Audience

Guild Masters and Officers of fledgling or reorganizing guilds. Players thinking about undertaking the creation of a new guild. The article is applicable to all guild creation however a focus is put on the considerations needed for progression raiding.

Guide

Time is Your Nemesis

As a GM of a new guild there are a ton of factors working against you. The most important one is time. Every factor gets worse over time so you need to make things go as quickly as possible once you get them rolling. Some factors that will crop up are that: your players will want to see results, they will want whatever events you’re running to actually go off, they’ll want quick progress or loot. The longer your guild is around the harder it is to recruit as a “new guild” for most guilds that’s a problem. Also, once you have a tabard and a guild bank you’re now into the day-to-day running of things so you have to constantly do damage control while also trying to set things up.

If those time sensitive things apply to your guild, you definitely want to offload as much of the “guild start up” work to you and your officers BEFORE your guild even gets an in-game charter. Now I know some of you are thinking "but I want to raid?!?!", believe me I know. The flip side is that when you're starting things up you likely wouldn’t even be able to run events that first week due to the size of your guild if you wanted to. Take that first week and don’t try to run anything at all. Put the time and your guild’s effort into creating your guild. You'll reap the rewards later.

After your guild is created you're going to spend a ton of time recruiting, monitoring the health of your guild, reassuring people, occasionally wiping noses and tying shoes, researching encounters, etc. A good way to burn out is to be doing all of that stuff AND trying to setup the structure of your guild. Unless you have the luxury of sitting at home 24/7 you'll run out of hours in the day. If you’re fortunate enough to have that luxury, it’s unlikely that your officers and players will also, therefore you’ll increase the chances of burning them out.

Officers are Your Saviors

The first part of creating a successful guild is to have a solid core of officers. I'm talking about people that want to succeed in whatever goals you set forth, and are willing to dump time at it. In terms of a raiding guild, these players don't necessarily need to be your super skilled players; they need to be good leaders who have enough time on their hands to help out, period. You NEED these players. If you try to go it alone as a GM you will almost definitely burn out in short order from the massive amount of work there is to do just in day-to-day work, let alone start-up work.

Distilling the Essence of your guild into a Mission Statement

The second part is your mission statement. These several sentences need to be the distilled essence of what you want to create. They should be used to create the rest of your charter and should govern everything about your guild. That being said, you *can* change this at some later date, but you probably don't want to change it very much or you're essentially creating a new guild. Some things to think about when you're creating a charter:
- Think about what types events you want to run: raids, pvp, role-playing, quests, leveling, achievements.
- How often do you run events?
- Are there time restrictions (number of nights, hours per night, hours per week) that you need to keep in mind?
- Are there levels of relations that you want to keep with your server or the WoW community? Ie. Some guilds may want to present a friendly/helpful front to the server, other guilds may not care, this choice will affect how you setup and run your guild.
- Think about any restrictions that you have and if you're willing to compromise them, if not, put them in your charter.
For raiding and PvP guilds:
- Do you want to be a competitive guild in the server, country, world? If so, you’re going to start at the bottom so set realistic goals and timelines.
- Do you want players who have really quality personalities or are you willing to tolerate some jerks so long as you achieve your goals?
- Do you want to complete some title or achievement before the next set of content is released or before the next expansion is released?

Creating a Charter

Where to start...

Once you've created a mission statement you need to think about how you're going to achieve those goals. Now you need to setup everything regarding how your guild will run day-to-day. You’ll need a loot system, a rank structure, a recruitment policy, and an event policy for a minimum. Some guilds may also find that a code of conduct is useful. Once you outline these things in the charter it's imperative that you follow them. It's really worth putting time into thinking through how all of these things will work. While creating these rules, remember the points from the "Enemies to Watch Out For" section, namely burn out and drama.

Loot Drama Ahoy

A loot system is the single touchiest part of your guild. Everyone has watched a 5-man, if not a 10/25/40-man dissolve because somehow loot went to a player and some other player didn’t think they needed or deserved the item, then the drama ensued and the group broke up. If you’re planning on running anything involving loot, you absolutely need a loot system. For raiding guilds this is going to be much more involved and I’ll get into that in a second. For guilds that don’t focus on raiding you’re likely going to need at least basic rules…need before greed, RL discretion, whatever you choose…but make sure it’s stated up front before you run anything, it has the potential to save you a lot of time. If you’re one of those smaller guilds you can probably skip the rest of this section, for raiding guilds please keep reading.

