’t gel with the rest of the community; although the members themselves might force new people out, if they don’t fit.

I said I would provide a list of good, free forum providers, so here they are:

Free Forums/Guild Portals

• Guild Portal
• Guildomatic
• GamerDNA
• GuildLaunch

If on the other hand you are a smaller clan, how about getting an IRC room on QuakeNet? (It’s a very comprehensive guide!)

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Since the start of this series of ‘Life as a guild leader‘ articles I’ve received quite a variety of questions both here on the site and via email. With a little break from the norm, I’m going to answer these questions publically, so that hopefully everyone can learn from the trials and tribulations of other guild leaders.

I’ve removed any incriminating and identifiable data so don’t worry, if you’re one of the people that sent me a question!

I have questions from very hardcore through to casual ‘we met in The Barrens and are currently working our way through Wailing Caverns’ guilds, but first I’m going to answer some raiding-oriented questions:

My guild is at that stage where we’re not quite sure if we’re hardcore, and we’re not quite sure if we’re regular raiders. The serious players are pulling us towards the hardcore side of things, but we have a lot of ‘oldies’ that would rather remain a normal raiding guild. What should we do?

One of the questions that plagues the membership of almost every WoW raiding guild: Are we hardcore? Do we want to be hardcore? There’s unfortunately no simple answer to this one. It will probably come down to one thing though:  does your guild leader have the time and energy to propel your guild from regular raiding through to hardcore progressive raiding. Obviously active class leaders can help a lot with the transition, but at the end of the day it’s the drive of one person putting in hour after hour to ensure you have a stable platform for hardcore raiding that will make the difference between success, or failure.

Someone has to set up a good website, a DKP system, a set of rules — this is nearly always the guild leader! If you want to make that step-up from server 10th to the top 3, someone has to put in the hours. Whether a group agreement is made by the officers, or the guild leader agrees to put in a lot of extra effort, one thing is certain: a lot of labour goes into building a hardcore guild. I’ve written some other articles on the topic of leading a hardcore guild, which you can find in the archive.

If you think you have the balls and the time to make a hardcore guild, the next question to ask is: Do we have the players? It is certainly guaranteed that you will lose your casual players if you become a hardcore guild. Likewise if you remain a regular guild, you will lose your hardcore players to hardcore guilds! As World of Warcraft is an easy game, it’s not normally hard to find raiders, but it does require rigorous recruitment to find raiders that can play unhindered and unmolested for 4 hours a night, 5 days a week.

If you have the players, and someone that’s willing to put in the effort of recruitment and logistics (making sure people turn up for raids is hard), you simply need a good DKP system and you’re ready to rock!

Is it better to lead a guild with an iron fist, or to take a more laid-back position? Should I ween out the weaklings myself, or should I let natural evolution take care of it for me?

This likely comes down to how your guild was formed. If you are a relatively new guild where the power structures are weak, with nonexistant or newbie class leaders, leading with an iron fist is probably the only way to go. Someone has to grab the reins and dig their spurs into the guild to drive it forward — and that person is the guild leader. As the structure of the guild develops and a successful hierarchy forms, a more laid-back position can be assumed. Issues will bubble up through class leaders and perhaps to assistant guild leaders before they finally get to you. In mature guilds problems tend to solve themselves through discussion and peer-pressure — just like communities in real life — and it’s likely you’ll only have to step in with your fist of iron if things get really out of hand.

If you lead a developed guild with an unwavering, unerring view on things, you might find that your guild becomes stale and lifeless. Tyranny is generally very poor for the development of society or culture — you want your members to be able to voice their opinions and feel at home! A community is only as strong as its members…!

What’s the best way to judge if you have enough raiders to raid successfully over a period of time? Is there an ideal number of each class that prevents burn-out, but also limits drama when people don’t get invited?

With Blizard’s new ‘bring the player, not the class’ initiative, it’s hard to pick exact numbers. Assuming Blizzard continue to provide a ‘fair’ experience for each class (i.e. encounters that favour each kind of tank, DPS and healer), you can’t go far wrong with the following numbers, broken down into class and role, and starting with the tank classes:

• 3 warriors — 1 tank, 2 DPS/tanking hybrids
• 4 paladins — 1 tank, 3 DPS/healing hybrids
• 3 death knights -- 1 tank, 2 DPS/tanking hybrids
• 4 druids — 1 tank, 3 DPS/healing hybrids

With this setup you have 4 available ‘main tanks’ — a number you require, assuming each raider maintains 75% attendance. Three tanks is the ’standard’ 25-man raid tank alotment, according to Blizzard — you have plenty of hybrids if you need to fill in an off-tanking role for whatever reason, though

Moving onto the pure DPSers (Rogues, Hunters, Warlocks and Mages), it’s fairly straightforward: 3 of each DPS class.

This leaves just the shaman and priests — 4 of each is a good target. Shaman, with so many juicy buffs, tend to do a lot of respeccing. Priests, as the jack of all trades (well, except for tanking…) can fill any remaining gaps nicely. It’s not uncommon to see a guild with 5 priests, or with 0, depending on the strength of their other healers!

This gives you a total pool of 34 players, which assuming raiders maintain 75% attendance is about 26 players online at any given time! In reality though, you will tend to have either too few or too many people online — that’s when a rota system can come in handy! If you have 4 raids a week, 1 druid can skip a single raid each week — as long as the other 3 promise to turn up!

In general, with these kinds of numbers, assuming 75% attendance, you will be able to maintain healthy raids with a minimum of ‘invite time’ drama. An attendance closer to 80 or 85% is obviously more desirable on ‘progress raids’ where you might want to make switches — but hopefully with Blizzard’s new initiative that won’t be a requirement!

One last question:

Morale’s really low in our guild at the moment. We never really recovered from the complete cock-block of the later bosses in Sunwell Plataeu, and now this easy-mode grind has taken us in the other direction — now we’re done with things in one night, everyone logs out, and we don’t see each other until next week. I’m worried that when Ulduar comes we won’t have the teamwork we once had. Help!

This is a remarkably common problem, especially amongst guilds that didn’t quite become a hardcore progressive guild (i.e. number 1 on the server, or close to it). You’ve pushed incredibly hard, often to the point of breaking and eventually giving up; or going on a  ‘raiding break’ as some guild leaders like to diplomatically call it. It often happens on pre-nerf instance end bosses — C’thun at 60 and Kael’thas/M’uru  at 70 — where only the very top guilds will have the skills, endurance and reserves of morale to get the kill. We’re talking tiny numbers here: about 150 guilds killed Kil’jaeden — maybe 4,500 people out of a few million.

Quite simply, if you haven’t quite got what it takes, your guild will at the very least lose a bunch of players to burn out. At the very worst, enough people won’t turn up at the end of the raiding break and the guild will fold. So then, how best to prevent that burn out? It’s remarkbly simple: don’t push it beyond breaking point. The only problem is knowing where that breaking point is! Normally it’s when people start turning up late, or you begin wiping more rather than less. If you find yourself bringing new people to the raid each time, that’s a good sign too.

Ultimately you have to judge how strong the guild feels. Is Ventrilo becoming a graveyard during raids? Are people losing their temper at the tiniest and inconsequential mistakes? Are people making more and more odd excuses in the raid-skip forum thread? Any and all of these are signs that you’re pushing it beyond the threshold of your raid group. Just remember that those pre-nerf bosses are only meant to be done by the very top guilds — Blizzard always nerf them at a later date for everyone else to do them! If you haven’t got what it takes, don’t push it. Wait for the nerf! Even if you’re not #1, at least you’ll have a guild and your community at the end of it!

The second half of the question, regarding the dumbing-down of content in Wrath of the Lich King, is slightly harder to answer. You could embrace your inner casual (Blizzard certainly seems to encourage it), or you could encourage the guild to level alts together. PVPing is always good, both arenas and battlegrounds; they keep people talking to each other, and it’s a whole lot more ‘reactive’ than the current content available to us. The other option is to play other games! Left 4 Dead and DOTA are the two current favourites of my guild: both require a lot of teamwork and communication, and both are excellent time-sinks if you are looking for cooperative games like WoW, but don’t require 25 people!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

If you are more interested in the players found in hardcore guilds, you might find this article more interesting.

Following on from my article on who plays in hardcore guilds, I’m now going to discuss the kinds of players you will find in a normal, World of Warcraft raiding guild. I’ve discussed tips and tricks for pushing a raiding guild’s progress, and I’ve also touched on what it’s like being a guild leader of a raiding guild, but now I’m going to try and get inside the heads of raiders. Not the hardcore, very-little-going-on-in-real-life raiders — the normal raiders. The raiders with jobs, or lots of school work to do, or even kids to care for.

Normal raiders make up about 40% of WoW’s subscription base, so obviously it’s going to be quite hard to boil down just a few player types — but I’ll try my best. Hopefully you’ll be able to spot yourself, but don’t worry if you can’t — there are always exceptions!

As with my my other article on hardcore raiders, I’ll be utilising Bartle’s player type system to give more abstract classifications of each type. I’ll also be using David Kolb’s research (further studied by Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford) into ‘Learning Style‘ — the way in which certain people learn in different ways — either through theorycrafting, wiping, or a mix of the two! Due to the less specific nature of raiding guilds (almost anyone can be in a raiding guild) some of the classifications might be a little lacking.

Enough preamble — let’s get right into the kinds of players in raiding guilds!

The 4 player types found in raiding guilds

Raiding guilds, being made  up a much larger percentage of the player base, tend to contain a huge variety of gamers. Unlike hardcore guilds, raiding guilds can contain any kind of player. The actual playing of WoW raiding content is very easy — the hard bit is the logistics and continued, 5-raids-a-week effort.  Raiding guilds consist of what’s left after you remove everyone capable of raiding in a hardcore capacity, which means you’re not generally left with very good gamers! Luckily, you don’t need to excel to progress; you just need a loyal bunch of players, and some perseverance!

What are the 4 player types? Let’s start with the most despised:

The Visitor

I thought I would leap right in there with the most hated and reviled of all raiding player types: the player that’s only hanging around for a while. The player that thinks he’s way too good to be in your pokey, up-and-coming raiding guild — you’re merely a stepping stone for the Visitor, he’s on his way to the top baby!

