Chylde Roland
June 13th, 2005, 02:03 pm
Ok, so… after a lot of thought and some online research, I've come up with some ideas about how to grow our guild. There are basically three options available to us:
Recruiting, Alliances and Mergers. There are plusses and minuses to these approaches, and I wanted to open things up for discussion.
Recruiting
One of the overriding threads/themes I saw in this area is that you need to define what kind of guild you are, and what your overall goals, or purpose, will be. We have definitely been lacking in that department, and I'll need some help establishing this aspect of FoL.
In terms of the "type" of guild, I would say we fit the "social" type best: a group of players who like to have people to talk to for humor, advice, trading and feedback on the game. We're not a hardcore guild that's into power-leveling, or large scale PvP, or massive raids.
We also group with one another very infrequently, and I think this is one area we will want to work on changing as we build up. For now, it's very tough because of the low number of members, but I hope we can alleviate this some by growing and diversifying. It's going to be tough at first, but I think things will eventually hit an upswing and get us going.
The "purpose" of our guild is something that's a little more difficult to nail down: Why are we here and what do we hope to accomplish? This basic question needs to be answered, or we'll continue to lack focus/cohesion, which will in turn make it harder to attract and retain new members. So we need some goals… do we want to kil Onyxia, for example? How about Majordomo? Do we want to become a BG force to be reckoned with? Do we just want to adventure, raid dungeons and generally have a good time? Do we want to throw some organized and scheduled PvP into the mix?
These are just some ideas, but I would like to hear back from as many of our members as possible regarding our purpose. This way, we can really nail down who we are and what we're looking for. I'm still not into the idea of making this feel like work, but I have some ideas for some scheduled events that I'll get into in the WoW events thread later today.
Once we've established our guild type and our goals, we can work on a standard message we can use for recruiting. This message will ideally be very short and to the point, and we can use it to recruit both in-game and on the boards. I've read that it's generally fine to recruit in-game, so long as you're not spamming your message. Ideally, do it in IF a few times while you're running around buying and selling, etc. I'd say in a 15 minute period, using the message say 3 times would be ideal, but that's just a thought.
Ok now, onto:
Merging
I think this may still be a viable option for us. Vilya and I had a phone conversation the other day, after our guild meeting (since he came on after we had finished up, and I wanted to update him on what happened). So we tossed some ideas around as well, and came up with the following:
First, the ideal candidate for a guild merger would be between us and another guild that's almost exactly like ours. It would need to be small, with casual gamers and a few hardcore players, and with identical gameplay attitudes and philosophies.
If we were to try a merger, I think the best way would be to set up a whole new guild, with a new name, and create it as a guild of equals, with maybe a co-leadership. Vilya suggested using a new toon as the leader, in a figure-head sense. Much like we use Tancil as a gold mule, we'd have a guild-leader mule who isn't a played character, but only holds the spot because we need a character in place to hold the spot according to Blizzard's system.
Then we could create a "board" (for lack of a better term) composed of an equal number of members from both guilds to ensure both teams are represented in the new guild. My hope is that if this were to happen, it would then be business as usual, only with a whole lot more members. :):
A few other things would need to be maintained, such as only a couple of people having permission to boot players, so we can maintain the discussion requirement for removing members.
Just some more thoughts in that area, which I hope will get some discussion going.
Alliances
As far as alliances with other guilds go, I'm still very open to this idea, and hopefully we can get something going in that regard soon. Once we get a website set up, we can drive new people to there as a source for information, and we will still use the boards here, as well.
Please take the time to weigh in with your thoughts on this stuff. It's very important for us to get as much discussion and feedback going on this as we can, so we are all on the same page in regard to how we want to grow. Please feel free to post your thoughts here, or send me a PM or an email. I'd prefer that to a conversation in game because I would be able to keep better track of what we talk about if it's written down somwhere, instead of relying opn me to remember in-game conversations and the like. :lol:
Thanks, gang.
Cel
Recruiting, Alliances and Mergers. There are plusses and minuses to these approaches, and I wanted to open things up for discussion.
Recruiting
One of the overriding threads/themes I saw in this area is that you need to define what kind of guild you are, and what your overall goals, or purpose, will be. We have definitely been lacking in that department, and I'll need some help establishing this aspect of FoL.
In terms of the "type" of guild, I would say we fit the "social" type best: a group of players who like to have people to talk to for humor, advice, trading and feedback on the game. We're not a hardcore guild that's into power-leveling, or large scale PvP, or massive raids.
We also group with one another very infrequently, and I think this is one area we will want to work on changing as we build up. For now, it's very tough because of the low number of members, but I hope we can alleviate this some by growing and diversifying. It's going to be tough at first, but I think things will eventually hit an upswing and get us going.
The "purpose" of our guild is something that's a little more difficult to nail down: Why are we here and what do we hope to accomplish? This basic question needs to be answered, or we'll continue to lack focus/cohesion, which will in turn make it harder to attract and retain new members. So we need some goals… do we want to kil Onyxia, for example? How about Majordomo? Do we want to become a BG force to be reckoned with? Do we just want to adventure, raid dungeons and generally have a good time? Do we want to throw some organized and scheduled PvP into the mix?
These are just some ideas, but I would like to hear back from as many of our members as possible regarding our purpose. This way, we can really nail down who we are and what we're looking for. I'm still not into the idea of making this feel like work, but I have some ideas for some scheduled events that I'll get into in the WoW events thread later today.
Once we've established our guild type and our goals, we can work on a standard message we can use for recruiting. This message will ideally be very short and to the point, and we can use it to recruit both in-game and on the boards. I've read that it's generally fine to recruit in-game, so long as you're not spamming your message. Ideally, do it in IF a few times while you're running around buying and selling, etc. I'd say in a 15 minute period, using the message say 3 times would be ideal, but that's just a thought.
Ok now, onto:
Merging
I think this may still be a viable option for us. Vilya and I had a phone conversation the other day, after our guild meeting (since he came on after we had finished up, and I wanted to update him on what happened). So we tossed some ideas around as well, and came up with the following:
First, the ideal candidate for a guild merger would be between us and another guild that's almost exactly like ours. It would need to be small, with casual gamers and a few hardcore players, and with identical gameplay attitudes and philosophies.
If we were to try a merger, I think the best way would be to set up a whole new guild, with a new name, and create it as a guild of equals, with maybe a co-leadership. Vilya suggested using a new toon as the leader, in a figure-head sense. Much like we use Tancil as a gold mule, we'd have a guild-leader mule who isn't a played character, but only holds the spot because we need a character in place to hold the spot according to Blizzard's system.
Then we could create a "board" (for lack of a better term) composed of an equal number of members from both guilds to ensure both teams are represented in the new guild. My hope is that if this were to happen, it would then be business as usual, only with a whole lot more members. :):
A few other things would need to be maintained, such as only a couple of people having permission to boot players, so we can maintain the discussion requirement for removing members.
Just some more thoughts in that area, which I hope will get some discussion going.
Alliances
As far as alliances with other guilds go, I'm still very open to this idea, and hopefully we can get something going in that regard soon. Once we get a website set up, we can drive new people to there as a source for information, and we will still use the boards here, as well.
Please take the time to weigh in with your thoughts on this stuff. It's very important for us to get as much discussion and feedback going on this as we can, so we are all on the same page in regard to how we want to grow. Please feel free to post your thoughts here, or send me a PM or an email. I'd prefer that to a conversation in game because I would be able to keep better track of what we talk about if it's written down somwhere, instead of relying opn me to remember in-game conversations and the like. :lol:
Thanks, gang.
Cel