It’s February 2009 and World of Warcraft now has 11.5 million players worldwide. It has more players than any other MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) in history by a considerable margin; it’s simply blown the competition of the water. The growth of WoW is quite literally unprecedented.

And that’s just up to some time in 2008. WoW has taken huge bites out of other gaming segments; when you are the third biggest selling PC game of all time (behind Sims 1 and 2 — damn those female gamers!), other genres tend to take a hit. Blizzard didn’t just conjure 11.5 million people out of thin air! People dumped their FPSes and RTSes and came to see what all the fuss was about. I remember when I started playing, the majority of people that I met were CS kiddies, or StarCraft/Warcraft 3 players. You can see from the graph that there just weren’t that many subscribers from other games to play WoW — Blizzard had done what every other games developer can only dream of: they cracked the MMO subscription market wide-open.

Blizzard made fantastic use of their experience from StarCraft and Warcraft, and made a game that’s easy to learn and enjoyable to play. A lot of the ‘old school treadmills’ and ‘grinds’ that players had grown to be accustomed to (and often loathe) in other MMOs all but disappeared in WoW. If you’re one of the million-or-so gamers that came from EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot or Final Fantasy XI, the first thing that strikes you about WoW is just how easy it is. Never has it been so easy to be ’successful’ in an online game.

You might’ve heard the phrase ‘welfare epics’, or ‘casual friendly’. Both of these terms have been coined to describe Blizzard’s ideology of massively-multiplayer online gaming: It should not necessarily be about how much you play, it’s about taking part. WoW is about making everyone feel special. And boy it works!

In other games, before WoW, you could only dream of one day being in anyway equal to the best players. MMORPGs really weren’t for casual gamers, they were for gamers that thought they had a chance of being #1. They had the time, the dedication and a certain lack of RL obligations — that’s what it took to be competitive pre-WoW.

Then along came the casual-friendly welfare-epic gloriously lore-rich realm of Azeroth. A world where you could attain the max level is about 15 days, and be adequately well-geared within 20. Such an easy game had never been heard of! All those newbies were subscribing after their free month. An awful lot of people never play past the first month of MMOs — WoW’s player retention is truly awesome compared to other MMOs; people pick up the game, and never put it down. Finally we had a game where the reward is directly related to the effort, and not some sick-and-twisted system where the higher levels require exponential time investments and dedication.

And that’s the key to WoW: a linear curve of progression. There is very little justifying reason to play those extra 25 hours a week to get that small one-up on the opposition. (There’s a very good business reason for this too, as Blizzard make more money if you play less!)

Anyway, you can probably see where this is going. I’m not one of those casuals; I’m the total opposite. I’m a guild leader. I’m in that tiny percentile of players that goes a little bit further than the rest. Not only do I play those extra 25 hours a week, I also manage a guild at the same time.

The purpose of this blog is to educate and inform people about massively multiplayer games in general, and leading a successful WoW guild in particular. If you’re a struggling guild leader, or you’re thinking about starting your own guild, hopefully you’ll be able to find some tips here. Perhaps you’re just a raider, with no involvement with the leadership of your guild, you might find some interesting things about inter-guild politics, or how to be a better raider.

There’s actually very little out there on the Internet about actually leading a successful WoW guild. That’s probably because we’re overshadowed by our hyper-competitive PVP brethren, like Serennia and Ming. Hopefully this blog will give you an insight into the other, more social side of online gaming: guilds and PVE.

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.

The MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) market is an interesting one. Unlike most other forms of media, MMOGs are a service rather than a consumable product.

A normal game has a very predictable life-cycle: development, launch, patching, possible expansions and finally product retirement. Most software follows the same pattern. You buy a game, or piece of software, you expect to get some use out of it, and ultimately expect to buy the next latest-and-greatest version of it in a few years.

In fact, it’s the life-cycle for almost everything on this planet that’s consumed… except for the service industry.

The service industry is the ‘golden egg’ of modern civilisation. It’s the defining trait that splits a secondary industry from a tertiary industry. It’s the difference between selling someone the materials to make a house, and being the person that maintains the house, keeping it shiny and new, and adding new features as they become available.