• Bartle Player Type: Opportunists, with a few Planners thrown in (the more intelligent ones). Maybe one or two Networkers (but they are rare, and would probably already be in a hardcore guild).
• Kolb Learning Style: Being such a variety of types, it’s hard to pigeon-hole The Visitor into a learning style. In theory, they could be any of the hardcore raiding types, just waiting for their moment to come!

The Visitor is an odd ball. They are likely to be your best gamers, as they are looking to be ’spotted’ by top guilds; but at the same time, any investment you make into a Visitor is most likely going to be a waste (in the long run!) It’s not uncommon for a Visitor to constantly remind you that he’s only in the guild while he looks for a ‘better guild’ more suited to his awesome abilities. Visitors will sometimes be complete underachievers, knowing that their efforts feel wasted on a normal raiding guild.They are probably of the opinion that they can do more damage than the next player with one hand behind their back.

What To Avoid

Visitors are likely to be prima donnas — they want special treatment for being a cut above the rest of your guild. Sadly, you probably should give them special treatment. It really depends on how keen on progress you are — Visitors could provide a quick boost in progress, but then a drop in progress and morale when they ultimately leave. Visitors are likely to be the best damage dealers in your raid (much like the Killer in a hardcore raid) — but in the vast majority of cases, there’s a reason they’re still not in a hardcore guild. If you treat a Visitor with respect, and make sure they get the loot that’s rightfully theirs, they might just hang around! They might leave and rejoin a few times, but that’s just part of the ‘experience’ in a normal raiding guild.

The Loyal Soldier

These are the raiding guild’s equivalent of the Silent But Deadly hardcore guild member — your stalwart members that have been in the guild since the start, and won’t depart until the guild disbands. If you need someone to boost you through a low-level instance on an alt, the Loyal Soldier is the player most likely to help you;  if you need some kind of old reagent, they most likely have a stockpile on one of their many, many alts.

• Bartle Player Type: Again, a large split between Scientists, Friends and Networkers — the implicit types. These are generally quiet, reclusive types that you will rarely notice causing a fuss in general chat.
• Kolb Learning Style: Likely to be Divergers. They might not raid a lot, so they spend more time thinking about their raiding experience. Reading strategies might be very dull to them, though.

We are talking here about players that joined a guild back when they were low-level and running around The Barrens. Perhaps they are real life friends of the guild leader, or they have some other emotional tie to the guild — either way, they are likely only playing the game because of the guild. Raiding is probably a relatively new thing for them — they are likely to be incredibly experienced with ‘old world’ content and dungeoneering.

What To Avoid

While loyal, don’t expect Loyal Soldiers to be the best raiders. They are likely to be ’slow and steady’, preferring to try things a few times, and then digest what just happened. They don’t want to wipe and wipe for 4 hours — they would rather crack open a beer, have a laugh with their old friends, and try to kill something by the end of the raid.

The only real risk is that their gradual accumlation of gear and experience make these quite prized by hardcore guilds. If a Loyal Soldier suddenly has the plan to join a hardcore guild, there could be trouble. They will very rarely leave, but if they do it could be very bad for guild morale — and the huge loss of experience and gear is obviously detrimental too.

The Troll

First of all, apologies to our blue-and-green skinned friends the trolls (did they have a run-in with nuclear waste or something?) I am talking here about Trolls; internet trolls. These are the equivalent of the hardcore ‘Dramatic’ player type… but unfortunately they don’t have hardcore raiding to focus their attention on. Their excess energy inevitably leaks out as trolling. Forum trolling, general chat trolling, guild chat trolling — you name it, the Troll probably spends more time talking crap than anythinig else.

• Bartle Player Type: Griefers and Politicians. Their time is probably equally spent between ganking lowbies and holding court in a major city, or gneeral chat.
• Kolb Learning Style: Raiding is a bit of a joke for a Troll — the learning style is thus a bit hard to pin down.

Sadly (or happily, if you can keep them in check!) every guild has a few of these, with raiding guilds likely to have more than their fare share. Trolling is normally a sure sign of chronic underachieving. Chances are they were once a  failed hardcore raider and had to give up, perhaps due to not having time, or simply not being good enough. Some trolls are ‘home bred’ though — they are just the cocky, social types that treat WoW more as a big, shiny soap box than a video game.

What To Avoid

Raiding guilds don’t tend to have as stringent recruiting policies as hardcore raiding guilds, so inevitably a few Trolls will sneak into your ranks. In some cases though, they are disaffected Visitors or Loyal Soldiers — bored with the game, or upset with Blizzard for some reason. Trolls are likely to be return customers — coming and going, quitting and resubscribing. Trolls aren’t a happy bunch — you probably want to avoid keeping Trolls in your raid group, incase  their sadness spreads. They might be funny for a while, but eventually they’ll get on the nerves of the other members!

The Newbie

Making up the rest of a raiding guild’s ranks are the newbies. Undergeared and inexperienced, the Newbie is a lovely blank slate, tabula rasa, just ready to be scrawled all over by the guild leader, and anyone else in the guild that likes creating an impression.

• Bartle Player Type: Let’s say their player type is as-yet undefined. They might have some tendencies, but Newbies, nowadays, are probably first-time MMORPG players, still discovering their likes and dislikes.
• Kolb Learning Style: Could be any of the four… you’ll find out in time!

A Newbie is very much what you make of him or her. WoW is an incredibly easy game, so a Newbie could easily flourish into a beautiful young raider and almost certainly into a Loyal Soldier, given time.

What To Avoid

Newbies need guidance — lots of it! Obviously it’s very much a mixed bag; you might be nuturing a Troll or Visitor, but there’s no real way to tell at this early stage. You want to avoid bringing them into contact with Trolls or Visitors, lest the early seeds of destruction are planted. Encourage the guild to communicate well with Newbies — answer their questions, help them gear up. There’s a chance they will fly the nest when they grow up, but that’s a risk you’ll always have to take in raiding guilds.

The fate of the raiding guild

Unfortunately, as the intermediate step between casual and hardcore guilds, a raiding guild is likely to be treated as a stepping stone. It’s a sad fate for the guild leader and his Loyal Soldiers, but it’s something, as time goes by, that you will come to terms with. A new instance is released; you’ll lose players. Have a large argument with a player? He’ll leave. Other than Loyal Soldiers, raiding guilds do not have great player retention — the grass is always greener on the other side, remember?

So the key, then, to surviving as a raiding guild is to convert your players into Loyal Soldiers. I have seen some raiding guilds survive successfully since WoW’s release by keeping an active core of Loyal Soldiers and steadily subverting Newbies into the loyal and adoring fold.

How best then to go about making the most of your guild and its players?

• Visitors will make up a sizable portion of your guild and must be looked after. If you are a new guild, there’s a chance your entire guild will be made of Visitors — if that’s the case, it’s the guild leader’s sole responsibility to convert these to Loyal Soldiers. In older guilds you should have a strong enough feeling of comraderie and loyalty that Visitors are either converted automatically, or they ultimately flee. Sadly, they are likely to be your best raiders — so if you wish to progress quickly, you are going to have to gear them up, and pray.
• Loyal Soldiers might be either rare, or make up almost your entire guild. When the other 3 types have quit, this is what you’re left with — a slow and plodding core of loyal members. Loyal Soldiers don’t make the greatest raiders, but they do make good officers. They are ideal at converting Newbies into future Loyal Soldiers, and as such are perfectly suited to being class leaders, or recruitment officers.
• Trolls are thankfully quite rare (because you’ve kicked them all, right?!) and merely serve as comic relief. While they’re on your side (and trolling other guilds/players) it can be great to keep 1 or 2 in the guild or raid. They are often quite smart, and won’t be awful at the game (they are quite experienced, don’t forget!) — they just find trolling more interesting than doing lots of damage, or healing properly. The moment they turn inwards and start trolling guild chat or festering discontent and spreading FUD… it’s time to cut your losses and remove them.
• Ah, Newbies… Fresh like the morning, dewy grass. Unsullied and pure, a blank slate, just waiting for a charismatic leader or Loyal Soldier to come along and teach them some tricks. Newbies are the lifeblood of your raiding guild; they must be recruited regularly! Meet a nice, new player while in a 5-man dungeon? Recruit! As I said earlier, WoW is very easy, and almost anyone with half a brain can raid successfully — they just need to be taught how to raid and what their role is. An easy-going and understanding nature will help nuture these Newbies into loyal, life-long members of your guild. The risk with Newbies is that if you don’t get to them first, someone else might — a Troll, or a rival guild. There needs to be lots of hand-holding, like with a child!

Notes

Raiding guilds have an awful lot of caveats attached to them. Raiding guilds can be groups of real life friends, or they can be formed by a lot of spam in general chat. This wide gamut of roots means that your raiding guild might be made up of completely different types to the ones listed here. What I’ve tried to do is illustrate what a standard raiding guild might contain. A guild that’s levelled together, and started raiding, or perhaps a group of friends that have recruited a few more players to do some raiding content.

Raiding guilds, due to their wildly varying roots and nature, tend to be quite a ‘hands on’ experience to lead. While a hardcore guild is generally self-governed by players that all have the same purpose — to be number one! — a raiding guild isn’t quite so lucky. Raiding guilds will lose players to other raiding guilds, and they will lose a lot of experienced and geared Visitors to hardcore guilds.

The good news is — and really, it’s good news — in a raiding guild it’s the spirit and fun of the game that keeps people playing and not the progress! Your Loyal Soldiers aren’t going to leave you if you fail to kill a boss. Your Newbies won’t be any the wiser. Your Trolls will continue to laugh and bicker, no matter how far you progress.

If you lose a player, that’s generally a good thing. It means they didn’t want to be a part of your guild and community. Do you really want a player like that in your guild? Remember, WoW is easy — in a raiding guild, everyone is replaceable! Go and find someone nicer to replace them with!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

If you liked reading this, there is more to read about WoW, guilds and raiding in the archive!

Virtual worlds like World of Warcraft have long been known to mirror certain aspects of real life. It has often been supposed that people play games like World of Warcraft exactly because of that fact; some elements are so comfortably similar to real life that it makes the gameplay experience a lot easier to adapt to.

A game that is completely foreign to gamers would have a very limited appeal. We can embrace and enjoy the known, with a small amount of unknown thrown in to spice things up. The inverse is often quite disturbing — it’s hard to enjoy ourselves if we can’t predict with some kind of certainty what our future holds.

