Guilds and Guild Mgmt Part 1

Every so often I find myself in the position of watching issues in a guild play out and different results stem from those issues. Every time I see a guild go through these growing pains, I'm always curious to see how it affects the officers and guild master as that is a certain way to define the character of a guild. Guild drama is a given as is the response of the guild in handling it. In the alliance guild LOST SLEEP on Gilneas I've server as a Sr. Officer for around 2 years and been witness to a good amount of evolution within a guild. So it has been interesting to see my horde guild, Malice, experience one of the truths of casual guilds which is having a revolving door regarding membership.

Having tried to be a Guild Master of 2 guilds since beginning to play WoW 3 years ago, I can say that the job of the game masters of these two guilds is a full time job of sorts. Talks with both of them have shown me that these guild masters are the right guys for the job. My principle reason for saying this is; both of them want to have fun and share that fun with like minded individuals. So I'm going to share some of my thoughts from my own experiences.

One of the hardest things to do as a guild master, I believe, is to define the goal of the guild. If the GM decides to keep the guild casual then this is a lot easier to do, though end game concerns do complicate this at some point in the guilds existance. If a GM decides that raiding of PVP is his goal, then the goal is less burdensome but guild management increases a lot. Regardless of the guilds goal though, the GM should have a clear picture of the goal and how the guild should be achieving it, otherwise the guild will never grow or become anything other than a name over your head with a tabard.

Casual guilds are the easiest to manange in that a GM's primary concern is to ensure there are people in the guild and that they are like minded enough to want to stay in the guild and hopefully have fun. And this where the easy part ends. A lot of casual guild end up being more leveling guilds where people come to when they are low level and then leave when they hit the level cap. For all casual guilds this will be a constant, regardless of the guilds goal if the membership is large enough to keep the guild active. If the membership in the guild is small then the casual guild becomes more like a family guild. The larger casual guilds also have the pleasure of becoming casual raiding guilds, and here management of players and resources is key to their survival.
Survival, for a casual guild, is dependent upon a very active GM or a close and active group of officers. I think that there is a misconception on this though about the definition of being active. Active, I feel, means being involved enough in the guild to ensure that the GM and officers presence felt and seen. This does not necessarily mean that a GM of officer needs to be online every night and playing. The GM and officers do need to be active in making sure that they players are having their in game needs met as best as they can. The challenge here though is for the GM and officers to know what is a need and a want. Trying to resolve and/or meet every players wants is impossible and will drive GM's and officers away from helping players. Having a fairly well defined goal will help in resolving what is a need and a want within the guild.

Needs generally follow along the lines of completing class quests, having access to excess materials for use in developing professions in the guild (i.e. guild banks), the potential for non-PUG groups, and comraderie. Everything else is pretty much a want. Some guilds may add more to this, but for a casual guild this is pretty much it. Here though, it needs to be said that access to guild banks and groups for instances are not definites, players just should be allowed limited access or the ability to ask the guild first in these matters.
Regarding larger casual guilds, especially ones with a fairly good number of level capped players, good GM's will slowly delegate out some of the guild responsibilities. In my alliance guild LOST SLEEP, our GM is just that, the GM. Among the officers we're divided up along these lines of responsibilities; Guild Bank Officer, Raid Master, PVP Officer, Assistant GM, Guild Photographer, Guild Reporter, and so on. I am under the impression that several of the other larger casual guilds on Gilneas are set up similiarly. This has helped LOST SLEEP a lot in that it's not up to our GM to toil away his days working on ways to keep the guild members happy about end game content.

The main issue I see over and over with larger casual guilds in player retention. So many players are so fucused on getting the best gear they can and this usually means that the casual guilds lose a lot of players when they hit the level cap. In some ways this isn't a bad thing for casual guilds in that they will gain a reputation of being a good leveling guild and a lot of people will want to leve through while in the guild. The advantage of this is that the guild will see more new faces and will be able to add some of these players to the guilds more permanent roster when they find players that fit in well with the guild.