Seaking Advice: Running a large guild

maoh · #1 01-20-2009, 11:25 PM

Okay, since the forming of the guild in April 2008, our numbers have ballooned to 130 members, and most recently back down to about 70.

I run events for my guild every month, and we are allied with three other 100+ member guilds.

Ever since the school year started back up, I've noticed a sharp decline in the number of active guildies.

So how should I manage to maximise the number of active members, maintain morale, and keep everyone happy?

What are you thoughts?

Hades-LotD · #2 01-21-2009, 04:03 AM

http://www.lotd.org/58.html

I need to update that, we've been around 14 years now.

To maximize the number of members you have, you need to ensure you have enough regular gamers. Many guilds recruit a lot, and then find that too many of them are too casual. So if you are a casual based guild, you need a larger pool of members to pull from if you plan on doing large events regularly.

As far as motivating people, it depends on if they like the game. If you have members who are primarily happy with the game then all you need to do is make sure you have several scheduled events per week so that people feel the guild is progressing.

Allies are a mixed bag. Some alliances act like extended guild families, and can be pretty good if you all schedule events together. But if each guild is just doing its own thing most of the time, then mostly those guilds are running their own things. Having a good organized alliance takes a bit of work at the leadership level to set up, but once it gets going it can be rewarding.

maoh · #3 01-22-2009, 01:54 AM

Wow, very informative. Thank you.

I guess its time to roll up the virtual sleaves and get cracking.

Zinya · #4 01-22-2009, 03:46 PM

Howdy! We're around your size as a guild as well. I think we're around 120ish unique accounts right now and have been together as a guild for a little over a year. Whee...

To figure out how to keep people active and happy I think perhaps it is advisable to sit down with your guild leadership and decide exactly who you are as a guild and what type of gamer would be a best fit in your guild. After all, you can’t make everyone happy. Here’s a few questions to consider:

Do you want to focus primarily on raiding, pvp, leveling, social events, or maybe even role play? We focus on raiding. We still pvp together as a guild and have silly social events. But raiding is our main focus.
How do you recruit? Trade chat spam, Forums, GamerDNA, friends and family, pugging… each recruitment avenue can get you very different results in the type of member you invite to the guild.
How active do you expect your guild members to be? Point systems to reward attendance can always be put in place to encourage participation.
Is there a level restriction?
How independent do you expect members to be? Are there lowbie runs or is everyone expected to get to the max level and then participate in guild activities?
Do you have an age expectation for being in the guild? Some will frown upon this but it depends mostly on what your guild wants. For example, Everyone in our guild is 18+. Most are 25+. We have a handful that are my parent’s age. This works great for us, as no one has a set bedtime or school obligations.
Do you have some sort of absentee policy such as those who do not log on for 1 month are removed? 6 months? Whatever works.

I’m sure there are many other questions you could ask to define yourself as a guild but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. It seems that when many guilds first start, they recruit everyone. This is great if your guild’s primary goal is to be purely social and/or leveling. However, if you have a set goal in mind for your guild, there is a good chance that many of these people will not share that same vision.

It may seem like a no brainer in many ways… but as this website shows, many people have vastly different expectations of what should happen during their play time.
You can’t make everyone happy.
Decide what it is you want for your guild and then find like minded individuals.

I apologize if this did not seem to answer the question you posed at the bottom of your post. Defining who your guild is and recruiting like minds just seems like the first step to getting people to log on and be happy when they log on (hey, they’re in a guild of people who all want to do the same sorts of things they want to…why not log on!).

maoh · #5 01-23-2009, 10:01 PM

Hmm.. those are some good questions.

The guild was set up initially to PvP. But ever since the guild PvP system got gimped, we've become less of a PvP and gearing towards PvE to help people finish their story quests, etc

We never really had an age restriction, so as a result have had a few incidents of drama caused by those let were less mature about situations than they should have been. All in all, we acknowledge members based on maturity, and their actions in and out of the guild.

We've never had much of a absentee rule. We've maxed out the guild's level so we can hold quite a few members (250 max), so it's never been an issue.

We've been running mostly end game type runs. So I think it'd be wise to help out the lowbies for awhile, to help get everyone caught up.

We recruit through word of mouth in game and on forums.

Sorry for the unorganized reply.