While there are many facets of online games that I could look at, I’m going to look at one that I’m very intimate with: social and power structures. With Patch 3.1 and Ulduar fast approaching, and the promise of some taxing content, it would definitely make sense to ensure your guild is structured in a way to support strong progress and a thriving community. From guild leader through to the grunts and peons of the guild, I’ll try to break down what makes the difference between a good guild and a truly great guild.

The structure of a guild

WoW, like real life, has a very well defined social structure. While there is an over-arching hierarchy for an entire server, I’ll be focusing more on the structure inside a guild.

What real life structure does a guild most represent? A large solely owned company, or perhaps even a small autocratic country. There is often a single leader, a board of executives or advisors, department chiefs and then the workers or citizens themselves. These real life roles map perfectly to the ‘common’ ranks you will find in a guild.

The Guild Leader

Real world equivalent: Tyrant, Dictator, Monarch, Pope, President.

At the top of every guild or society you will have an ultimate leader. In rare cases this can be a title without the attached powers or responsibilities (such as a ‘token monarch’ in Britain or Sweden), but almost always this will be the the primary decision-maker in the guild. Guilds are very much like smaller autocratic states in that there are often other roles filled out — executives and advisors — but the leader always has the power to veto any decisions made, and to enact new rules (laws) as his fancy and whim dictate.

As I touched upon briefly in other articles, some guilds might have more than one leader — there might be 2, 3 or more if formed out of a group of real life friends. In almost all guilds this is a single figure, though. Many people play games like WoW for the power it gives them over other humans…!

Primary Tasks

• Decision maker — I’ve discussed it in previous articles, but the primary role of the leader is simply to make decisions. Good, bad or ugly, the decisions have to be made in a timely, and hopefully fair fashion.
• Chief justice — The guild leader plays the arbiter and justice maker in almost every argument that raises above normal every-day strife.

If you are interested in the other roles of the guild leader, just read some of my collected writings — that’s what this blog is all about!

Assistant Guild Leaders

Real world equivalent: Vice President, Home Secretary, Joint Military Chiefs, Secret Police Chief.

Behind every great leader there are great advisors. Even in fully autocratic states leaders know that they simply can’t govern an entire country (guild) on their own. They can’t keep track of everything that’s going on. They can’t keep abreast of every eventuality or developing situation; there is simply so much to do, so much going on.

While a guild, being a small subset of real life, is relatively restricted in what actually goes on, it can still be very hard for a guild leader to keep his finger in every pie. Factions might develop amongst nationalities, or perhaps a raider harbours resentment that he refuses to tell the guild leader about. This is where your assistant guild leaders — your most trusted advisors — step into the fray. They are distant enough from the leadership that they can see situations from a different angle, and discuss problems with members of the guild that the guild leader might normally have difficulties with.

Primary Tasks

• Secret police — There’s a lot of stigma attached to such a phrase, but it does best suit their role of ‘information gatherer’. Assistant leaders can get into places that the guild leader can only dream of. They can play the good cop to the guild leader’s bad cop. They are the guild’s rottweiler!
• Decision making — In the guild leader’s absence the assistant guild leader inherits the mantle of decision making. You’re not expected to be as competent as the guild leader, but they should certainly try to limit the number of people that leave the guild during their temporary reign!
• Management — It’s common for assistant guild leaders to get lumped with tasks like DKP management, or recruitment. It will vary though, from guild to guild, guild leader to guild leader, and the size of the guild.

Class/Role Officers

Real world equivalent: Department of Defence, Education Secretary, Senator.

At the bottom of the leadership pyramid we have the class and role officers. Varying form guild to guild, you might have one per class (Hunter, Priest, Warlock…), or perhaps only one per role (Damage Dealing, Healing, Tanking…) although I propose that class officers are a better way to go about it.

These are more of your ‘every day’ officers. Unlike their real-world counterparts, they will have quite limited responsibilities — their class, or role. A hunter class leader might purely be in charge of making sure hunters operate well during raids. The most an officer at this level would do would be the management of recruitment for his class. It is through close contact with class officers that a guild leader can best judge how upcoming raids might be — if there might be a shortage of players, or how recent changes made to the game might impact the guild.

Primary Tasks

• Know your class/role — It’s rather obvious, but a class or role officer must be the master of his job. He becomes the authority for a sizable fraction of the guild so he better be damn good at what he does. The class officer definitely needs be on top of all the latest developments, macros and strategies.
• The guild/raid leader’s crutch — During raids their primary role is the support of the guild or raid leader. When discussing strategies for new bosses it’s their job to suggest better methods of execution. It’s their job to say what is and is not possible for your class. Can we reach those DPS requirements? Do we have a working healing strategy? Are the tanks mitigating as much damage as possible? It is their job to support the leader’s knowledge of your class — it’s impossible for the leader to know everything, that is why he has officers!
• Recruitment — Many guilds use their class/role officers to manage recruitment. Normally this will involve the guild leader saying ‘We need more of X class!’, and the respective class leader running off to find more awesome players. As the authority of their class/role in the guild, they are obviously best suited to finding more good players!

Members/Raiders

While at the bottom of the pile, members and raiders are by no means the least important people in the guild. They make up the majority of the guild or group; they are the civilians and the soldiers. Canon fodder! A good leadership is nothing without a happy, loyal gang of followers. You can craft a fantastic DKP system and install a great forum, but without an actual group of players to do the healing, the DPSing and the tanking… you have nothing!

Luckily, a member’s list of obligations is short and sweet:

Primary Tasks

• Don’t quit – ‘Huh?’ Yeah — the worst thing you can do to a guild is quitting; either the game, or leaving to another guild (which is even worse!). A member/raider is an investment to the guild — the leadership is investing in you by gearing you up and teaching you strategies. You might feel like you own the gear on your character, but just like in real life, there’s always someone that thinks they own you. It would be like training to be a doctor in your home country, and then seeking work in another country. It is for this reason that loyalty is probably the most valued trait of for a member — of any group.
• Know your role — Your primary role in the guild is often defined by the grounds of your recruitment. If you were recruited to be a great tank, it is obviously your responsibility to become a great tank! You need to research what must be done to perform your role successfully. Members should also maintain very good communication with their class/role officer.

A real example — a successful WoW guild

Like my other articles, I am talking entirely from experience. While I do have some degree-level education on the topics of sociology, anthropology and gamer psychology I am going to stick to real, applicable proof for this example. This section is going to focus on what I have found to be workable and true in the leading, success and ongoing survival of my guild over the past 4 years.

There have been many iterations of our guild structure, but the past 2 years have seen it remain virtual static. Those same 2 years, with a combination of strong leadership, durable structure and an environment in which a community can thrive, have seen a rise from 600th to 30th in the world.

From top to bottom then:

• Guild Leaders — We run two guild leaders of equal power, much like an ancient Roman Duumvirate. Historically, one would be a military leader and the other a civic leader. The idea here is that both leaders have the power of veto — nothing can occur unless both leaders agree. This small amount of bureaucracy has saved us a lot of pain over the years. If one leader steps out of line, the other can quickly move in to rectify things. If members are afraid to talk to one leader, the other can do the listening. You would be correct in relating this as the famous ‘good cop, bad cop’ setup.
• Assistant Guild Leaders — We run three assistant guild leaders. A neat number that brings us up to a council of five, for any decisions that might impact the whole guild. Assistant guild leaders have all of the powers of a guild leader, but obviously can’t veto a guild leader’s decision. Our assistant guild leaders play advisory roles:
  • DKP Advisor — I told you DKP and loot distribution were important! One assistant guild leader focuses almost entirely on our loot distribution system, with a side-interest in making sure consumables are prepared for raids. This is the guild’s ‘economic advisor’.
  • Casual Advisor — We’re a large guild, so having someone that can keep in touch with the casual players and alert the other guild leaders about any pertinent issues is vital.
  • Political Advisor — Or as we like to call it… ’secret police’: the rottweiler of the guild. The vicious dog that tears things apart until he can see what’s within. He has a good sense of smell; very good at picking up on problems that might arise in the immediate future.
• Class Leader — 1 officer for each class in the guild. While their role might include the overall well being of his class in the guild, each of these officers are also hardcore raiders. They know their class very well, and are in charge of recruiting. They must be very active players, always looking for new and better ways to play their class, and of course keeping an eye out for possible recruits!
• Raiders — This rank is split into two: ‘pro raiders’, and just ‘raiders’. The titles are just that though — titles. If a raider maintains almost perfect attendance and is the true paragon of raiding, they can be promoted to ‘pro raider’. We try to maintain 3 or 4 raiders of each class, for per 25-man raid. I will discuss building successful raid groups in a future article!
• Member — Everyone else in the guild falls into this rank. Casual raiders, casual players, friends and family — they’re all mixed up here. Raiders that have also let their attendance drop, or can’t raid due to real life problems also find themselves at this rank.

The ranks worth noting here are the officers — guild leaders, assistants and class leaders. Every guild has the member rank (obviously!), but I’ve seen a huge variation in the actual leadership structure in guilds. Some have only 3 or 4 officers, and some have assistant class leaders, PVP officers, profession officers… sometimes as much as half the guild!

I’m not saying that they are necessarily bad structures, but they do have some inherent weaknesses that our guild structure avoids. In my previous writings you’ll note that I put a lot of emphasis on fairness and communication, and that’s what our structure provides. There’s always someone for a member or raider to talk to. There’s always someone for a class leader to talk to. And then at the top, there’s 5 people that always try to reach a consensus so that when changes are made they never have a negative impact on any aspect of the guild.

The only real weakness of our setup is that it requires a lot of good people. There’s certainly a lot of bureaucracy built into our system, which means most changes happen incredibly slowly. One of the two guild leaders can always change something quickly if there’s some urgency, though. We’ve found that ’slow and steady’ has served us well over the years. Radical leaps have normally not gone down very well and normally destabilise the core of the guild — and at the end of the day, progress in earnest, year after year, can only come with a stable guild.

Notes

The guild structure we use is actually very similar (if not identical) to the system used in the early Roman Republic: Consul -> Praetor -> Quaestor. This system is also used, albeit with different naming, in almost every republic today. The only difference we made was the dual leadership, rather than one primary leader. We felt that given the ‘egoistic escapist’ nature of online games that two leaders could keep each other balanced and focused.  Online, with very few checks and balances, the power one wields in a large guild can grow out of control; and that’s where the second leader steps in to sweep up the mess.

