Spooncraft

This article has been in production for a long time. I’ve written and rewritten it about 5 times now because it really is a serious subject for me. Many casual guilds have found themselves falling apart or simply living in perpetual limbo at this stage in the game.

Many times it’s just a group of friends that have tasted a bit of every aspect in this game from PVP to 40-man raiding and simply want to play in a guild together. I won’t go into semantics but needless to say, many small guilds fail. It’s beyond hardcore and casual. Sometimes you need to cut your losses and rebuild from the ground up.

There isn’t come overly complicated explanation, this isn’t Illidan, simply put; when you find your guild in a state of disrepair and lethargy you must truly look at your core group of people (the ones you call friend, the ones that stuck through everything, the ones that will be there tomorrow) and decide what the group goal is. For the sake of argument, let’s use raiding.

Hitting 25-man content is the goal. We all want to see the big lore figures, we want to kill them and loot their still steaming bodies for truly shiny gear. There are a few steps that I believe help keep things on track as there are way too many factors and distractions that end up spelling your doom.

• Summarize your guild roster into classes/spec, availability (raid times), and profession.
• Evaluate your new list. Check for baggage, drama queens, assholes, and MVPs.
• Draft a charter addressing loot, raid times, conduct.
• Recruit!
• Run the instances.

Summarizing your guild as is pretty much helps you know where your feet stand. You need to know who your raiders are, who the people that are actually going to help get the ball rolling and aren’t just filler. The ultimate goal is to have everybody in your guild driven and motivated and capable and have nobody acting as “filler” just leeching off others and being mediocre.

It’s important to see who your tanks are, your healers, any main tanks? Any main healers? Do you have any enchanters or jewel-crafters? More importantly cooks and alchemists; all these professions really help with raiding as you can get shards for loot nobody wants, food and pots/flasks/elixers for raids, and somebody to cut gems that can help enhance gear. Most importantly you want to know when everybody can raid. It’s pointless to have 25 amazing wonderful players if they can’t all get on at the same time.

Evaluate your guild now that you have setup a list of all the assets at your disposal. This is where you check your members. Make sure you got rid of the drama queens that will only bring you down in the long run. Get rid of the jerks that always have to argue or go off and do their own thing during a raid. If there are couples in your guild make sure to be ready if one goes the other will most likely follow. It may seem like I am keying in on negative aspects but luck favors the prepared and who’s to say that nothing bad happen. You might find yourself blessed with a group of players that don’t have some crazy life altering event that cripples your raid.

On a more openly positive note you want to find your MVPs. These will be your raid leaders and officers (if you have to replace current ones). It’s a pretty heavy task for one person to run a guild alone, you need others that are trustworthy and mature enough (read responsible) to handle things while you sleep and eat and try to see the sun.

Drafting a charter is key. You’re going to be recruiting soon and hopefully raiding immediately after. Having a set of rules that the majority agrees on like when you will raid, how will loot go out, will there be a cutoff time (ours is 1am) and all that jazz including requirements for recruitment. Take into consideration people’s work schedules or school, if they have kids or are themselves kids and maybe have a curfew. Making the college student with 23 credits who also has a 6 day a week part-time job your main tank is pretty much suicide.

Recruit! Using your new charter and knowing where everybody stands should make recruiting easy. The only hard part is finding members. Hit up your realm forums, shout (but don’t spam) in Trade chat your intentions and such. Try to have a website even a simple phpBB forum site where you can see applications, post raid times, talk and such offline to try and help build the community feel of your guild. It might be tempting to flash recruit people and get them going right away but a little bit of screening will help MASSIVELY in the long run. Be patient, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Finally, you RUN THE INSTANCE. If you have 7 people and are trying to run Karazhan then don’t be affraid to pug the missing 3. Same for 25-man content; we all hate pugging but you have to do it. There is no better way to recruit people have them come with you on a raid, they like what they see, it’s better than what they have going on now. Bam you got new members that already have a groove with you and know how things roll.

I’ll leave it at that folks, going into further detail means going off on tangents and i won’t give you guys a larger wall of text than I already did post comments, questions, concerns, nudy pics and more.