What I've Learned Running A Guild.

Preface: Short warning here, this post may end up turning into a rant of some sort, but that's what I do best!


Now I don't claim to be the best guildleader ever. In fact, I can probably name a few of my shortcomings as a WoW guild leader (and I will later), but I will try to at least bring some light on some things I found to be important... can you apply these lessons in life? Maybe in some context. But here it goes.


1) Understanding your members
Everyone who joins your guild has their own reason for joining. They chose your guild because your guild can offer them something another guild couldn't (whether it was the people, the raiding times, the raiding positions, the pvp groups or hell, maybe you're the only guild he could get into).

Understanding where your members come from is a pretty important part of keeping your guild happy. Now you might think this is overanalyzing the situation (and maybe it is), but generally speaking, you want to try to keep as many people in your guild happy, without compromising someone else's happiness in the guild. If you want your guild to run smoothly, you want to be able to continue offering to that person what they originally joined your guild for. In many cases, you cannot control that... like you can't control friendships. But if you're trying to run a successful raiding guild, you have to cater to their needs (especially your MVP) and work with their personalities.

You know, I have a few emo players that I put up with. I have a few people who just have no skills at all, but high attendance. I have players who refuse to login for a boss where he can't get any decent loot. I have players who will only show up to a farm boss. Should I throw them all away? I mean, a lot of these quirks can hurt your guild if it happens at the wrong time. Honestly, my approach to this (may be different than how others approach it), is that I can still get value from these players. As long as you have a fair and structured reward/consequence system that reflects these types of behavior (be sure not to be too draconian). When these players do decide to play nice, you can extract a lot of value out of them.

2) Befriending your members (or not).
There are people in my guild who can't stand me. I'm a number cruncher. I check WWS logs after every raid. I theorycraft at work. I can be a smartass... I've read hundreds of pages of other people's experiences with different encounters or dps strategies. I tell them they're playing poorly.

Well, how can I be friends with everyone in the guild if I do things that not everyone likes? Well, I can't. I try to be friendly with everyone in the guild, but it just can't happen. But there is something very important that does need to happen... everyone in the guild needs to respect you to some degree.

No matter how much they hate the fact that I'm often quoting how 20 other guilds do something better than we do, and how they do it, the fact is that at least at some level, they respect the fact that I'm actually going out of my way to IMPROVE the guild. So while at some level some people might find me as an overbearing leader, they also realize that nothing I do is going to be for the wrong reasons.

Which brings me to another point..

3) Maintaining respect.
It's extremely important to maintain the respect of your peers. Things fall apart when they will no longer trust you. There are many things you can do which help destroy that trust, and most of it has to do with the level of corruption that sometimes takes place amongst leaders.

You should always remain fair on loot. Just because you're leader and you invented all the loot rules doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with the loot. You have to follow your own rules too.

There is no perfect loot system, and I understand that. In our own loot system (we use an auction system), there are times where I can see if the auction closes as-is, there would be a serious misallocation of loot for the purposes of raid progression. So while I retain the right to override bids in many situations, when I do so, I prepare myself to justify it in detail to all the other 25 witnesses in the raid... not doing so will quickly make it seem like abuse of power, even if it was clearly for the sake of the guild, and not b/c of some hidden agenda.

And even then, you simply can't justify everything with "it's what was in the guild's best interest". Going back to point #1, you have to know your members, and there has to be some sort of balance between rewarding long time members and doing things solely for the sake of progression. While many times those 2 coincide and go hand in hand, you have to strike a balance for the times when those 2 do not align exactly.

You should also respect other people's time. Just because you're running a tight ship and constantly rotating people in and out, you have to respect the fact that someone really wanted to show up and logged in at 6pm for a raid spot. Even if the player is subpar in someway, and some better player logged in at 7pm, and you want to boot the other player out for him, you have to respect the fact that one guy was on time, and the other wasn't, and either ask nicely, or work something out between the two. Not respecting that players time and effort is a quick way for him to lose respect for you as well.

4) Leading by example.
In the end, it really can't help if most of your guild thinks they can do things better than you can. In order to maintain any sort of control over the guild, they have to trust that the advice and orders you're giving are somewhat accurate. They also have to see that you're practicing what you're preaching, otherwise, they'll just head for greener pastures.

If you yell at people about attendance, you can't be sporting a 45% raid attendance yourself. If you're complaining about lack of consumables used, you can't be going to raids potless/flaskless. If you're complaining about people's DPS, you can't be sitting at last place yourself. This is probably the most obvious point, but it's still one of the most important.