Something should also be said about purely autocratic, tyrannical guilds — guilds with only one real officer, with perhaps 1 or 2 of his ‘chosen’ playing minor roles in his leadership. History has shown fairly authoritatively that autocratic states rarely have much long-term stability. Guilds lead in a similar fashion normally suffer the same fate. They never quite reach the state required to drive a healthy community, and thus progress. They might do very well in the short term, with the entire guild membership unified and polarised, whipped up into a fervor behind the guild leader’s vision, but it’s very much a temporary high.

Don’t forget, power corrupts!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

Loot, the one great equaliser. Hardcore or otherwise, you want loot. Maybe you you want loot to perform your role better, or perhaps it’s just a status symbol — either way, you really want those shiny loots.

The main reason for attending raids (after securing your position in the world rankings!) is to get loot. This isn’t a bad thing — as a guild leader you want lots of loot flowing into the guild. It’s actually your prerogative, after racing for the world rankings, to make sure loot flows quickly and easily into the guild. There’s even a phrase that defines your success which I first heard 2 or 3 years ago: Purples Per Hour (PPH). Raising the happiness of your guild might really be as simple as increasing the PPH (’Purples’ are ‘epic items’, if you are new to the WoW lingo).

This should come as no surprise, as wiping for hours and hours without any kind of reward obviously drives down the morale of your raid. Only the most hardcore and determined raids can keep up a high level of wiping for more than a few hours — it’s really just not very fun! That’s why it’s often beneficial to take a break from the wiping and head to an easier, farmed instance — to increase your PPH!

So, let’s imagine you’ve wiped for hours and hours (or even weeks and weeks!) and finally you kill the boss. Even as that wave of  elation is still riding through the raid, people are rushing forward to check what glorious little purple pixels have dropped. The most tricky problem of all rears its ugly head: 25 people have killed the boss, but only a handful will be rewarded. How do you decide who gets the loot?! This is a question that has plagued groups for as long as loot has existed. It was a problem in MUDs, Ultima Online, Asheron’s Call, EverQuest — you name any online game and there’s been issues over the distribution of loot.

Luckily, various systems have been devised to assist the fair distribution of loot, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

What’s the point in ‘fair’ loot distribution?

This is a valid question to ask — why should you care about how loot is distributed? Why not just /roll for everything? Damn, why not just fight each other for the loot? Survival of the fittest! (That’s how they do the loot in some single-nationality guilds!)

It should be fairly obvious why you want to use a fair loot distribution system:

• Avoid drama — Every guild’s worst nightmare, and the best way to pop the guild leader’s 3 remaining blood vessels — yes, it’s drama over loot. Giving the ‘wrong’ person an item of loot is… well… it’s not pleasant. You want to avoid it all costs!
• Keeps people happy — Following on from the previous point, a transparent loot system is incredibly important to the happiness and survival of a guild. Having a ‘fair system’ removes drama, but having a structured, transparent system, where almost everything about the loot distribution process is known by the raiders is incredibly useful.
• Loot utilisation — You want a system that makes sure every upgrade is taken. The main reason you are raiding is to gear up, to make future content easier (or to frag people faster in battlegrounds). Disenchanting items is a waste, and a good loot distribution system should try to eliminate wastage.

What is ‘fair’ distribution?

You might’ve heard me talk about it in previous articles, but one of the keys to guild leadership (or any form of leadership for that matter) is being fair. At a really basic level, this would mean that both player A and B get one item of loot. That’s fair. You buy both of your children a burger. That’s a good place to begin: ‘1 item each per raid’ is actually not a bad starting point for loot distribution! But now, imagine you’ve spent 3 weeks trying to kill a boss; Player A has been to every raid, but player B has only turned up for the first kill of the boss. Neither player has had any loot that raid — who should get an item from this fresh kill?

Now imagine another similar situation: player A wipes on a boss for weeks, but doesn’t attend the first kill of the boss. Perhaps they were late, or perhaps their internet connection failed — but they’ve put in a lot of effort, so you have to reward them somehow, right?

What is the best way to handle such situations? Well, it certainly depends on your definition of fair, but let’s look at the different kinds of loot distribution first. They break down into the following types:

• DKP-based – Originating from EverQuest (DKP stands for ‘Dragon Kill Points’), this is a system that keeps track of player attendance and loot drops, and awards differing amounts of points, depending on the variant used.
• Loot Council — This uses a council (or in some guilds just a single chairman) to decide the distribution of loot.
• Rolling and other systems — These methods normally revolve around using WoW’s built-in /roll function, generating a number between 1 and 100. Depending on the variant, it might be as simple as winning a roll, or there might be some kind of modifier applied to your roll. Other ’simple’ systems are alsoincluded  in this category; systems that keep little track of player effort or attendance, but provide quick (and quite fair) ways of distributing loot.

What is the best and ‘most fair’ system? You’ll have to read on to find out!

DKP-based loot distribution

By far the most popular system is DKP. DKP is a system where there is some kind of reward system for the effort given by a certain player. Most DKP systems reward for attendance, but there are other systems that are slightly more complex. I will talk about the kinds of DKP-based systems, and how best to use them.

Attendance-based

This is where you are awarded DKP for your raid attendance. The best (and most popular) method is time-based DKP where you are award DKP per hour, often with bonuses for attending on time, or staying until the end of the raid. Some systems just give a flat amount of DKP per raid, but these are less common (and less fair). This system can use either fixed-cost items, or allow for bidding.

Pros:

• Incredibly fair method of awarding effort and attendance (those that put the most time and effort in are inevitably rewarded).
• You can create very large incentives for attending on time, and for staying until the end (this is a huge bonus, trust me)
• Very flexible. You could also award bonus DKP for boss kills, or coming prepared to raids, etc.

Cons:

• Item pricing is very important. It is by far the most important aspect of DKP-based systems — get it wrong, and your system will be pointless. I’ll discuss item pricing later.
• New members might find it hard to ‘catch up’ with those at the top as they will always be spending DKP to gear up, while the old members already have their loot. This is a problem with all DKP systems though, but I will propose a workable solution later.
• You can’t easily ‘boost’ certain players, like your main tank (I don’t find this a problem, but some guilds might).

Loot-based (or zero-sum)

Here you are awarded DKP dependent on what loot drops — more loot drops, more DKP is awarded. If an item drops and it has a value of 25 DKP, everyone in a 25-person raid is awarded 1 DKP. The player that buys it spends 25 DKP. The total DKP in the system is still zero (and thus why these systems are called ‘zero-sum’!)

Pros:

• Less inflation than attendance-based systems (you don’t have all those wipe-raids generating DKP).
• Encourages bosses to be killed, as that’s the only thing that grants DKP!

Cons:

• There is no incentive to attend wipe raids! (The only real reason to avoid this kind of loot system).
• No way to reward players for attending raids, or staying until the end.

To bid, or not to bid?

Most WoW guilds today run attendance-based DKP. They might’ve tried other systems, but settled on an attendance-based DKP system as it is the only one that properly awards effort (and avoids the most drama). Attendance-based systems are split into two types: fixed-price and bidding.

Depending on which guild leader (or raider!) you ask, they are probably highly polarised, stating one method as far superior to the other. Bidding certainly has its place, but is incredibly hard to control (you need things like a ‘minimum price’ to make sure the system isn’t abused) and ultimately you will end up with a Killer player trying to abuse the system. Bidding systems can work, and do allow huge flexibility in awarding bonuses, but they are tricky to implement and maintain. You also have to remember that some classes have ‘unfair’ loot itemisation — a warlock might only need 20 items, but a warrior that both tanks and deals damage might need 40 items.

Because of the pain of managing a bidding system, the difficulty of keeping it fair for all classes, and the massive increase in the time spent assigning loot, I would always recommend a fixed-price loot system.

DKP bonuses… and penalties!

DKP bonuses and penalties are a sticky subject. Do you award bonus DKP for turning up early? Or do you remove DKP from someone for turning up late?  Assuming you are using an attendance-based system, you can award or deduct DKP for just about anything (and what is most effective will depend from guild to guild). The key, as always, is to be fair.

With 4 years of raid-leading experience, I would strongly recommend awarding DKP for the following:

• Turning up on time — This is a no-brainer. Award bonus DKP for people that arrive before the ‘first pull’ time. Award a disproportionate amount of DKP for attending on time. Marvel as tardy players start to turn up on time.
• Staying the full duration – Likewise, award people DKP for staying until the end of the raid. The only thing worse than starting late is someone leaving half way through the raid, leaving you without a replacement.

You could also award DKP for a first kill, or staying beyond the normal end of raid time. In general, you are trying to reward behaviour that increases your raid’s health or guild’s progress. You really do not want to deduct DKP from players — it’s better to replace them, either temporarily or permanently. I don’t want to go into the psychology of it, but let’s leave it at this: it is better to feed them the carrot than shove it up their ass.

DKP bonuses are the key to driving healthy raids and progress. They can make or break whether you start on time, or go the full duration. The number of first kills that we’ve had in the last 30 minutes of a raid is huge — if we’d started late, or ended early, we might never have got those kills!

Fixed-priced attendance-based DKP

I’ve finally arrived at the holy grail of loot distribution. You award DKP for attendance, with suitable bonuses for being prompt and staying the full duration. Only one factor remains — the most important one, really — pricing the loot.

There are many ways to price loot, but I’m going to give you the best one (which we’ve only reached after 4 years of getting it wrong in all kinds of ways). This is another ‘insider secret’ which I hope other guilds can use effectively — old guilds that have been looking for the right pricing system all these years, or new guilds that are looking at good DKP systems before they start raiding.

The Iron Edge Loot Pricing System (At least, I think we invented it)

Over the past 4 years we’ve tried just about every kind of DKP-based system, but nothing really worked until we finally discovered the best way to price items. With accurate item pricing, it just became a matter of balancing the DKP earnt per raid — much, much easier than trying to mess around with taxing and other complicated things.

It’s incredibly simple. To start with, to derive a ’slot multiplier’ (the places you can equip items), we work with Blizzard’s own stat weighting system, with some modifications by us, to take into account the value of a bow/gun to a hunter, or to a non-hunter:

• Two-hand weapon & Hunter ranged weapon = 1.5 * normal stat weighting
• Head, Chest, Legs, 1-hand weapon = normal stat weighting (1)
• Shoulder, Hands, Waist, Feet, Trinket, Hunter 2-hand weapon = 0.75 * normal stat weighting
• Wrist, Neck, Back, Finger, Off-hand/Shield = 0.50 * normal stat weighting
• Ranged, Hunter 1-hand, Libram/Idol/Totem = 0.30 * normal stat weighting

This stat-weighting system used by Blizzard is why you always hoard DKP for  head/chest items, and why you’re always bitter about spending DKP on a new libram or totem.