There are tons of systems out there. Some of the popular ones: EPGP, variations of DKP, loot council. As a raiding guild I’d advise looking into them. Each will likely have some book keeping involved, however long term the rewards of one of these systems makes up for the work you’ll put in maintaining them. If you’re still not sure about putting in all of the work to maintain one of these systems, consider a few things: How do you keep players interested when they no longer need loot from an instance, yet you need them to help gear up other guild mates? How do you deal with rewarding players for the amount of time they put in? If you don’t have a loot system how do you reward or punish players for unacceptable behavior?
While looking through all the possible systems, consider the weird cases that will happen. How do you handle:
- Ties in your system.
- Collusion (it will absolutely happen).
- New players joining your guild. Is the gear DE’d or given to the newbies? If you give the gear to newbies, do you charge them?
- Learning nights without boss kills?
- Crafting patterns and items?
- Mounts?

While creating your loot system, look around for mods and website scripts to help you automate your system. Again, remember what I was saying previously about burning out, you want minimal work to keep this system up. A simple search of the mod websites for “loot”, “DKP”, “EQDKP” will give you a good starting place. If you go with a DKP based system look into EQDKP-Plus for your website and CTRT (the EQDKP version) to keep EQDKP updated.

While setting up your loot system, consider that it takes our officers a good half an hour after every raid to update our loot tables, even with all the mods. If you're doing it by hand it can easily take an hour or two. Now consider that you probably raid several times a week, and you raid most weeks of the year. Any time you can clip off turns into [time saved per raid] * [number of raids per week] * [52] = [time saved per year]. In our case, figure our mods save us an hour a night...1 hour * 4 raids * 52 = 208 hours per year or 8.7 DAYS per year! You can definitely find a better use for those hours than maintaining your loot system. It's worth spending a few hours up front to setup an efficient system than to suck up all that time in an inefficient system.

Officers and Rank Structure

Setting up ranks is fairly easy. Let’s start with discussing your officer structure. Whether you’re a small social guild or a competitive raiding guild you’ll need officers. Small guilds can likely get away with only a few officers just to maintain your ranks, your guild bank, recruitment, and settling disputes and wiping noses. You may only need a couple helpers and your setup could just be GM, an Officer, and Guild Member ranks. Smaller guild GMs you can probably skip the rest of this section as it’s going to discuss the issues larger guilds and raiding guilds need to worry about.

Setting up your officer structure can take a little time but if you do it right your officers will basically run the guild for you and you’ll only have to monitor your guild’s health and tweak things from time to time. First up, you’re going to need to choose between class leaders and role leaders. There are a ton of articles out there debating the two and it’s well beyond the scope of this article to give a full discussion. The main points are that role leaders will have a good idea of what’s expected of players in a particular role, but they probably won’t have a full grasp of every class that fits their role so evaluating players and giving them advice will be a bit harder. Class leaders should have a pretty good handle on all the specs in their class so evaluating players and helping their class mates should be easy for them. The down side is that you may not always have a good leader for every class as your guild will probably only have 2-5 players of a given class. The other problem with Class Leaders is that it will expand your /o to a size that you may not want to deal with.

There’s a bit more to consider when setting up your officer structure. Who does the recruiting and evaluating of new players? Typically that falls under Role/Class Leaders, but maybe you’ll want to have a set of “Recruitment” officers. What do you do when a Role/Class Leader is unavailable? You absolutely don’t want all of that work trickling to you as a GM or you get into the realm of risking burn out. Who does your loot maintenance? With loot you’ll likely want a few people who know the system, can run all of it, and rotate the work load around so that they don’t burn out. In our guild we have a “Council” rank that maintains our loot system and covers any work that doesn’t get done by our class leaders. I’d recommend having some sort of “back up” or “catch all” position like this to help out when things get rough.

When you’re creating your leadership structure you should consider how the players are selected for the leadership positions. This may seem simple, but there are some underlying issues here that can really help or hurt your guild, again revolving around burnout and drama.

