Basic Guild Making Guide

[stevenw9]

A basic guide for those who want to make a guild, nothing fancy, no super secrets.

So you want to make a guild eh? Well there's a few things you should know before you do so and also quite a bit of planning.

- General Planning -

Guild Name: Be original and creative. From a players stand point, <Scarlet Crusaders> may seem all cool and whatnot to the average joe but you want to give and leave an impression. A unique name can help you stick out from the crowd. Since there's such a large population of elves and elf guilds it might benefit you to look up and english to elvish translator, yes they do exist!

Guild Type: Is your guild an RP, PvP or PvE guild? Is it a mix of some or all of these? It's best to choose one to focus on so that you're not overwhelmed. Of course, you can do the others along the way to.

Guild Size: Do you want a huge 100+ member guild or a small and solid 50 person guild? Remember that the bigger it is the more difficult it can be. Many of the large guilds tend to start to break so it's a good idea to choose your 'cap' compared to what you can handle early.

Guild Bank: Every guild at some point needs one, atleast buy one tab (100g) for your guild to use to swap items. It is recommended that you do not give rights for an initiate to withdraw or even view the bank.

Guild Tabard: Designing one early and buying it (10g) as soon as you start off your guild is a good idea. Really a guild without a tabard will be looked at as if they were just a pack of n00bs.

Guild Ranks: It's always good to have a firm set of ranks within the guild to sort out who can do what and who have done major things for the guild. A basic rank set is this:

Guild Leader
Officer
Veteran
Member
Initiate

- Planning the Rules -

Rules are very important to your guild. They instruct your members on what to do and what not to. Too many however can be too restricting and stressful for the average member so you should keep this in mind. A good startoff is to read the games policies and to build off of those, they tend to help and i'm not sure why so many bypass this step.

Also it is best to let your guild members know that if they have drama with eachother they should work it out. If not, you need to step in and stop the drama as soon as possible. You will have the final say, if the members do not like your final say then let them know they need to figure it out or you will. It seems a bit like a dictatorship but drama breaks guilds, and they have a chance to end the drama themselves.

- The Officers -

The officers of your guild are also extremely important. They should be set to handle certain things in the guild such as Recruitment, Raid Organization, Guild Bank Organization and Review and more. You should be extremely careful who you give this position. I wouldn't recommend giving it to anyone who hasn't been in the guild for atleast a month for the sake of avoiding someone coming into your guild and ruining it. It's also a good idea to know this person as best you can to see if you can trust them with the functions at their disposal.

- Events -

It's always good to have weekly events for you guild to keep your members interested in the guild at all times. There's always the events for the main focus of the guild, but this portion of the guide will focus on events that can be used in any guild type.

Lotto: Your members choose a number from 1-100 and send it to you by in-game mail, e-mail or on the forums of your website. In-game you /roll and the members closest to the number wins the jackpot. In the case of two members being exactly the same distance from it you can play odd/even differences, /roll 1-2 to randomly select the winner or split the pot between them.

Protect the N00B: Here you start a party of five people, where one is a level 1 n00b alt. Select an area for them to run through and set two points, beginning and end. The part must protect the alt through the area and keep him alive with no buffs, healing or any enhancements.

Hide & Seek: Same as the real life version. One person hides, first one to the find the person wins.

- Community -

Voice Chat: Many guilds do not touch basis with this area, but it is very important. Either a World of Warcraft voice channel, Ventrillo or Team Speak will do. This allows your members to socialize in an easier way which can be very beneficial when you want your members to know each other better.

Website: It's your opinion on what to use this for. Either have your members actively use the website or just use it as a hub of extra information and recruitment.

- Initiates -

Always put your initiates on a two week trial or more. If they aren't patient then they probably don't REALLY want to be in your guild. This will be a large brick in a leechers face.

During the trial period of your initiate you should encourage them to meet all of the guild members.

Set an extremely hard task for your initiate. It doesn't matter if they complete it or not, but how hard they try does. This will give you an idea of just how badly they want to be in your guild and how far they are willing to go for it. An example is 375 fishing in two weeks.

When your initiate is about to finish their two week trial period it's a good time to setup a meeting between all the members to see how they feel about them. If it's all green lights then rank them up on the proper date. If there is even one red light you should speak to that member very closely about why they are not satisfied with the initiate. This step will also help weed out people who wont benefit the guild.

- Finish Planning; Initiate Guild -

So now that you know what you want to do with your guild, time to start it up right? Hah! If only it ended there! There is of course, more to be done!

- Promotion and Recruitment -

There are several ways to promote your guild. First you should give an overview of what your guild is about. What's their focus? How often do they do events? How far progressed are they? How many members do they have? What are they looking for? Those are the common questions asked and should be answered in your overview. Once you have this overview there's a few things you can do with it.

In-Game Promotion: The easiest way is to drop a modified version of the overview in the Guild Recruitment Channel. Depending on your server, you may also be able to put it over General/Trade. Note, most servers will flame you for posting an advertisement over Trade but this may not be true in all cases.

Forums Promotion: Another idea is to advertise on the WoW Guild Recruitment forums or several other guild recruitment forums for WoW around the web. This can help your guild become a bit more noticed.

Website Promotion: You can always submit your site to the google search engine and start advertising the site. This is a much slower way to recruit but can sometimes yield quality members.

Youtube Promotion: This is one of the hardest but most fun ways to promote. You simply capture video from the game and make a 'trailer' out of it for your guild. GameCam and several other programs can 'record the game' for you. A simple Google search should reveal quite a few results.

- Your Growing Guild -

So your guild is growing, people are happy. All the hard work is over, right? No! Most certainly not! You need to come up with new events to keep people interested, keep tabs on both your members and officers, remove the trouble makers and deal with drama that may spill in your guild.

[matser]

good for newbies :P

[Reece W]

Nice Guide, helps out me and other newbies quite a bit...

[tsincaat]

If you want to flesh out your guide you could add "Recruiting", "Promoting", "Growing", I'm sure there are a few other ones.

[stevenw9]

If you want to flesh out your guide you could add "Recruiting", "Promoting", "Growing", I'm sure there are a few other ones.

Yeah, i'll be doing a more in-depth guide when I have time. Hopefully i'll be able to make one that'll work for the newbie guild master and the veteran. Till then, hopefully this will give some ideas for the generally new guild master.

[Dutch-Ninja]

Great guide, I can see you put your time in it! Too bad I cant rep yet, but this post is for sure worth a rep

[stevenw9]

Updated the guide, should be a bit more in-depth for the person who requested it.

[Alth]

Nice contribution. +rep!

Keep it up!