My history and learning experiences from running a guild.

Now, I'm not going to claim to be the best guildmaster in the world, b/c I'm pretty certain that there are people in my guild who really don't like me, or think I do an overall poor job.

I think I can safely say that those people are in the minority however.

While I haven't been a guild leader for many years or anything, maybe I'll give a short history on my leadership background before I start dishing out anything you may or may not think is even worth reading about.

To be honest, I never really cared for being a leader, but I did join an one of the most elite guilds on the most popular server in DAoC (Guinevere at the time). That guild was Knight Templars. They were a small elite guild that was extremely elitist at the time. Unfortunately, I had major issues with the way the guild was run. There was way too much favoritism playing out, and there were cliques forming that were imo unhealthy. Which didn't stop me from trying to break into ALL the cliques, but eventually, I just lashed out at everyone for propagating this crappy behavior and eventually got myself kicked out hehehe. Learning experience #1 anyways.

I joined a PvP server and befriended a player who eventually created one of the largest and unwieldy zerg guilds I'd ever seen. With guild sizes typically around 15-25 in DAoC, this guild hit the member limit @ 230. Now this guy wasn't an extremely skilled gamer which became evident, but his ability to manage this 230 man zerg was simply amazing. His zerg leading abilities literally floored me and I decided that no matter how skilled you were, if you were a strong leader, you could achieve successes far beyond what anyone could accomplish on their own, no matter how skilled. Which kind of makes sense in RL... the smartest people, most skilled people aren't necessarily the richest. It's the people who are in charge who always make the most.

Anyways, I became an officer in that 230 man zerg guild, and just picked up leading tips from him (sure enough, he went on to form his own web startup and cashed out after being bought).

In WoW, I didn't have any intention on leading anything, simply to come and PvP with my friends. Eventually, realizing that this was more a PvE raid game than it was a PvP game, I joined a medium sized elite guild, and it just sort of happened b/c I was unhappy about the way things were being run. Fast-forward to now, I've been leading our guild successfully (imo) for about a year now, and I think we're as strong as we've ever been. Obviously the success of our guild is completely due to the hard work of our members, but I'd like to think that I've helped foster an environment conducive to not only the performance of our raid members, but to create an environment where we could introduce new people in without feeling overwhelmed as being the outsider (obviously, the secret to keeping a hard-core guild running so long is to have good new players trained, then coming in to full member status to replace the people retiring).

I think that also helps with why I feel like I'm successful at doing this. I didn't start this guild, and I was a grunt for the most part. But b/c of my experiences from my 1st DAoC guild where I got kicked out for being too forward on my problems with the guild, being constructive led to gradual acceptance from the guild leadership to eventually me taking over. It's also b/c I've had so many issues with the way guilds were being run that I don't allow it to completely corrupt the way it is lead, and how I still hold my basic principals pretty dearly.

Anyways, I thought I had to put this out before anyone started blindly asking where I came from. I'll do an actual post detailing what values I use to run a guild, and in what order they come in.