Let’s start by considering how leaders are selected. When you’re creating your officer structure you’ll need to consider that sometimes you won’t have a player who wants a given position. How is that handled? Is it ok to leave the position empty in the short term? The other side to this, and the side that has the potential for drama, is what happens if multiple players want a position? There are two main ways to choose your officers, either appointment by leadership or the GM or voting. Appointment is typically the easiest method, but you need to be very careful to be as impartial as possible when doing this. Make the appointments for the best of the guild, not for your own personal gain. Really consider what your players will want, you don’t want a person in a leadership position that your players cannot deal with, it will create a daily headache for you. The other method, voting, lets you get rid of the responsibility of appointments. What that means is that, with fair voting, you put the responsibility back on the players. If someone isn’t voted in, it’s on all of the players who were able to vote for them, instead of it being on you. That minimizes conflict between your players and yourself. As I mentioned before, you want to make sure that your players can deal with their leadership. No matter how much you try to keep tabs on your guild, if it’s a larger one, you likely won’t be able to know everything to make a totally impartial appointment. Voting lets some of those underlying matters be taken into consideration as they’ll affect how players vote without causing any drama within the guild.

Now let’s go to officer burnout. No matter how much you spread out the work, some players will have their real life situation change to the point that they won’t have the time to put in doing guild leadership. Sometimes this means players will quit the game or guild. Other times this means they just won’t have time to do leadership, if that’s the case you don’t want to compound your problems of losing a leader by adding to it the loss of a player and probably friend. Leave your players an out. Strongly consider some sort of “terms” for your leadership that gives them a natural “out” if things change. I also recommend keeping the communication with your leadership very open and letting them know to talk to you if they’re feeling overwhelmed (if they do this is the first sign someone is on the road to burn out). If you know your leadership is overwhelmed you may be able to shuffle around responsibilities to ease up that leader’s work load, or you may want to offer them just a straight guild position without the leadership duties on top of it.

So that's your leadership, next let’s consider your members. The biggest issue is how much you want to stratify your members. Having lots of ranks allows you to apply different rules to different players based on whatever criteria you set forth (typically some combination of attendance, skill level, and time in the guild). This can be a blessing if your members’ skill or attendance commitments are vastly different. The down side is that it takes more time to maintain lots of ranks. Also, the more ranks you have the more players will complain if they’re not in either the correct rank according to your charter, or the rank they think they should be at. You’ll also want to consider a rank for family, RL friends of guild members, maybe in-game friends. Probably as a rank that only increases the social aspects of your guild but those players aren’t allowed to attend events. I really recommend keeping these ranks simple. Have a “social” rank. Have an “initiate” rank (I’ll get to recruitment and initiation in a minute). Have maybe 2 ranks for your “core” members.

Once you decide on a rank structure put it down on paper. Setup expectations for each rank, such as attendance, skill, dues, behavior related to the rest of the guild or server, or anything else you have. Specify how many events a player needs to attend in a given period to retain the rank. Specify if there’s a skill or participation level that’s required. Specify if players are expected to donate to the guild. Specify what players get at each rank, preference for invites, guild repairs, whatever. For each rank also specify how a player attains or loses the rank. Are they promoted at a class leader’s discretion? Are they promoted when they get their attendance to a specific level? Is the rank attained via elections? Are they removed for a single infraction or multiple infractions? Do they lose their rank if they miss one, several, or many events?

When you're setting up your ranks and officer structure very clearly outline the responsibilities of each rank. You'll likely want to hold your officers to the same standards as your member ranks, otherwise people will abuse power and the "lower" ranks will complain...ie. drama. Set it up at the beginning, follow it after that.

How do you recruit?

You need a recruitment policy. I strongly recommend an application, interview, and trial period. While WoW isn't a job, please consider that you're going to spend a substantial amount of time with these players. You want to enjoy your time, as so your guild’s members. You don’t want to bring in players that will rock the boat or not maintain the expectations of your guild and cause drama.

An application lets you evaluate some basic credentials...their experience, their computer's specs, their past guild history (although this has become harder with server/name/faction changes), the days they're available, their writing skills, how much effort they're willing to put into joining you, etc. Often times people will apply to your guild without reading whatever material you have out there about the requirements to join your guild (age, event days, experience/gear levels, whatever), so an application saves you a ton of time by being able to screen these out very quickly.

I'd strongly recommend also having an interview. Again, you're going to spend a ton of time with these players, spend 10-15m talking to them and see what they're like. After talking to them consider if you'd want to spend hours every week playing with them, do you think the rest of your guild would like playing with them? You don't want to bring in a player that doesn't click with your guild or you risk losing multiple players who have already proven themselves.

After an application and an interview, you need to decide who has the final say on ginviting the player. Typically this will be some combination of the GM, Raid Leader, and Class/Role Leader. This doesn't need to be terribly elaborate, but some sort of discussion back and forth is probably worth the few minutes it takes. Having multiple people involved in the process also increases your chances that you won’t let a bad apple in the guild.

