How to have a successful Guild?

This is a post by GixEdgewood of Invictus and Outer Heaven.

Building a Successful Guild

With different 15 guilds in different games, played multiple online games, and made a good track record each guild game we often get asked for advice from others on how to build a lasting and successful guild. Our primer is mainly designed for a new guildmaster, or a guildmaster of a competitive guild (larger than 25 people) who is moving their guild to a new game for the first time. Without writing a novel, I'll cover some of the core elements that have helped us last through the years and remain competitive in each game we've played.

Leadership

It all starts at the top with a stable leadership core that knows how to plan, develop a consistent set of standards, delegate and supervise to implement the plan, and to ensure that critical timelines are being met. Good leadership can make or break a guild, and many new guilds or guilds trying to make a transition to their second MMORPG fail due to breakdowns in the leadership.

A guild must also take the time to develop junior leadership that can quickly fill key roles in the event that a senior leader has to step aside, or if a senior leader has to be removed for other reasons. Guilds should have a good set of policies and procedures in place that allow for talented members to slowly ease into positions of escalating responsibility and authority. Properly trained and oriented junior leadership can be an asset to a guild, but poorly trained junior leaders can cause all sorts of problems.

Policies and Procedures

Believe it or not a set of standard policies and procedures can save a guild lots of headaches. I don't know how many guilds I've seen fall apart because members got special treatement, promoted, or disciplined without regard to any set standard. In Invictus, every member is evaluated, promoted, demoted, or booted according to our by-laws. In instances where our by-laws haven't been followed by the leadership, one of the Officers has over turned junior leadership decisions and sanctioned those leaders. Some policies on behavior, expectations, etc need to be tailored for the game being played but its always a good idea to have some universal standards and expectations for the membership.Standardized procedures are also a good thing. Having a basic start up plan, standards for certain activities that are fairly universal no matter the game, PVP standard operating procedures, etc are all ideal to have. Once you establish basic procedures, then you just need to modify the parts that are new to the game you are presently playing. For example, in Invictus we have standardized PVP Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's). These SOP's cover how we organize for PVP by going over how we prepare, what some critical roles are, what each class is expected to do, and some basic strategies we employ on certain maps or zones. Having standardized procedures helps us with new member orientation and training. The newbie member who shows up to his first PVP practice with an obvious lack of knowledge of our procedures isn't allowed to run with our groups until they show they understand the basics.

Planning

In instances where your guild is starting new or transitioning to another game, your leadership will need to do some careful planning. How long is your setup time going to be? How do you plan to handle recruitment? How many of your existing members are likely to transition? What resources is the guild likely to need, and how soon? Who do you have that will be able to fill key leadership roles in the new game?Guilds don't fall apart because they plan to fail, they fall apart because they fail to plan.We usually consider our setup phase of a new game to be the 45-60 day mark, and we plan certain milestones into that time period for where we want the guild to be by that time. We consider the operational phase to be the 60-90 day mark, and by the end of that period we want to have the guild engaging in its long term strategy for that particular game.In a sense you have to treat a guild like a business. You have to do your homework on the new game you are going to, create a setup plan, create operational plan to maintain after the setup is done, and then follow through accordingly.

Communications

In this day and age, voice chat is all the rage. Any guild worth its salt is going to have ventrilo, teamspeak, or some voice server capacity. Things happen so fast in games these days, that you just don't have time to sit there and type in text chat commands to people. For day to day coordination, it is imperitive that you establish some sort of voice based communications capacity. On the flip side though voice chat makes people lazy. The guild leadership must take time to establish policies and procedures on its website or in forums, make regular news announcements, and ensure that their members are reading the updates. Otherwise you waste time and productivity with having to constantly explain what's going on to every idiot who's too lazy to take five minutes a day to check the forums. Voice chat is great for coordinating activities, but it sucks ass for long term planning and organization. Figure out what works for you, but beware of the trap that voice chat can create.

Public Relations and News

One way to keep your guild in the public eye is to make periodic announcements about relevant activities, events, or achievements. This shouldn't be overdone or the public will get "your guild" fatigue, but its certainly acceptable from time to time. By keeping your guild in the public eye, it can also help to attract new recruits over time. Regular guild news is also a good way to keep your membership informed about guild events, planned activities, outlining goals, and setting preferred activities for your membership during a given time. I like to release monthly newsletters, internally, on guild chapter forums to that everyone knows what the expectations and priorities are for that month. When members know what to do or what the priorities are for a given time period, they usually become more productive.

Member Discipline

Last but not least we have member discipline. Most members integrate well, but from time to time there's always that one person who feels he's god's gift to your guild. This is gut check time because sometimes you have to boot that guy, and all his friends who came with him. Personally I believe its acceptable to suffer a temporary setback in order to remove a cancerous member and his supporters within the guild than to let them fester and grow. Games like Grand Chase, Ragnarok or RF Online that require a perfect combination of so many people or so many of each class do make one hesitant to boot someone and their friends at times, but letting cancerous people remain in your guild can doom the entire guild.