Hopefully you’ve given some thought to your WoW Identity (both personal and guild), and considered how important it is to you.
Now, let’s talk about Guild Mergers.
My Experience
I’ve only been directly involved in one guild merger. It was my first guild, one in which I inherited the guild master title from the founder, who logged in one day, transferred leadership to me without saying a word, then gquit. I wasn’t even level 60 at the time if I recall correctly. I did my best, and fairly well under the circumstances, but I also made a large number of mistakes. One of those was trying to push us into Molten Core faster than we were able. We had 25 or so regular members and wanted to get into raiding.
We’d tried running a guild alliance with a guild who was working on BWL, trying to do “half-and-half” MC runs, but they screwed us over on the first run by promising us 20 spaces then only providing 12. Incensed and unwilling to cut almost half of my signups, we left their run and cobbled together a 28 person raid which took down Lucifron before getting eaten alive by Magmadar.
We kept trying to recruit, but could never get to a critical mass of people. One of our members put us in touch with another guild in a similar situation. We talked over the idea of a merger, then did a few 20 man raids to get a feel for each other. Those raids were filled with mostly leadership types and the other top players, and overall went pretty well. We got along, killed the bosses, and ended the run thinking that this group would go far together.
We agreed that they would merge into us. I remained the GM, with their GM and his officers all becoming officers in the new guild. I’d already made the mistake of having too many officers in my guild (seven or eight), so this put us at thirteen officers in a guild of about 50 people.
Within a week or so, problems started to arise. Our guild wasn’t stellar by any means, but they were pretty mature (in line with what you’d expect given the positions I’ve written about). The merged guild had a lot of younger age people in it, and were right on the other side of the maturity scale.
One of my members quit because she had had to deal with sexual harassment in chat from one of merged members in the past. Guild chat became so garbage-filled that I had to create a separate chat channel and kick people over to it when they started babbling.
In retrospect, I was overly heavy-handed, and some of the new people picked up on this and chose to press my buttons. It drove me up the wall, to the point where I took a week-long vacation and told my officers to get things in some semblance of order by the time I returned or I’d start kicking people.
As you might expect, things didn’t get back into order, and most of the new people (and some of my members) left the guild. We re-built over time, though a job change forced me to step down as GM and subsequently leave the guild and the server. They stayed together through TBC, but from the looks of the armory, the guild fell apart completely before the 3.0.2 patch.
What went wrong? Many things. I wasn’t an experienced GM. I exposed my weakness with regards to immaturity to some children who chose to take advantage of it. Mostly, we didn’t do enough investigation before choosing to merge. The best of ours and the best of theirs got together, and we were both surprised when that wasn’t representative of either guild as a whole.
Guild Identity
I didn’t pay enough attention to what my guild’s identity was, and I didn’t consider how the integration of the other guild would change it. In this case, it brought the maturity aspect of our identity down below what I considered to be minimum acceptable levels, which led to me acting the way I did.
I haven’t heard very many guild merger success stories. You don’t really even see many stories about mergers at all these days (unless it’s one that you didn’t even realize was happening). The 10 person raids in Wrath combined with the easy of acquiring loot means that you rarely are in a position where a guild merger is the best option available.
Will that change in Cataclysm? Perhaps. If recruting woes aren’t letting you move from 10 to 25 person raids, merging in a small guild that doesn’t have much of a guild built up may be quite attractive: you get the people you need and the incoming members get access to the talents and heirloom patterns that they don’t have.
Conversely, as a guild’s age (post-4.0) increases, the idea of a merger becomes less attractive, because you can’t bring anything but the warm bodies over. Both guilds might be at level 20, but they will likely have different patterns and different talents. You might be able to reconcile talents, but patterns will not carry over.