Once a player is invited, what happens next? I'd recommend having a trial period. If you trial people it's very easy to get rid of them as there is no expectation for them to have a permanent spot in the guild. They know they're being evaluated, your officers/players know the player is being evaluated, there really isn’t an expectation that the player will make it long term in the guild during a trial period. Once you get someone into your guild and start giving them privileges it's harder/more drama to take those privileges away and/or get rid of them. Even with an application and interview you really don’t know how a player will do in your guild’s environment. You want your players that are pulling their weight, and you want them to get along with the other players in your guild. If those criteria aren't met, you probably don't want to keep them around, get rid of them as soon as you know they won't work out.

How Are Your Events Structured?

The last part is exceedingly straight forward. That's your event procedure. Just outline what a typical event should look like. Also add in some exception handling...what happens if you don't have enough people? How long do you wait to start? When do you call it? What causes you to call a night early? Again, set up the expectations for the event so your players and you know what will be going on and why. I can't stress enough that players will tolerate things a ton more if they're told up front. Springing rules on people tends to create drama.

Recruitment is Your Lifeline

Getting Started

For most guilds, you will need to recruit and recruit and recruit some more. Setup threads on the recruitment forums. Setup pages for your guild on the progression websites, raid information sites, any WoW site that you come across that allows you to post a profile and recruitment needs. The more you get your name out there, the better. This will take some work; you need to keep all of these pages updated with your latest exploits and needs.

Advertising Your Guild

I recommend pulling up Google and reading some articles about writing a successful recruitment post. It’s not as simple as you might think. Include anything *you* would want to know if you were joining a guild. Typically this post will include your event times, guild contacts, your server, what you're recruiting, guild recruitment requirements, links to your website, progression, rankings, etc. There are also posts out there regarding how to write a successful recruitment title (you have a couple dozen characters to draw people in, also harder than it sounds).
Some basic tips: Usually your name can go, unless you're one of the top guilds in the World/US/maybe server, no one's going to have heard of you so it's a ton of wasted space in the title. Include your progression, ranks, most pressing recruitment needs, and anything that makes you special (we include hours/week as they're well below most similarly ranked guilds). While we're talking about the title, minimize negative factors, if you're a new guild that has no experience in the latest content, don't say 0/10...say "Quality New Raiding Guild" or something to that effect, you only want to point out things that will draw people in, not things that will scare them away.

You also need to take an active stance with recruitment. Bump the heck out of your recruitment threads, the more often they're on the front page of the recruitment forums, the more people are likely to see your thread. You need to be reading the recruitment forums a lot if you're actively recruiting. Lots of good players are seemingly lazy in their guild hunt approach. They won't actively look for a guild; instead they'll post "I'm an 80 some-class looking for whatever". It's usually worth going into those threads, reading over what the player is looking for, and if it's applicable posting on their thread. If you have extra time going to their server and pitching your guild can yield some impressive results.

Still can’t find enough players? Consider a Merge

Sometimes when you’re starting out you’ll find that posting threads, posting on websites, word-of-mouth just don’t meet your recruitment needs. This is a very common problem. Don’t get frustrated because you’re not out of options yet. Often times the players you want or need to recruit won’t want to take a chance with a new and unproven guild. While considering the options I’m about to post, please think over the rest of your charter and consider what parts of it you and your guild can compromise on and what parts need to be kept firm. Don’t compromise to the point that you and your players won’t enjoy the game or you’ll just end up unhappy and/or losing players.

If you’re looking for players, merging may be the option for you. You can usually find other guilds that are starting up, guilds that are struggling to stay together, or guilds that have recently or are in the process of breaking up. Looking at these as potential fixes to your situation. You can find a list of guilds on the armory, on progression websites if that’s applicable, usually there’s a list in your realm forums, word-of-mouth on server, using a /who on your server. You can contact those guilds’ leadership to see if they’d be interested in a merge or absorbing situation. Your server may not have the players interested in starting a new guild that meets your requirements. Check the WoW recruitment forums as there are often new guilds or guilds looking to merge that are posting there.

If you’re considering a merge there are of course some things to consider. The most important is setting up a solid foundation for the new guild. Make sure your current guild’s charter is compatible with whatever the new guild’s charter will look like. You don’t want to merge and lose a lot of your players in the process otherwise you lost players you knew and ended up back in the same situation of not having enough players. If you merge you also need to consider the new leadership. You likely don’t want to have one or the other guild have all of the leadership positions as the players from the guild without representation will likely fall through the cracks. What I mean by this is that those players won’t have a “go to” person to vent their complaints; this will inevitably lead to drama. You also want to “mix things up” in the guild as much as possible. Don’t let the original guilds turn into separate social groups, you want the players to interact with each other and form a cohesive unit as quickly as possible.