So with a ‘fair’ slot multiplier, we  now need a way to work out the base price for an item, compared to other items of the same kind (the price of totem A compared to totem B). We again use one of Blizzard’s built-in systems: ‘item level‘. Totem A has an item level of 200, Totem B has an item level of 213 — totem B should cost more!

The formula we apply is: (Item Level – 200) * 8 * Slot Multiplier

(200 is the ‘base’ value for the expansion — it was 100 in TBC, and now it’s 200 for WOTLK — why multiply by 8? It gives nice numbers around 100, but below 1000).

Right now it just looks like a bunch of formulae, so here are some examples.

• Belt of Hogwarts drops from Dumbledore. It has an item level of 226. Its price is (226 – 200) * 8 * 0.75 = 156 DKP.
• Gandalf’s Staff of Power drops from Sauron. It has an item level of 226. Its price is (226 – 200) * 8 * 1.5 = 312 DKP.

You can already see that the pricing looks kind of ‘fair’, with the big items costing more than the ‘less important’ armour pieces.

A good item pricing system like this is really the corner-stone of a raiding guild’s success. Please use it!

Tips & tricks for DKP-based systems

Now we have a fair way of pricing items, and a fair way to earn DKP based on your continued effort and attendance. There’s not much left to say, just a few tricks (and pitfalls) that we’ve discovered while fine-tuning our DKP system.

• A ‘zero cap’ is a very good idea — Quite an interesting idea to get your head around, but if people can’t go below zero, people are always encouraged to take loot if they are already at the bottom. This encourages people to take everything that drops, with relatively very little hoarding (only the top few players will hoard, but it’s ultimately their loss to do so — they are getting less loot!). We achieve this by resetting all players with negative DKP to zero, after updating the DKP as usual.
• Reduced DKP costs for off-spec items — This is an idea that often gets pushed around, and depending on the makeup of your guild is either frowned or smiled upon. Guilds that like to PVP a lot often like cheap/free off-spec items. We found with our zero-capped system that people at the bottom took all the off-spec items they could, while the people hoarding DKP at the top didn’t care much for off-spec items. With Blizzard’s tokenised loot system, you could start with off-spec items having the same cost, but make them free once everyone has their main-spec PVE loot.
• How much DKP to award per hour — With fixed item costs, the DKP you award per hour of raiding is the key to controlling inflation. If you find that the people at the top of the DKP list are more than 1 or 2 items ahead of the bottom, you will want to reduce DKP earnt. It’s very hard to give you a definite number to start with, but anything from around 30 to 60 DKP earnt per raid is probably ‘OK’. Play around with it until you find a number that suits your number of wipes, and Purples Per Hour (PPH)!
• A single, combined DKP system is fine — Some guilds like to run multiple DKP systems, one for each dungeon. This is bad idea. If you farm an instance, and a new dungeon comes out, your long-time raiders effectively lose their DKP that they’ve saved up. You can successfully run one DKP system for all instances — the key is managing the amount of DKP earnt per raid! We ran one DKP system for the entire Burning Crusade, with the top players never being more than 2 or 3 items above the people at zero DKP!

A brief word about loot councils and /roll systems

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably realised that I believe DKP systems to be the best way of distributing loot — and it is for raiding guilds. No discussion of loot distribution would be complete, however, without discussing the other two kinds of distribution: loot council and rolling/other systems.

Loot Council (or sometimes simply ‘loot chairman’)

Often also known as ‘who’s been brown-nosing the tyrant the most?’ or ‘a very quick way to develop discontent and distrust in the leadership’, a loot council uses humans to decide who gets loot. Because humans are involved in the decision-making process, this system is inevitably flawed — it is unfair. It’s all good when the main tank is being geared up first, but then things start to go wrong. One rogue is geared quickly, while the other 2 have to sit and wait for ‘their turn’. Perhaps if you’ve somehow upset the chairman, or the council, you might never get loot.

The only time this system works is when you have a leader (or council) that the guild fully supports. In theory it is the best system for quick raid progression, but it’s simply too difficult to balance over a long period of time. The only time you will see this used effectively is in the very top guilds where the focus is only on first kills, and not the gearing up process — but even then, these guilds tend to have very high churn; a constant stream of newbies is required to replace the guys that couldn’t hack waiting 6 months for their first epic item.

Rolling and other ‘casual friendly’ systems

Roll systems are great for smaller raid and dungeon groups. They are quick, they are painless and they are fair if there is little or no wiping. Roll systems fall down when you have to keep track of effort and attendance, but for raid groups where everyone is a real life friend, or the same 5/10 people are always present, /rolling is a very viable system indeed. You can make it more complex and do ‘weighted rolling’ where someone with more DKP gets a bonus to their roll (this lets new players always have a ‘chance’ of winning items), but at the end of the day you should either roll, or use DKP!

I should also mention, just quickly, systems such as ‘Suicide Kings’ and ‘Spend All’, where the system only keeps track of whether you’ve had an item recently — or not. These are glorified ‘1 item per run’ systems; take an item, and you drop down to the bottom of the list. There you must wait until everyone above you has taken an item before you can get another (you can also take items that no one wants, from the bottom — which is nice!).

Notes

I’ve skirted around topics such as taxation and ‘main tank priority’, and completely ignored some topics such as ‘gearing up alts’ and ‘upgrades should cost less’. What I’ve described here is the exact system my guild used to distribute loot through TBC (and will continue to do so through WOTLK), with no taxation, no priorities, and no reduced upgrade prices. Gearing up alts is a sticky subject, and not one I want to discuss here; focus on your main raiders for now!

DKP is definitely not an easy solution, and can require a lot of administration, but is definitely worth it in the long run. Perhaps it’s time to delegate the role of DKP officer to one of those helpful SBDs in the guild?

Resources

I’ve compiled a list of useful websites and addons for anyone trying to develop a loot system for your guild. Please let me know if I’ve missed something important from the list!

• EQDKP — The software most commonly used to track DKP. You can host it yourself, or use a site like Guildomatic if you don’t have your own website (but you might not be track DKP in the way that you wish)
• RT_Import — A modification to EQDKP that allows you to easily award DKP per hour, with start and end bonuses.
• ct_raidtracker — A useful mod for tracking the attendees of your raid — you’ll need this to import data into EQDKP.
• Suicide Kings — if you’re a casual guild leader reading this, or you simply don’t like the overhead of managing DKP, you might be interested in checking Suicide Kings out. It’s surprisingly fair!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

So far I’ve discussed in quite general terms the kinds of guilds you can see running around in World of Warcraft, why they exist, and their drives and purposes. Next, I covered in quite grizzly and unpleasant detail who the most common characters in a hardcore guild are.

Now that you know the why, and the who, it’s time to talk about how you progress as a guild. I’ve missed out a few steps here (and I will go back to them in future articles), but the question that most often plagues me as a guild leader is: What do I do now? You have a choice to make, and you have to make the right choice in a timely fashion.

This could be something as simple as ‘Do we go to A or B instance?’ but in the grand scale of things, as the leader of the guild (and the raid) you’re going to be the sole decision maker during your (hopefully long) reign. The number of times I’ve wished someone was there to help me make a decision is uncomfortably large; and we’re not talking 1 or 2 decisions a day, we’re talking 50, 100 or 200 little decisions each and every raid. Let me give you a brief example:

Do you wipe another time on that boss encounter, or do you give up for the night? If you stop now, have you spared some guild morale? Maybe you would’ve killed him on the next attempt? Are you going to lose to another guild if you don’t stay an extra hour? Will that extra hour cause unrest amongst the workers in your guild that must be up early in the morning? If you give up, maybe you’ll upset The Killers that are only there for the kill, the fresh taste of blood.

And that’s just one decision! By the end of this article, if you’re a guild or raid leader, you’ll have a much better idea of the _best_ choices to make for the ongoing survival and progress of your guild. If you’re not a raid leader, perhaps by the end of this article you’ll appreciate why us raid leaders always look like we’ve only got 3 blood vessels left – it’s because we do only have 3 blood vessels left — the others were lost in Tempest Keep and Naxxramas…

I’m going to assume, for the sake of brevity and simplicity that the guild leader is a tyrant. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I just mean that you are the sole leader of a guild and that there is little or no bureaucracy in the decision making process. Being able to make snap decisions can be vital to the continuing success of your guild, and ultimately… progress!

Types of Decision

Before I get into the ‘decision making process’, it’s good to understand what kind of decisions there are. Some have immediate impact and some are much longer-range ‘for the future’, but both will have a long-lasting effect on the guild if you get it wrong. The decisions you make in a guild (and raid) generally boil down into just a few types:

Administrative decisions

These are decisions that affect the long-term survivability of the guild, from expansion to expansion. Get one of these wrong and you likely won’t see any problems for a while, but when they do finally rear their ugly heads, it’ll be rough going. These will make or break your guild in the long-run.

• What DKP system should you use?
• Should you recruit more players before the next dungeon is released?
• Is a particular class officer pulling his or her weight?

Day to day decisions

These are decisions that have more immediate implications. Often these are to do with raiding, as that’s what your guild will often be doing on any given day.

• What kind of raiding schedule should you use?
• What dungeon should you raid?
• How do you decide on who gets invited to raids?

Immediate decisions

Finally we have the hardest decisions – the ones that you’ll often have to make on your own. These are snap decisions that need to be made within a few seconds. You don’t have the safety of a forum to hide behind for these – you have to decide now, and it better be a good decision! (The example I gave above illustrates a chain of immediate decisions)

• Do you kick a player from the raid?
• Do you deduct DKP from a player when they make a mistake?
• Do you change a boss encounter strategy after using the same one for a few nights?

What decisions are important?

Depending on the type of guild you belong to (hardcore or ‘normal raiding’), various decisions will have a different weighting: A normal raiding guild is unlikely to care quite so much about the raiding schedule, but for a hardcore progressive guild the correct schedule can mean the difference between world 1st kill or being 10th.

