Guild management - Seeking Advice

[frater]

I am seeking your advice on how to configure a guild and develop and implement a raid structure and guidelines around who will be qualified for invites to raids and who will not.



Our guild is not a progression guild. We are a group of mature players who just don't have the time or inclination to be serious raiders or to want to take on the level of management required to run such a guild - as most of us are managers in our day jobs.
We have grown without active recruiting but instead through friends and family. We are not large enough to do full 25 man but often have 17-18 on who desire to raid


I am hoping you can share your experience with me about how to set-up a two tiered approach to raiding.

I want to create an A-Team for our progression raiding. There is a subset of our players who are very skilled and knowledgable. We need to implement rules that will set certain criteria for who can be on the A-Team and be considered for progression raiding.

I then need to do something about the rest who we will call the B-Team. These are more casual players who havent taken the time to master their class or how to play the game well. Hate to generalize but wives who often have babies on their laps, and others who just consistently show they aren't paying attention. They still want to raid but frankly inserting them into our A-Team has become frustrating.

because it's a friends and family guild I am trying to figure out the best way to do this without ruffling too many feathers.



How have you structured your guild and what rules have you communicated on how you decide who goes on raids and who doesn't?
Anyone ever been in a similar situation? How did you handle it?


Any feedback would be helpful.

Thanks!

[Penlowe]

You are not alone, at all. Your guild is the most common type there is, that should be comforting in the fact that so many have gone before that it will be easy to cut & paste a set up together ion no time. Start here: Roundtable ~ Chamber of Guilds: Forum (http://tankspot.com/rt/e107_plugins/forum/forum.php)

[shez]

Good website, didn't know about it!

I'd like to register but it wont let me, it kept saying my email is not a valid one (guild website domain), i've also tried my personal email it just didn't work

[Penlowe]

I've contacted the admin there about these issues, keep trying. You should be able to read the guides without registration though.

[Bashal]

I want to create an A-Team for our progression raiding... I then need to do something about the rest who we will call the B-Team.

I have some suggestions regarding this.

Set up some criteria for being a-team. Make the criteria roughly match the minimum performance of the people you currently feel are a-team material. This prevents the a-team from being truly exclusive, as it becomes possible for someone to get good enough to join you. Have officers be available to give advice to folks who don't meet the requirement and want to do better.

Although I fully understand the need of an "a-team" if you want to get somewhere reasonably fast in raids, the downside is the existence of a "b-team". The danger of having a clear-cut b-team is that the group can begin nursing a "b-team syndrome". They have their faces rubbed in the fact that they aren't as good, especially when the gap between what the a-team and b-team can accomplish widens. This can cause hard feelings, and can also actually reduce performance. Kind of a "we suck, why bother trying" attitude.

One thing I try to do, in order to mitigate b-team syndrome is to make sure the second group has good leadership. Fortunately for myself, I have fairly well-geared alts. I throw one of those into the "b-team" and that guarantees at least 1 good, geared player. Since I also lead raids, that also means the quality of leadership is the same. It's basically a "I'm not abandoning you, I give a damn" kind of message I'm sending.

[nethervoid]

This kind of 'A-team / B-team' split has a high rate of guild fracture, just FYI. People get all butthurt that they're part of the B team and feel treated unfairly. Usually the people who want same reward for different levels of effort. v0v

What we do is just take the 'heavier hitters' to the new progression content, while rotating in a few 'lower-end' players. This way you have enough juice to push new content, but everyone eventually gets a chance to see the content. Although one of the main problems with you guys is having 17 people sign up for a 10 man, I guess. You might have to go 25 man and pug the rest. You might have to split your teams more evenly, and run two 10 mans...

Guilds have a really hard time switching goals, and now you can see why. Usually raiding guilds require a specific structure set at the get go to avoid these kinds of issues. =/