Drama and Burnout – The GM’s Lifelong Enemies

Burnout

Burning players out is likely inevitable. You can minimize this in a lot of ways though. Players burn out either because they’re overworked, or because they’re not getting out of the game what they would like. You want to minimize the amount of “not fun” things your players are required to do. Try to minimize book keeping, very few people tolerate doing it, even less enjoy it. Spread out the work as much as possible. That also means planning for when someone leaves, you don’t want to pile tons of work on a player, especially if it’s beyond what they can realistically maintain long term.

Drama

Drama is the other huge enemy of the guild. In the guild you want to keep things as fair as possible. That’s why I recommend a charter, it outlines the expectations of your players and it outlines the consequences for what happens if players don’t maintain the expectations. Drama comes in all sorts of nasty forms. Most drama is very easy to minimize. Setup expectations of your players for skill, time commitment, whatever is applicable to your guild and absolutely hold them to what you outline. Setup rules for how your guild deals with loot, how ranks promotion/demotion are handled, how players are invited or removed from the guild, what sort of behavior is acceptable in terms of interacting with other players on the server.

At the same time, setup expectations for yourself and the guild as a whole. Will the guild deliver raids, guild events, pvp, questing, achievement runs? What happens if you don’t provide the services people want? Make sure it’s covered or people will get grumpy. If you’re going through a rough patch, be very open with your guild. If attendance is down and it’s interfering with you running events, let people know what’s going on and what’s being done to resolve it.
The last sort of drama you’ll have to deal with on your own. It’s the drama that comes from e-relationships (or even more dramatic RL relationships that spill into the internet). When relationships go south they’ll involve the guild and you need to be prepared to deal with it. You can try to resolve the issue, but you’ll need the patience of a saint and more luck than a leprechaun for that to work. Chances are someone is going to have to go. I tell the players to work it out themselves and that you won’t tolerate the drama spilling into the guild. If it does spill into the guild, I handle it swiftly or it tends to spread. You’ll have to find your own way on that issue.

Keys to Success

-Be fair. Setup rules that achieve your goals but remember there are real people on the other end of the rules. Don’t screw them over. That being said, be firm with your rules. Once they’re in place don’t bend them for your friends, significant other, or yourself. That is one of the biggest sources of drama in guilds, when a GM lets some people get away with things, but holds others to rigorous standards.

- Follow the rules you outline in the charter. I'm going to emphasize again the fact that people will accept exceedingly draconian rules and not complain about it so long as they're stated up front (not that I'm recommending doing this, just saying people will tolerate it). Don't spring things on your players; there will be so much drama your head will explode, even if you think the decision is totally fair, it will be drama. If your rules don't cover some weird case that comes up, don't be afraid to admit it. Stop whatever you're doing, grab your officers, discuss the matter, then discuss it with the guild and carry on. As soon as your raid is over, make up the policy on that case and add it to your charter.

- RECRUIT. People will always leave due to job changes, new babies, getting married, realizing they're failing school, their mother unplugged their computer, disinterest in the game, whatever. It's not a commentary on you when you lose players to these factors. It's the nature of the beast. You MUST replace them quickly or your ability to raid will be compromised and then things start falling apart.

- Spread the work out to as many officers as possible. If there are guild members who want to help out, sign them up too. If they're asking to help, they don't need a special title, let them help. You can always use them to bump recruitment threads, help screen apps, maybe gather up materials if your gbank is poor. If people are willing to help, find something for them to do, it's good for you, good for the guild, and it will keep them occupied with something productive.

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Audience

No matter who you are, this is the important lesson: "Despite him being incredibly paranoid, using Firefox, noscript, never sharing his password, etc., they still found a way in."

Bazz wasn't dumb other than that authenticators had been sold out for the past 6+ months.

Get an authenticator, Blizzard is stocking them better these days. No matter how careful you are, you're not careful enough.

Guide

We don't usually bother to inventory what we have, we just go by a gut of how much is "too much" to store, and we buy multiple times a day from the AH and trade channel whenever we find herbs "sufficiently cheaply."

We've also bought up the supplies of raiders who have quit.
Screenshots of the recovered supplies. No bank panes are duplicated.