It is your job, then, as a guild (and raid leader) to make the right decisions for your guild in a timely fashion. I’m going to break down the decision making process for my 2 raiding guild types (go and read it if you haven’t already, as this won’t make too much sense otherwise), defining what constitutes an important decision and, by exclusion, what doesn’t.

(I have left ‘casual guilds’ out of the equation, as raiding is something they so rarely do.)

Hardcore Progressive Guild

In a hardcore progressive guild (HPG) your decisions are going to revolve around making good, instantaneous calls of judgement. Because players in HPGs are wound so incredibly tight (and really, anything could make them snap – especially The Killers or The Dramatics), the tiniest of decisions that you make today could avalanche way out of control, costing you a handful of players at a later date.

You are leading passionate players, players that play to win. That’s not to say that fun isn’t important to these players, but winning is more so – either the worldwide race, or at least the server race for a glorious ‘first kill’. Therefore, decisions that impact a player’s ability to ‘win’ are by far the most dangerous in a HPG. Here are some common stumbling blocks that you might’ve encountered, or you should avoid:

• An unfair loot distribution system — This is probably the number 1 cause of disbanded guilds. This deserves its own article, so be sure to read it when I write it!
• Cancelling raids – The single best way to get Killers to leave your guild: cancelling raids. This is why having active class leaders and a good recruitment system is very important. It also makes sense to design the raid schedule around the days with best attendance.
• Unfair persecution — This is likely to cause a lot of pain, especially if you persecute a Dramatic. You might find that the unfairly persecuted Dramatic will play the role of the politician and breed anger and distrust behind your back.

The Raiding Guild

A raiding guild is a lot slower moving but also tends to be a breeding pit of agitation and discontent. You are likely to have a lot more factions in a raiding guild – nationalities, real life friends, etc. It is not uncommon for such a guild to be ‘cliquey’ and split into the ‘hardcore crew’ that always get invited to raids, and the ‘casual raiders’ that fill the gaps. Raiding guilds are much more about the interaction of players, rather than focusing on conquering the content of the game. This isn’t to say they don’t want to clear the content; it’s more that they don’t raid enough to keep themselves occupied, so their attention inevitably turns towards… drama.

You are far more likely to have a player walk out of a raid in a ‘normal’ raiding guild. Perhaps even more so than in the HPG, you need to be very, very fair. A raiding guild is all about the structure you build, rather than the individual player skill. As such, you the common problems you’ll bump into when making decisions are:

• Unfair loot distribution — The leaders of raiding guilds tend to be slightly less ‘serious’, and see less of a problem assigning loot in the way they deem best, or ‘most fair’. You can be assured that giving loot to your real life friends before everyone else is a very quick way to destroy your guild.
• Acting above your station — In a normal raiding guild you are more of a lieutenant than a major. You are certainly leading the raid, but don’t even begin to think that you know other classes better than your own. Telling someone ‘how to play’ is a pretty bad idea. Stick to peripheral decisions, like ‘this is the boss strategy should we use’.
• Choosing the wrong dungeon – A common mistake made by raiding guild leaders is choosing the wrong dungeon to progress in. Either the raid leader isn’t clued up enough, or they are trying to close the gap between them and more hardcore guild. Skipping content and thus making life unnecessarily hard is a bad idea; unless you are trying to become a hardcore progressive guild!

How do I push the guild forward then?

By now, if you’ve read everything I’ve written, you should be quite intimate with the kinds of players in your particular kind of guild. You should know what pleases them the most (boss kills!), and what is likely to upset them quickly (unfairness!). The plan must surely be to build a guild that cultivates member happiness and eliminates any cause for unrest, or distrust in you as a leader.

The best way to quell any kind of discontent or uprising is, as you guessed from the title of this entry, progress. The best way to destroy a guild’s attempts at progress is the opposite: stagnation. It’s your job as the leader to keep things moving — it doesn’t matter where particularly, as long as it’s somewhere – to the side or hopefully forward — from where you are right now.

How do you choose where to go? How do you stop your raids stagnating?

You try to reduce the blunt trauma of raiding. Raiding is repetitive. Humans are very good at repetition, until they master it, and then it very quickly becomes boring. This is in fact why we, as humans, like to mix things up. It’s why those Dramatics like to stir the guild with a big stick and see what happens. It’s why the Killers want to try a new way of killing a boss each week. It’s why the Silent But Deadly players enjoy nothing more than theory crafting a new ‘better’ strategy.

Let’s face it: WoW is about having fun. You can try to convince yourself otherwise — ‘Raiding 10 hours a day means we’re the best!!’ — but at the end of the day, if you want to avoid massive churn and the joy of recruiting new raiders every week, the guild has to have fun. The only real questions you have to ask are: what constitutes fun for the members of my guild? What makes it a game?

Your decisions therefore must create fun. As I said in the example earlier, it’s entirely your decision: Do you go home, or do you stay for one more try? Ask yourself ‘which is more fun for the guild?’ It is sadly a question I can’t answer in definite terms; it’s about your personal leadership experience, and knowing who you play with. It’s about judging the mood of the raid, or even the guild – do you need that kill for guild morale? Or do you need to go and lick your wounds?

In my guild, there have been times when I’ve gone home, and there are those few fateful times where staying for that last try has resulted in us obtaining a server first kill. You can’t always make the right decision; you can only try and learn from experience! The only real difference today I can make the right decision 90% of the time, instead of 50%.

Endnote

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve written this article from a much more personal, empirical perspective. That’s because what I’ve written here is the ‘secret’ of how I have led my guild (with many helping hands) from a server 15th (!!) kill of Ragnaros 3 years ago, to 30th in the world (as of Patch 3.0.9). I’m actually an incredibly soft leader, nearly always choosing the ‘easy’ way out  — going home, or cancelling the raid, instead of wiping mindlessly — but as I have tried to explain: what makes a guild happy varies wildly from guild to guild. What I’ve given you here is a basic set of ground rules that can help you keep a raiding guild happy and moving forward!

Furthermore, while this article was written from the perspective of a tyrannical leader, there are perhaps better alternatives – our guild runs a ‘[dual leader]’ system, for example – but at the end of the day, the key is to be a fair and just leader. This certainly isn’t as easy as it sounds and it’s no wonder we have very few dictatorships in real life. If tyranny isn’t for you, I will explore different leadership styles in the future: tyrannies, multi-leader councils and of course… communism!

I understand this entry actually raises more questions than it answers, and for that I apologise. I will hopefully fix that with the next few articles that I write. The next one will focus on the most evil of all MMORPG beasties: the mighty destroyer of guilds… fair loot distribution!

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

If you are more interested in the players found in regular raiding guilds, you might find this article more interesting.

A few days I spoke very generally about the kinds of guild you can find in World of Warcraft. It was by no means an exhaustive list, just an idealised list of guild types that cover most of the bases. Now I’m going to go a little deeper and actually describe the kinds of personalities tend to accumulate in Hardcore Progressive Guilds (HPG). I’ll be applying the ‘Bartle Test‘ (one day I aspire to have a test named after me — maybe for judging if someone’s righteous and egoistic or not…) to each kind of player. I will then also try to define each gamer’s ‘Learning Style‘, as defined by David Kolb’s research (and later expanded by Peter Honey and Alfred Mumford).

This is going to be slightly more meaty than the previous entries; remember to double click a word or phrase if you don’t know what it means: a helpful box will appear, (hopefully) defining it for you! You can also find a WoW-specific glossary over on the official site if you’re a World of Warcraft newbie, or if you just need to freshen up on the language of our ‘secret society‘.

With that said:

The 3 player types found in hardcore guilds

By the time gamers reach a hardcore progressive guild (HPG), most of the chaff has been stripped away. The first thing you’ll notice about all of these players is the sheer comparitive quality. I’m not saying they are the best gamers or team players in the world, but compared to players in normal raiding guilds, HPG members will blow them out of the water on almost every front: skills, dedication and play time. That’s not to say that every member in a HPG has all 3 of these attributes, but they will usually have at least 2 — incredibly skillful and dedicated, or dedicated with a lot of play time. Sometimes you’ll find a player with all 3 of these desirable traits; these are the players you really want to fill your ‘world top 10′ guild with.

What ‘quantity’ of these traits does each member type have? Assuming every player in a hardcore guild already has these traits to some extent, what other characteristics also define the members of such a guild? Once we can define their characteristics, we can try to determine what makes them tick – what keeps them playing at such an incredibly intensive and tiring level of play. This is where the Bartle and Kolb metrics are useful. We can define, with fair certainty, how a certain kind of player will react in a given situation.

From ‘most desirable’ through to ‘least desirable’ we have the following:

Silent But Deadly (SBD)

These are the few players that almost certainly have skills and play time, but above all they are dedicated. They are loyal. It actually hurts them inside when they have to skip a raid — they apologise profusely and say it’ll never happen again. These are the few players that you can really rely on to always have their consumables ready, as they really don’t want to be the ‘odd one out’ that didn’t bring what was required. They are often quite softly spoken because they are focused on doing their job, and doing it well. They are most certainly not dominant; they are quietly confident — they are in one of the best guilds in the world, after all.

• Bartle Player Type: Most likely to be a Planner, although Scientists are fairly common too.
• Kolb Learning Style: Almost entirely Convergers.

The Silent But Deadly are a fairly easy-going bunch — they don’t require strict raiding schedules and guaranteed progress, but it both are obviously desirable. They are quite happy to busy themselves theorycrafting, or help the guild make consumables if a raid is cancelled. Get as many of these players as you possibly can; at least 1 of each class! If you can find a main tank of this variety… God is smiling upon you.

What To Avoid
You can probably do almost anything to a SBD before he gets upset. They are most likely to get upset at themselves for underachieving, or missing raids. You want to make sure they always get a raid spot, even if it means kicking someone else from the raid. These really are your most trusted, loyal companions. Look after them, and don’t ever call their loyalty into question!

The Killer

Aptly named after one of Bartle’s player types, the Killer is in the guild to do just one thing — kill. Kill raid bosses, or kill those that oppose the guild; they don’t care, as long as they’re killing. These are the most passionate players — equally as dedicated as the SBD (but perhaps more dedicated to progress than to the guild’s wellbeing), but perhaps slightly less skilled (but not through lack of trying!)  They may have issues reflecting on past experiences but obviously not to such an extent that they are bad players, but more so than other players in hardcore guilds. They really are there to hit stuff as hard as possible, and to be #1 in the world.

