Guild management

[Yisungyol]

Looking at some of the most successful guilds in WoW past and present, I can seem to draw any conclusion on the elements to their success.

Sure having good players helps, leader/s who has very good analytical skills, and a good recruitment pool all helps. However from a management view what are some of the things they are doing right?

This is specifically geared towards a re-rolling guild, and how what are the most important elements to becoming successful and competitive?

More specifically and detailed, how do the top guilds tackle:

Raid planning
Weaknesses
How you cope with those weakness and play on your strengths
How you split up responsibilities
How if you had to start over would you go about managing a guild to start raiding?


Thank you.

[Muffin Man]

I never raided much until WotLK. And I never raided seriously until Ulduar.

But in my limited post-3.2 I've noticed one *huge* ingredient.

Stability.

I run 10's and we have about half the roster constantly turning over (not just players, but also roles, ie. I started as dps, now I'm tanking). And especially with hard modes it's quite glaring how it hurts us, where bosses we have on farm with certain players are just wipefests with others. I think this is more of a recruiting thing and hard to screen out. I don't know what that x-factor is that makes one player reliable and another flakey.

Strong leadership is also a really big one. My guild recently went through a loss of officers, raid leaders, and even the gm. You'd be surprised how hard it is to get things organized and how hard it is to get people to follow you when you aren't 'in charge'. Most of the raiders were still around, but they just couldn't get any raids off the ground. And when they could, they didn't get as far as they used to. I suppose this also goes under stability.