Musings from a Guild Master

**TehVoyager** · 07-26-2011

Hey Folks!

Back in the first week of Ulduar, i was kicked from the guild i had raided all of T7 with. The Guilds main tank never liked me, and after he was promoted to a class lead, he abused his newfound power to remove me from the guild, then threatened to leave if they reinvited me.

well, after being the whipping boy in most of the guilds i joined in TBC, then this fiasco in Wolk, i decided it was time to take the plunge and start my OWN guild.

my guild has been going strong ever since. we started serious raiding serious in ToC and have done well since.
4/5 ToGC10, 3/5 ToGC25, 11/12 Icc 10H, 2/13 T11. were stalled out at 4/7 in firelands atm (stupid alysrazor >.<)

Back to my thread topic.

Along the way my guild has come up against its share of ups and downs. i wanted to come and share the experiences i've had.

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The first big piece of advice i have is: watch Carefully for Cliques and break them up. Friendships are good. Cliques are bad. My guild fractured working on BQL25 because of a clique between 2 officers and 5 members. they split and took about half the guild with them. dont let it happen.

Next is Delegation. you can not "Lone Wolf" lead a guild and play and have a good time. promote officers and delegate things to them. i have an officer who runs the bank, an officer who raid leads with me, an officer who does strategy and theroycrafting.
However, you MUST make sure that you don't have TOO many leaders. one issue we had was after transitioning down from a 25 man guild to a 10 man was our 10 man was 60% officers.

this next one took me a LONG time to learn. You can NOT make everyone happy. dont even try. make the majority happy, and talk to those who dont like it. you can make everone happy for a while, you can make some people happy most of the time, but you cant do both. so some people happy over the long term is the better solution.

LOOT WILL PISS PEOPLE OFF NO MATTER WHAT SYSTEM YOU USE. my guild started with loot council. everyone in our guild was well geared, but we STILL got accused of favoritisim. one raid i had to stop the raid in the middle of attempts on Cindy to give examples to one raider, publicly over vent, to show 100% definitive proof that the LC system we used was NOT biiased. I would recommend DKP or SK or LC for a 25 man guild, and /roll for 10 man (with a check to make sure someone with good rolls doesnt walk out with 10 pieces of loot)

Be viligant of Favoritisim in yourself and your leadership. once you have favoritisim, the guild wont trust the leadership anymore.

people will not use your guild website no matter how many times you ask them to. get used to it. just keep posting good info there. they'll go when they need it.

Deal with troublemakers swiftly and precisely. dont piss around when someones trying to raise hell in your guild.

i'll add more as i think of it, im at work atm and a bit distracted by my job xD

Hopefully you found this useful