• Bartle Player Type: Even split between Planners and Killers.
• Kolb Learning Style: Accomodators, with a few Convergers.

Killers aren’t brainless — far from it. It does take some measure of intelligence to be the best killer in the world; you have to plan the perfect murder of that raid boss after all! That being said, when it actually comes to the raid, they are nearly always the ones shouting ‘LET’S GO ALREADY!’ over voice coms. You want your DPS classes to be Killers, obviously! Killers can also make good healers (but the tunnel vision must-be-number-one thing can be an issue).

What To Avoid
Killers are likely to also get very dramatic if they can’t achieve their goals, for whatever reason. They are prone to be incredibly insulted if you don’t invite them to raids (because they’re the best in the world, don’t forget). They also don’t deal very well with criticism, unless you really know what you’re talking about (again, because they think they’re the best in the world, so how could you possibly correct them?). Complicated instructions and strategies are also not their strong point — they learn just fine from wiping and experiencing the encounter, though.

Killers respond very poorly to any ‘nerfs’ and treat them as some kind of personal affrontery. Killers are the most likely player type to quit the game, usually due to an unbearable nerf, or another change that significantly impacts how they play the game (the dumbing-down/simplifying of content by Blizzard is a common example, or simply a change that heavily impacts their killing power).

The Dramatic

I struggled for a while to give a name to this kind of player. The Dramatic perhaps sounds a little too derogatory, especially given the theatre of online gaming. Dramatic players are normally the ones causing problems for the guild, but they’re also the fun ones. SBDs are quiet, Killers spam in ALL CAPS — there has to be someone inbetween, and that’s the Dramatic. They are friendly and helpful. These are the ones likely to regale you with stories in guild chat — perhaps of a time they corpse-camped a lowbie when he was bored, or of when they explored a forbidden territory.

• Bartle Player Type: Fairly even mix of Politicians and Planners, with a few Griefers sneeking in.
• Kolb Learning Style: Accomodators and Convergers.

It’s their explicit player interaction which draws these gamers apart from the other types; they’re politicians. They like to talk and they like to be seen. What weaknesses they might have, they make up for with smart words. That’s not to say they are lacking in skill, they might just be slightly more occupied with their appearance than their actual performance. These are the ‘doers’ of the guild; they are proactive, and don’t require a promise of fresh blood like their Killer brethren. Dramatics tend to play healer classes, or at least hybrids — perhaps it’s something about their flexible, interesting nature?

What To Avoid
Dramatics can be skilled, and certainly play the game a lot. Where they can fall down a bit is dedication — it seems to be directly proportional to how valued they feel. You want to listen when a Dramatic whispers you something ‘important’. You want to pay attention to the Dramatic that tells you he’s going to get all of X nationality to walk out of the guild. Ideally you want to keep these players close to you (keep your friends close, your enemies closer!), or so far away from the core of the guild that their actions don’t matter. Give them a sense of purpose, or be ready to face their dramatic tantrums when they get bored. They are by far the most likely type of player to sell their account; like most politicians, more than anything else they care about themselves.

Dramatics make the worst ‘important players’ you can ever imagine. You do not want a dramatic main tank, or ‘main healer’. If you have a dramatic main tank, just save yourself the pain and replace him now — don’t wait until it’s too late.

How do I work with these 3 types of player?

You’ve probably noticed, if you’ve learnt about or researched Bartle’s Player Types, that all three of these hardcore guild member types are Doers and Learners. Right from the get-go that makes your job as a guild leader easier — there is simply a lot less hand-holding to do both in and out of raids. Your job becomes more of a facilitator and purveyer of information outside of raids, and a ‘nagging mother’ during raids.

How best to go about doing just that then?

• Silent But Deadly types need information, and lots of it. Dump lots of boss strategies on the forum, and easy access to parses of the raid statistics (using a site like WWS). They also need to digest and reflect upon each pull you do — they don’t want to mindlessly wipe time and time again. As a raid leader you can ask them what went wrong, or what went right. Why was the other warlock higher than them? Your job here is to get them thinking in the right direction.I’ve said it before, but the best thing you can do is cultivate your SBD players. Encourage them to thrive and never stifle their creativity or theories, no matter how wild they might sound. They’ll do a lot of the work for you, and come up with some truly awesome ideas when you least expect it. These players will notice things that no one else does.
• Killers are incredibly simple creatures. They are often blinded by their absolute and unwavering interest in being number 1. Your main job here is to just point these whirling death merchants in the right direction because they don’t strategise very well. You need to give them piece-meal strategies; very finely granulated strategies: ‘You need to run to this point [with you jumping up and down to illustrate], and continue stabbing furiously.’ or ‘At exactly 33 seconds into the fight, you will cast this spell, OK?’These gamers can have extreme  tunnel vision and really require a lot of strenuous effort to get them to follow a strategy. These are the players that wipe your raid, after they’ve reverted to a ‘better’ way of doing something, without telling you. They require by far the most effort on behalf of the raid leader, both during raids and out of raids. Slap them with written strategies, as many videos as you can find, and just keep shouting at them until they do what they’re meant to do.
• Dramatics, being a mix of the two other types, are a bit of a mixed bag. Some Dramatics might need help understanding boss strategies, and some might need help seeing the importance of excellent personal performance.  Being the most dynamic of players, Dramatics might surprise you — they might go and find a nice video of a boss encounter, or research for tips and tricks. Again, like Killers, you need to keep Dramatics going in the right direction — get them to do things.The problem with Dramatics is that… they like drama. You can never be quite sure what repercussions you’ll have when you kick a Dramatic from the raid or guild. That’s why I suggest you keep them close, either as officers, or as ‘highly valued members’. Give them some perks — repairs, consumables — something to keep them happy and content. You’re in for a rough ride if they get bored; they will often ’share the love’, festering and spreading discontent throughout the guild.

Notes

You will notice that I used classifications from both Bartle’s 4-category and 8-category player type systems — if the Wiki article doesn’t provide enough background information, or your interest has been piqued by this entry, go and buy his book!

Again, like the previous article, this isn’t an exhaustive list of the player types you will find in hardcore guilds. There are the brain dead types that sneak in when you’re not looking, and the girls that weaseled their way into the raid group by virtue of… being female (sleeping with the guild leader is certainly one way to get to the top). Hopefully though you now have a better idea of the kinds of players in top-end hardcore guilds, or the kind of players you can hope to attract if you’re looking to ’step up’ to hardcore progressive raiding.

If you have any questions about the issues or topics raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.

If you liked reading this, there is more to read about WoW, guilds and raiding in the archive!

In my previous entry I spoke about WoW itself. Hopefully drew an illustrative picture of the most successful multiplayer game of all time (and probably for the next decade, or until Blizzard’s next-generation MMO is released). It’s quite important that you understand just what WoW is before you can hope to ‘conquer’ it. You need to know what makes the game (and gamers) tick; you need to know what keeps people subscribing, month after month.

‘What does this have to do with leading guilds?’ I hear you ask. Everything! Almost everyone that plays WoW belongs to a guild! Ultimately, whether the players like it or not, it’s the guild leaders that have their finger on the button. It’s really is entirely up to guild leaders to make the game enjoyable for the players. Sure, Blizzard also has a commitment to make the game playable and fun, but without the glorious, omnipotent guild leader not much would ever get done.

So, leading on from there, I’ll try to outline the basic role of the guild leader: what a guild leader has to know, and do, to keep his guild heading in the right direction — be it onwards and upwards to #1 in the world, or just to provide a safe, fun environment for raiding and questing.

As a guild leader, you need to know why your guildies continue to play the game. Is it out of loyalty? A sense of competition? Are they playing because of real life friends, or family? Perhaps it’s a mix of all of these elements — or perhaps it’s just to escape from real life. The escapists tend to be the ones not in guilds though; they’re lone wolves, just trying to play their own little removed-from-real-life game, they won’t be discussed in this entry (escapism should be talked about at length in its own entry).

It varies from guild to guild (depending on their purpose), but each and every guild will have a distinct drive, that in turn dictates why its members continue to play and stay active. When that drive is lost, for whatever reason, a guild leader needs to be able to react quickly. He might have just a few minutes or hours to gauge the current feelings and emotions in the guild, analyse the situation and think of a solution before someone leaves the guild — and as you might all know, or have guessed, when one person walks out it can start an unstoppable avalanche.

So what makes various types of guild tick? What gives the members of a given type of guild the urge to play and win? I’ll try to put my finger on the nub. I’ll try to define the characteristics of each type of guild, and what their players require — and desire — to keep them interested and active.

The Hardcore Progressive Guild (HPG)

The HPG makes up for the tiniest percentage of WoW’s player base. A lot of people might perceive themselves as a hardcore raider, but the fact of the matter is that only about 2% of guilds clear all of WoW’s content in a timely fashion — sometimes even lower for ‘end bosses’ like Kil’jaeden and Kel’thuzad. This is the bracket that describes most of the world top 100 or so — Nihilum, Method, SK Gaming — HPGs are the only guilds even approaching ‘celebrity’ status.

HPG Member Traits

• Very high activity — 30 to 40 hours a week is not unusual. 60 hours a week is not as rare as you might think.
• Competitive nature — they are usually playing at this level because they think they are, or want to be, the ‘best’ of their class on a given server, or even in a territory (EU, US, etc.). These guys are playing to WIN; not second, or third place — first.
• Generally young adults — 18-25 is the usual age-group here. Students at university. Students that have dropped out of university. You can occasionally get a younger gamer, if they manage their homework effectively! You might see some ‘real adults’ with jobs, but they are quite rare. These players are often quite happy with five 4-hour raids a week.
• Impatient – generally they are impatient. They want to be moving now. They don’t want to wait for the next raid! We should be raiding ALL the time! If you’re not moving, another guild might be catching up! While they might be impatient, that doens’t mean they lack focus — they can often focus on performing the same repetitive tasks for hours and hours.

The guild leader of a Hardcore Progressive Guild really has the worst ‘job’ in WoW. You know it’s bad because it’s actually referred to as a ‘job’ (some top guilds have been known to hire professionals to manage their guild logistics). There is little pleasure derived from leading a HPG, other than that warm feeling inside when you’ve moved up another rank in the world, or you’ve beaten the competition on your server. It’s a thankless task, unpaid and with minimal rewards. By far the most common reason most guilds of this type disband is because the guild leader goes on a holiday, never to return. Or he just quits. Or he gets a girlfriend. So how does this poor bastard keep a HPG happy?