Now, the service industry isn’t new. It popped up sometime after the industrial revolution when someone realised that there’s an awful lot of money to be made in monthly retainers. Rather than giving a man fish, rent him a fishing pole at a reasonable price — there’s a lot more money to be made in the long run.

Not only is there more money to be made but loyalty is also instilled. If it comes to the stage where you finally have to upgrade your house, you’re almost certainly going to stick with the guys that have looked after your house for all those years. Heck, your house might have weird, proprietary additions — like a custom waste disposal, or a funky-shaped swimming pool –  that only these guys know how to maintain. They might not be cheap; but at least they get the job done… ish!

This brings me neatly onto Microsoft and Windows. Originally Windows was just another consumable software package. There were other competing operating systems, but in 1981 Microsoft secured a deal for its PC-DOS to be bundled with the new IBM PC. You know the rest of the story — the IBM PC shook the world, and Microsoft was along for the ride.

The sheer scale of the success of the IBM PC was unprecedented, and to capitalise on it, Windows was released in 1985 as a graphical addition to the already-predominant MS DOS. By 1990, Windows 3.1 was released, and Microsoft’s monopoly of the PC industry had begun. Windows 95 saw the release of Internet Explorer, and the beginning of a monopoly on the Internet browser market.

Scroll forward a few years to 2006 and Microsoft Windows is being used by 97% of all Internet users. That, if you weren’t quite sure yet, is a monopoly. That’s a 97% market share after 20 years of Windows releases. Every release confirmed its stranglehold on the industry. Every release tied its users further and further into the sweet embrace of Microsoft Windows. That’s the service industry — the soft, comfortable pair of shoes that you just can’t get rid of. It’s not a great pair, but damnit, they fit nicely and keep your feet kinda warm.

The problem is, monopolies are outlawed because they are ultimately very bad news for the consumer. A monopoly without suitable competition,can rest on its laurels and practically eliminate all technological progress. Occasionally a competitor  will emerge, bringing a new, exciting development to the table — the incumbent simply buys them out, or copies the functionality. Innovation all but dries up; there’s no risk from outside to spur the market tyrants onwards. Your subscribers aren’t going anywhere. They have no where to go.

Which brings me neatly onto World of Warcraft. Will it ever lose its crown? Can it ever lose its crown?

As of April 2008, WoW had a 62% market share. Not quite as immense as Windows’ 97%, but remmeber that Blizzard have only been on the MMOG scene for 4 years. All of the original MMORPG developers — SOE, Turbine, Mythic and NCSoft — have had years of experience and can still only scrape a tiny, few-percent share of the market from Blizzard.

At 12 million subscribers, Blizzard have obviously done something right. They would have to do something monumentously wrong to lose the grip they now have on the MMOG industry. Their subscriber base positively salivates for each and every content patch that they unveil. WoW is the most played, and probably the most universally-adored (or hated!) game in the world.

It’s this kind of blind-faith in Blizzard and their total monopoly that has me very worried indeed for the future of the Massively Multiplayer market. WoW was hardly an innovation over the existing MMOG titles; it did not bring anything new to the table, but what it did bring to the table it did well. It is polished, and well-cared for. It has a fantastic community of devout, zealous followers and fans.

I am worried, then, that with Blizzard’s next-gen MMO they will fail to innovate the market sufficiently. I’m worried that they’ll play it safe and bring out another game which is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Surely they will look at Microsoft — a company that has learnt that revolutionary leaps in technology are notoriously hard to support — and take the boring route out.

Blizzard now have the resources — both money, and the developers — to create something that’s truly awesome. If they slam the brakes on and squeeze out the gaming equivalent of Windows ME I will be stupendously disappointed.

But being a WoW player myself, a woefully addicted and dedicated player, I’ll be hanging around until World of Warcraft XP is released anyway.

If you are interested in more MMORPG-related articles, you might like to read my ‘Life as a guild leader‘ blog.

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.