How to start a guild?!

[Söfie]

So...I'm thinking of starting a guild, starting with guild PvP and casual raiding, and advancing to more serious raiding on a weekly schedule. I was wondering if anyone had a good guide, information, or tips for me. Anything at all is very helpful and will be greatly appreciated. (:

Thank You
--Söfie

[Quinafoi]

You start out a casual raid... you recruit casual people... when you try and convert to serious raiding you find this difficult, because, you don't have serious people. Your end goal differs too much from your starting goal, such that the progress you make towards you starting goal will actually get in the way of you achieving your end goal.

[Söfie]

How would I be abke to build up to that point then?

[Bellanca]

Howdy, Sofie!

This may not work for you, but it's how some old friends and I went from the 4 of us to a healthy and progressed 10-man guild in just a few weeks.

The first thing you should consider is why you're putting a guild together? Is your guild going to offer something other guilds on your server don't? Do you have a clear goal in mind? Also, do you have people you can rely on as support? I don't mean just friends, but people who will take this as seriously as you're taking it.

The answer to those questions is going to affect the type of people you're going to attract and how you're going to handle recruitment.

Recruitment is going to be one of the most difficult aspects of starting up a guild because you're unestablished, don't have any of the attractive guild perks (yet!), and you have to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Make sure your expectations are in line with that and it will go a lot smoother. (I had a lot of officer frustration because we weren't finding people immediately end game ready, and I had to constantly realign their expectations because becoming a raiding guild from scratch takes a lot of hard work and patience.)

We started out joining random PUGs as a group and scouting for untagged, good players from there, and then progressed to putting our own PUGs together and approaching people who did well about joining afterwards. Week after week, we ran at the same times (the times we planned to keep our raid team going) and eventually we went from recruiting for 5 people to recruiting for only 1 or 2, then we stopped recruiting altogether and had to rotate people in and out. We also checked the Looking for Guild forums on the official WoW website and looked for people who seemed to be good fits, then approached them individually. Don't cut and paste the same spam, be creative, tailor your responses to the individual, and you're likely to get a response from them.

If you're also going to be the raid leader, I cannot stress enough to you the importance of these two points:

-Praise in public, punish in private. Make corrections through whispers, not by calling things out over vent.

-If you are easily frustrated, keep something soothing handy. For some people that's music. For others, like me, it was a hearty dose of vodka on raid nights. Find what calms you, keep it near by, and always remind yourself of what the end goal you have in mind is. (I'm not joking, either. Vodka saved my inner child from hanging himself from the ceiling fan with his Muppets' Backpack on multiple occasions.)

If you have a good support system in place (Officers who are on board with your clearly defined goals and work to make your job easier) everything will fall into place over time. Make sure the people you recruit are good fits in personality as well as playstyle. If you're serious about being a raiding guild and are looking to progress, always weigh your decisions against what's good for the team as a whole, as opposed to specific individuals. It's a rough job being a GM, but if you're consistent and fair you'll have the love and respect of your members and that makes it all worthwhile.

[Bellanca]

The site is temporarily down for maintenance, but you should also go over the following link, as it has a lot of helpful advice: http://www.skywall-horde.com/gl.html