Finding Guild Officers
I’ve been the solo officer in Fury Untold for a while now. I previously had two officers, one went on a longish WoW break, the other had left the guild with some friends due to some personality conflicts. I’ve done a decent job of keeping that herd of cats together, but there is more I’d like to be able to do with the guild, and my efforts were being consumed by keeping the machine trudging along.
I had previously done most of my officer deliberation in private, sorting out who I think would serve the guild well. I had approached the hopefuls and given them a not-so-nonobligatory question about them taking up a position of responsibility/power in the guild. I never had good results from this. People that had seemed like that were good leaders, or wanted to lead, often fell short. The leadership turned more into a private committee for me and my deliberation. When the weight of the guild fell back on my shoulders and things started to get thick again, nobody was willing to step up even though they were officers.
This time around, I’ve created a basic Officer Application, one that is available to all the members of the guild. This gave the ones that wanted to lead an avenue to do so, and didn’t have me wrapping my head around which ones I should push into offer the position. My reasoning behind this was to let them Opt-in to the responsibilities of the position, as well as getting a bit more of a formal interview/intro process (to get the details sorted out).
In preparing this application, I scoured the internet, looking for other examples from which I could gather inspiration. I looked across any search terms I could, spanning multiple MMO’s guilds/clans/other social boundary. I didn’t appear to be the first to consider this, however I was severely disappointed by the quality of the application, and of the implementation.
I decided to get a little adventurous, and created a form. In case you missed the link, here is our Officer Application. In this form I ask them several things:
- General Information: IRL name, email…
- Experience: GL/RL exp, class knowledge
- Leadership Goals: Guild direction, their ideas…
- Situation Handling: Dealing with drama…
I like this method of selecting Officers because it allows people to pick and choose what they want to do. If I need somebody to do the things they want to do, awesome. If not, we can talk it out. At this point in my leadership career, I’d rather pass on something, than have them just carry the title with no real responsibility. I feel empowering the new officers, and letting them enjoy their role is much more important than having every responsibility assigned to somebody.
Dealing with an overfilled roster
With the release of patch 3.3, raiding has a new life. People are logging in again, and raids are getting roflpwnt. I am (as I’m sure every guild leader is) having to deal with a certain problem.
When times are slow and people just aren’t logging on, you might recruit a few new faces to fill in the gaps. Then when new content arrives and everyone decides to log on, you are left with one major problem: Roster overload. In this post I’ll be going over my exact strategy for recruitment, raid invites, and how I handle this particular issue.
In Fury Untold we don’t have a raiding requirement. I don’t want people to look at WoW like a job, so they have freedom to show up when they want or not when they don’t. The other side to this coin is they have to understand that I am going to keep a “healthy” enough roster to ensure that even if a few people don’t show up, we are still likely to be able to raid. Its the give and take of this type of system. I try to keep a few extra of everything: tanks, heals, and dps. This mostly sorts things out, but if everyone isn’t so understanding of why they aren’t getting into raids then you can have a problem.
How you handle raid invites, and making the process clear to everyone is very important. In Fury Untold, I value attendance and dependability over pretty much everything. If someone is putting forth the effort to show up to every raid, even after they out-gear it, I give them extra special brownie points. For the people who just gear their toon, then stop raiding till the next content patch take bottom of the list in my book. We are a guild and we need to operate as such. Just because you don’t need anything from the last tier’s raid instance, doesn’t mean everyone is in the same situation.
One thing that comes up a lot is integrating new members into a roster when there may be a little overlap. When I’m doing invites for a raid I consider new players as a sort of “clean slate”, whereas they don’t have any marks against them. So if I’ve got a guy that has been in the guild for a month, but has shown up to 3 raids a week every time, and a guy whose been in the guild for a year, but only shows up once in a while, I’m going to take the new guy with a good record. What this accomplishes is encourage the things I’m looking for in a raider: dependability, consistency, attendance. If your raiders are going to throw a fit and cry about not getting a raid invite when they know your invite policy, and what they’ve done to deserve being benched, then they might as well take their attitude and go cry in another guild. I have a very short patience for people who are self centered and do nothing but cause drama with it.
My last point for this post is what to do after the invites have gone out, and how to encourage people to show up each time, even if they didn’t get an invite this raid. We use EPGP and I offer a % of EP awards to people on standby. They have to be online (on any character, alt are ok) to sign their main up for EP gains, and they have to do so after every award. My point here being that you need to make logging on worthwhile, even if they aren’t included in the raid.
Blog direction
One thing I’ve always kind of lacked with this site is a clear focus as to what I’m posting about. I love guild management, as well as WoW sociology/player psychology discussion. With the recent changes I’ve made in my own guild, I’ve decided to take my experiences and share them here. I’m going to try to keep this blog focused on 10 man raiding and guild management in that atmosphere. I’m going to try to cover a wide range of topics and keep things fresh. I’ve got a few posts already in mind, so look out, you might get one later today if I get motivated before the realms come back up.
Games: Your time… My time… Our time?
This may seem redundant, but in the world of MMO’s you have to play with other people. Sure, you can level solo, but that only gets you to max level, and then what do you do? From PvP to heroics to 25 man raids you are going to have to interact with other people.
In the World of Warcraft, there are varying degrees of players. The variables are many and not really of our concern, but you will come in to groups with people that are better than you, and worse than you. Again obvious, but people pay to play. This makes them feel entitled to play the game the way they want to play. So when you get in a group people are expecting you to play the same way they are, so that they can accomplish their goals. However, as I stated, players don’t always play at the same performance level.
This is a major issue in progression content (large raid PvE). I will touch on this in my next post!