Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Archive for July, 2009

Stuck Up Officers

Jul 30

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management | 1 Comment

I was reading the latest Officer’s Quarters on wow.com recently, and was struck by this question that the author posed:

Is every conversation among the officers, even those having nothing to do with guild business, held in /o chat instead of /g?

In many of my previous articles, I’ve talked about keeping the lines of communication open.  But I hadn’t really thought about how guilty I’ve been of having most of my conversations in-game be in the officer channel.

I assume that most guild leaders tend to get along with their officers (even if the officers don’t always get along with each other).  Perhaps they are friends, perhaps they’re just people who are “better” at the game (by whatever metric you want to use) than other members.  Perhaps they’re just people who laugh at your corny jokes.

The trap lays in thinking of your officers as your inner circle of friends, and having most of your conversations in the officer channel instead of in guild chat.  It’s an easy trap to fall into, and a hard one to break out of.  You might not even realize how damaging it can be until you spend some time only able to see guild chat and realize how dead it is, even when several of the guild leadership are online.

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Breaking Up a Guild Bank

Jul 27

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management | 1 Comment

piggy_bank_hammerI’ve mentioned in a few past articles about choosing to disband or close up a guild when the needs of the members can no longer be met.

When this happened to the guild I started WotLK with, we had to decide how to distribute the contents of the guild bank.  You hear horror stories about this from time to time, and I thought it would be useful to share the method that we used to distribute the guild’s wealth evenly.

Clearing Out the Trash

Most guilds end up with a lot of useless items in their guild banks over time.  Nobody wants them, they aren’t useful for raids, but they won’t sell on the AH.  Things like the Gnomish Army Knife that engineers have to make en masse while leveling and low-level tradeskill mats.  If you have a free-for-all guild bank tab, you can just move all these items there and leave them out of the valuation step.  You could also vendor them and distribute the gold (even if it may be a paltry sum).

You can also choose to disenchant BoE gear that may be lying around so that it can be distributed as shards, dust or essence.  Though it seems counter-intuitive, leaving BoE gear for direct distribution can make things difficult, as they can pack quite a bit of worth into a single item.  If the items have a particularly high value, consider selling them on the AH and adding the proceeds to the gold balance for later distribution.

(more) Quantifying Effort...

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Motivation to Raid

Jul 23

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding | 1 Comment

motivation Motivation to RaidWhat motivates you to raid?

In my years playing, I’ve seen many answers to this question that tend to boil down to one of the following:

  • for loot to be able to take on harder content
  • for loot to PvP with
  • strictly for the challenge of beating content
  • to play with friends

Ask me, and I’d say I fall  into the first category.  I don’t PvP, and I want to experience all the content the game has to offer.  But unlike many people, I am happy to continue running content with my guild so long as we keep on challenging ourselves.

Of course, the question isn’t really complete, nor are the answers of much use to a guild leader.  It doesn’t take much skill to get a group of people together to progress through a raid instance and take down the final boss.  What you really want to ask is “What motivates you to keep raiding after you’ve achieved the superficial goal that was your first answer?”.  What drives your raiders to go back in and keep killing bosses after you have the loot you want?

The second question will illicit a multitude of responses from people, and those responses will tell you far more about the person.  As a guild leader, you owe it to yourself and to your guild to understand what motivates your raiders to raid.

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Alliance vs Horde Lore in Northrend

Jul 20

Posted by Karatheya in Off-Topic, Ranting | 2 Comments

horde logo

alliance logo

I’m not sure whether Blizzard has different quest designers working on the Alliance and Horde quest lines, but sometimes it seems as though one side has been given more care and attention than the other.

Back in the days of Vanilla WoW, the quest line that differentiated the sides the most was that to become attuned to Onyxia’s Lair.  This was a massive chain on both sides, invoking both excitement and fear.  One of my guilds instantly gkicked anyone who mentioned the quest Jail Break!, usually with a quick re-invite…. usually.

Having completed both the Alliance and Horde versions of the chain, it always felt as though the alliance side was more epic, due mainly to the climactic march through Stormwind and the final unmasking of Lady Katrana Prestor as Onyxia.  While the Horde version was just as hard (if not harder, as it required you to complete about half of UBRS in a 5 man group, which wasn’t a walk in the park at the time), it didn’t feel as “special” to me.  Though I have nothing to substantiate it, my memories of the time say that I wasn’t alone in this position.

