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.

If you like what you've read, or seen, or heard, subscribe to my RSS feed!

Alternatively, if you're new here, you might want to find out more about me, the author. Or perhaps you want to hear a posh Brit rant on about anything and everything (podcasts), or you want to read something more serious?

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!

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.

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.

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.