• Progress – Progress of any kind. Even stating there is progress when there might not actually be any: ‘Hey guys, we got one more mob down than last time!’, or ‘Hey, we did this in one raid less than our competition!’ Really, anything to make it look like you’re working well, and progressing. Of course, if you’re making real progress that’s the one sure-fire way of keeping your guild active and healthy.
• Move quickly – Don’t spend time waiting for people that are AFK (Away From Keyboard). In fact, remove constant-AFKers from the guild (or raid team). They are awful for progress, the raid’s morale and they simply waste everyone’s time. Moving between instances in a timely fashion is also a good practice. Keeping the pace up through a raid is probably the most important thing you can do, as a guild and raid leader; kicking a slow person from your raid is likely to guarantee you the love and adoration of everyone else.
• Know how to handle people – You are generally dealing with emotional young adults. You will often find yourself dealing with people lacking in social skills. Hardcore players are normally quite a handful — they don’t get out a whole lot, so their social skills can be underdeveloped. Often they struggle to put logical arguments together. This is another subject for another day though!
• Fairness — Almost everyone in a HPG wants to be the best. They want their hands on those shiny, epic loots when they drop, before everyone else. A fair loot distribution system is key (and again, another topic for another day).Being even-handed as a guild leader is always important (for every kind of guild). The problem is, everyone on the Internet thinks they have a valid opinion. It’s your job to play arbiter — High Lord Justice — in almost every argument that pops up in a HPG. You are probably the only person that every player in the guild fears and respects at the same time, and thus it’s really your job to make sure everyone feels like they have a place in the guild. A surefire way to lose members is to make someone feel like their opinions and input are inconsequential to the guild’s progress and well being.

Each of these topics will most likely have to be broken-down in future entries, but as I’m a hardcore progressive guild leader myself with a lot of experience, that shouldn’t be a problem.

The Raiding Guild

This is your standard raiding guild. This could be a group of real life friends, or a casual guild thath as finally decided to take the step up to 25-man raiding content. This is a large group of players — about 30-40% of all WoW subscribers. These players might not have started the game to raid, but Blizzard’s continued efforts to make all of the facets of the game approachable and easy mean that almost everyone has tried raiding. Most continue to raid once they’ve had a taste of the loot and glory that comes with it!

Raiding Guild Member Traits

• High activity — While not as active as the HPG members, raiding guild members still play the game an awful lot. They might not play for as many hours in one sitting, or they might have a time constraint on when they can play, but they still play a lot — 30 hours or more a week.
• Less competitive — These guys tend to raid because it’s a natural progression of their gaming experience. They’ve cleared all of the 5-man dungeons, so now it’s time to clear the 10 and 25-man content. They don’t care much about when they finish it, they would just like to finish it… some time.
• Less-defined age range – You are more likely to find school kids and people that work full-time jobs here, though guilds tend to be centered around one age group or the other though. It’s quite common to find guilds that raid later at night, to cater for those with jobs — or run early evening raids, for kids that have to go to bed early. Of course, the largest gamer demographic (18-25) is still prevalent here, perhaps they’re less competitive, or just gearing up ready to move to a more hardcore guild. Or maybe they are trying desperately to not fail their degree!
• Quite patient — These guys are actually pretty patient. They’re quite happy to wait for AFK players, especially if it’s a guild made up of real life friends. There’s no real rush — they’ve had to struggle through 5-man dungeons with a slew of disconnectors and AFKers. They might get sick of it one day and step down from raiding, though.
• Not so loyal – These guilds tend to be filled up with people that are just looking for somewhere to raid, or somewhere with some green guild text. There’s nearly always some guild on a server looking to recruit; sadly, players picked out of the trade channel don’t tend to be the most loyal guild members. Players in this category will often drop their guild very quickly if offered a place in a hardcore guild (even if it often turns out to be a bad decision).

Being a guild leader for a standard raiding guild is a lot easier. Players tend to manage things themselves — those that want to farm a little extra will do so on their own, without your intervention. Conversely, in this category there will be those that won’t farm for raiding consumables no matter how hard you shout at them. Disputes are often sorted out quickly with an /ignore, or someone leaving the guild. What are the best ways for a guild leader to manage a raiding guild?

• Patience is a virtue — Progress isn’t quick in a standard raiding guild. It comes eventually, after many long, arduous raids. You need to be able to keep your cool for long periods of time.
• Be nice — You aren’t dealing with highly-competitive people that can deal with constructive criticism. Many players simply don’t care if they aren’t very good. You really won’t gain anything by telling them that they’re shit. Your best bet here is to do some hand-holding: ‘Watch how I do it…’, or perhaps compile some links of ‘how to play X class’ and put them on a forum.
• You’re not God – raiding guilds don’t often become spiritual communities (a very tight-knight group where your fellow guild mates feel more like family members than online buddies) like their hardcore brethren. You can stamp your foot and shout like a madman all you like, but people are very unlikely to actually pay any attention to you. It’s better to lead by example, or just try to moderate guild chat. Or draw up some nice rules for guild behaviour on the forum.The rare exception is when you have an ‘ex hardcore guild’ that has fallen fromgrace, and the top rankings, but the guild leader still thinks he is a force to be reckoned with. This is the disgruntled emperor that has lost his empire; the kind of guy that beheads people just for fun, to prove he’s still Got It.
• Fairness — The same rules as the Hardcore Progressive Guild applies here. You need to be really damn fair, especially when distributing loot. You might even have to be more fair because loot means even much more to the member of a raiding guild. Those lovely little blocks of pixels aren’t quite as common in a raiding guild, so they have a higher value! While it would be quite rare to see someone quit over loot in a HPG, assigning an item to the wrong person in a normal raiding guild can result in all sorts of trouble. A good DKP system is a requirement.

I should add that not all raiding guild members are disloyal. They won’t all leave the moment an opportunity for easy epics arises. There are many strong raiding guilds that never stepped up to the hardcore plate — often they are formed of online communities that pre-date World of Warcraft, or they are just groups of friends that picked up the game to play with each other. Some players really are just very loyal. No matter how likely the ship is going to sink, some players will really stick by the guild until it finally disbands.

The Casual Guild

Finally, we have what represents about 50% of the WoW playerbase — casuals. This is a phrase that’s commonly used by hardcore raiders in a derogatory fashion (’Oh, he’s logging out after only 4 hours… what a casual!’), but I use it here to describe the players that are casual gamers. These are the players that can only play an hour a day, or perhaps a few hours on weekends. They are married, have large work commitments, or they just don’t enjoy sitting in front of a computer for hours on end.

Leading a casual guild is a bit of a misnomer: you don’t so much lead as… guide. And recruit. Some casual guilds are so large that they won’t even know who their guild leader is — you as the guild leader might only play a few hours each week!

Casual Guild Member Traits

• Low activity — Casual gamers tend to play from zero to 10 hours a week. 1-2 hours an evening, or an occasional weekend binge, if the significant other is out of town.
• Their time is sacred – Just because they don’t play much, doesn’t mean they don’t care! They normally want to get a lot done in their small time online and so they really have no patience for timewasters, or timewasting. It’s kind of ironic though, as they are the most likely kind of player to disconnect without warning if  ’someone knocked on the door’, or ’sorry, important phonecall’.
• Every age group – Almost anyone from any walk of life can be a casual gamer, but they do tend to be either very young, or old (over 40 — I know it’s not actually old, but it is for the sake of gaming!). There’s normally a caring parent metering the amount of hours they can spend playing, or they are married and not ‘allowed’ to play more than a certain number of hours a week. Unless the significant other is out of town… then all Hell can break loose. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, right?
• Loyalty? What’s that? – For these players, a guild is just somewhere to hang out, chat, and pick up players for 5-man dungeons. If someone accidentally rolls on your item, you’re more than likely going to leave the guild. The exception is if a casual guild grows towards a casual raiding guild (1 raid a week, often on weekends) — then the players are likely to be very loyal to the hand that feeds them epic items. Casual raiding guilds very rarely work out though; it’s just too hard to keep it together especially with casual officers.

You’ve probably gathered that you can’t really lead a guild of casuals. They come, they go. You can’t reliably predict when they’ll be online, so you can’t really plan any kind of guild event. There are however a few things you can do to grow the community and keep everyone happy:

• Recruit — The key to a casual raiding guild is the size of its roster. You need enough players online so that there’s always enough people on at each level range to find questing/dungeon-crawling groups! Casual guilds are often ‘levelling up’ guilds, so you need a vast number of players to hope to have 5 characters of any given level.
• Make some rules – It’s very easy to just have a free-for-all guild where anything goes, but you might find you receive a position reaction from your guild members if there are basic ground rules. No swearing, as there are kids in the guild? Each person gets 1 item of loot from a dungeon? No ganking of lowbies? Don’t be rude to other players? Rules like that can generate a good reputation for your guild — it can create a guild that casuals aspire to be in.
• You can be picky – As I said earlier, casual gamers make up the biggest portion of players in WoW. There’s no shortage of people that you can recruit into your guild, so it doesn’t hurt to choose who you invite! Pick up the people that put some effort into speaking like a human being. Recruit the players that stop and help you with whatever you’re doing. Invite the players that offer to pay you for a service, instead of demanding it for free. You are trying to build a guild that is fairly autonomous, as you probably won’t play the game a lot — the best way to do that is to invite other responsible, helpful players; the kinds of players that always ‘have time’ for other people.
• Get a forum – This goes without saying for every type of guild, but it can be especially useful for building a successful community out of players that don’t otherwise interact with each other a lot. You could have threads that allow people to share ‘the best places to level’, or ‘good addons to use while levelling’, or ‘your class role in a dungeon’. Anything that encourages people to interact and share their views on a topic is a good thing.

There’s Lots More

I’ve touched on a lot of topics that will need to be fully explored at a later date: community building, DKP systems, how to survive when the ‘going gets tough’, and generally ‘coping’ as a guild leader — it’s hard to not be afflicted and aborbed by a God complex if nothing else! There’s also a gap between the Hardcore Progressive Guild and the standard Raiding Guild — the guild that is trying to become hardcore. They all deserve seperate entries though, so stay tuned!

If you have any questions about the issues raised here, I’m more than happy to answer them. You can ask them in a comment, or email me using this form.