In TBC, it seems like the pendulum swung back the other way with the Hero of the Mag’har chain.  If you never played Horde in TBC and have always wondered why Thrall was appearing in Nagrand, you missed out on what was to that point one of the best in-game events, re-creating the cinematic from Warcraft III in which Grom Hellscream defeats Mannoroth.  Perhaps Blizzard shared the above opinion and was giving Horde some love to apologize.

Now we come to WotLK and Northrend.  Having recently completed Loremaster of Northrend on one of my Alliance characters, I’m sad to say that while the Lore seems to be balanced between sides a little better than it was in Vanilla, Alliance get a more epic experience while leveling than Horde do.  Let’s go through the zones and examine why.

(more) Zone-by-Zone...

How the Roster Has Changed

Jul 16

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic | No Comments

roster

I’ve been a member of five guilds since I started playing WoW in the fall of 2005.  Of those, three are still around, and for the most part I am still in contact with some of the members I used to play with.

I’ve been playing on the EU realms since I moved to England in early 2008, but recently took the opportunity to re-activate my US accounts and level the characters I left behind from 70 to 80.  I had characters on both the Alliance and Horde, and one of the first things I did was check out the guild rosters on the armory to see who was still around.

To my (in retrospect unwarranted) surprise, I recognized less than 10% of the current membership.  Even the guild that I’d left only 15 months before had changed radically, with only a few of the leaders from my time remaining.  These were not fly-by-night operations either: both were #1 or #2 in progression on their realm and faction.

Even in the course of leveling, I only ran into two or three people whose names I recognized in Dalaran or PUG groups.

Next time you log in, take a look at your guild roster.  How many of those people will still be there in 3 months?  6 months?  A year?  Does that concern you, or not at all?

WoW is a dynamic game, in content and playerbase.  While the subscription numbers have been steady in the 11-million-odd range for the last half year, I don’t think we always appreciate how much the population of a realm is in flux.  People start playing, retire, and server transfer to or from your realm each and every day.  This naturally affects guilds; the degree to which it affects yours is not entirely in your control, but there are some lessons for guild leaders in the knowledge.

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Foresight

Jul 13

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Cold Comfort, Guild Management | 15 Comments

eye color changed ForesightWoW is in a double-lull right now.  Not only is it summertime, with all the attendance issues that this time of year brings, but we’re at the point where juicy information about the next content patch is being dangled in front of us.

If your guild started running Ulduar right when patch 3.1 came out, you should have Yogg down by now at least, if not working on and hopefully completing a few hard modes.  Perhaps attendance issues have slowed down your progression, or stopped it entirely.

Regardless of where your guild may be in the 3.1 content, now is the time to put on your thinking cap and think about how 3.2 is going to affect your guild.  While the raid content being added may be smaller than Ulduar offered, there are a number of important changes that will have an impact on your members and your guild.  Having a plan in place early can help you retain current members and attract new ones over the summer months.

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What Completes You?

Jul 9

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic | No Comments

I am a hopeless completionist.  I admit this freely.

When I start a character, I am driven by an irrational need to “complete” that character before I shelve it.  Even if I don’t particularly enjoy the playstyle or talents of a given class, once I’ve committed myself, I know I won’t stop until that character is complete.  By the mid-60s I may already know that the character doesn’t stand a chance of becoming my new main, but that doesn’t stop me.

But what is “complete”?  For my WotLK characters, that includes:

  • Level 80
  • Loremaster of Northrend
  • Epic flying
  • Crafting skills to 440
  • Gathering skills to 450
  • Honoured with Sons of Hodir
  • A champion of my home city in the Argent Tournament

Basically, I want to know that if I came back to this character after a long break, I’d be comfortable picking it up and making it my new main without having an arduous leveling process ahead of me.

I did this with my US characters – when I left for the EU they were mostly at the TBC equivalents of the above criteria.  When I decided to come back and level them up, it wasn’t terribly difficult to do.

The additional cash outlay required for WotLK is pretty small (1000g for cold weather flying), and easily earned while leveling, so I didn’t feel like I had that much of a grind for any given character.  You can get Sons of Hodir to honoured in 6 days of dailies, and it only takes 7 days to become a champion at the tournament.  With my play schedule, it takes at least a week of daily play to get from 77 (when most of these open up) to 80, so I never reach a point where I am only doing dailies.  I just tack each on to the start and end of my playtime so that it doesn’t feel that much like work.

I know that many readers (well, the theoretical “many” readers, as there are all of two subscribers to this blog) will read the above and think that it looks more like a checklist for a main character.  But as I said, I’m a hopeless completionist.  You don’t want to see what lengths I go to on my main.

Applying this to Guild Management...