We freely use both auction houses when supplies are low. For example, in order to get our Fish Feast hoard, we had to buy almost all of them on our alliance AH -- which meant moving epics cross-faction to sell them to have the cash to buy fish and herbs to then transfer back to the horde side.

I skipped things like 3-4 stacks of each color of gem, miscellaneous other food items, other potions, eternals, saronite, etc. -- lots of little stuff. But the big totals are below.

It's fun knowing things like the fact that we have over 4,000 vials of pygmy oil! And over 12,000 lichbloom (over 600 stacks.)

There was about 300,000 gold stolen.

Totaling up the market prices below (based on Turalyon's AH, the only prices I have easy access to), they also netted an additional 240,000 gold worth of goods.

The embedded screenshot is a little small. If you don't mind the wait, you can view the 4MB version of the "banks" screenshot.

Bazz used to store everything on his characters plus two 4-tab guild banks (in addition to the main Fusion guild bank with 6 tabs) - mostly he bounced it back and forth in the mail.

Since the hacking we've opened up two more alt banks and bought them all to a full 6-tabs to make it easier to handle the sheer raw goods associated with running Fusion and make it easier for other officers to help with refreshing consumables.

Herbs

Frost Lotus: 1,302 at 40g each: 52,800 gold

Black Lotus: 118 at 10g each: 1,118 gold

Goldclover: 13,120 at 21g/stack: 13,776 gold

Icethorn: 6,720 at 24g/stack: 8,064 gold

Lichbloom: 12,180 at 40g/stack: 24,360 gold

Potions and Flasks

Mana Potion Injectors: 43 injectors at 79g each: 3,397 gold

Potion of Speed: 207 at 22g each: 902 gold

Flask of the Frost Wyrm: 630 at 33g each: 20,790 gold

Flask of Endless Rage: 394 at 32g each: 12,608 gold

Flask of Stoneblood: 264 at 36g each: 9,504 gold

Enchanting and Orbs

Infinite Dust: 2120 at 3.8g each: 8,056 gold

Greater Cosmic Essence: 590 at 9.7g each: 5,723 gold

Abyss Crystal: 300 at 95g each: 28,500 gold

Runed Orb: 28 at 800g each: 22,400 gold

Food

Fish Feasts: 1400 at 15.2g each: 21,280 gold

Nettlefish: 1060 at 2.7g each: 2,862 gold

Glacial Salmon: 760 at 1.4g each: 1,064 gold

Pygmy Oil: 4,620 at 0.22g each: 1,016 gold

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Today there was an interesting thread on our Turalyon forums. The poster claims:

There was once a wise old saying that man cannot live on bread alone, given that you still need water and a scource of Vitamin A and C, this saying would not be far from the truth. In the wake of the most recent expansion, coupled with a change in attitude from Blizzard toward the gold selling scourge (Sunwell island daily quests etc) these here are profitable times for many. But is it enough? So here is the issue I am putting forward to debate from anyone willing to answer:

That a level 80 raider using only the income derived from Raids and heroic 5-person dungeons, sustain a profit after all expenses (Flasks, repairs, enchants on new gear etc) have been taken into consideration. Without having to rely on outside revenue streams like the AH or tips from crafting.

Where do you stand on this myth?

The poster claimed it was possible as long as you were raiding 3x/week, in wasn't progression content (i.e. not too many wipes) and you can run two heroics a day.

With the content as it stands now and if these conditions are met, the profits sustained from doing all the above would be at best marginal, but I would say its within the realms of possibility.

There are a lot more conditions here than specified so far. The big one I am thinking of is:

Is a guild allow to AH BOE raid drops that mains no longer need (surge needle rings, BoE Sunwell patterns, nether vortex crafted goods, or even to sell stuff like Amani War Bears).

If the answer is yes, than a guild can support players 100% for raiding, with no outside farming needed (as long as you put some work into maintaining the guild bank.) However if the answer is no, then the answer is no.

There has to be an income source somewhere. Flasks don't grow on trees, and bosses don't drop enough gold to sustain repairs + consumables (not to mention enchants and gems).

Fusion members as a whole have not had to pay for any raiding type item for years now. All flasks, gems, enchants, repairs, etc, are all paid for by the guild. We even finance people swapping trade skills. This comes with a price though. We ran ZA speed runs for months after the guild had bears. I don't know exactly how many we sold, but for the last 3 weeks we were selling 3 bears per reset (3 days). That's over 20 bears at 5k gold a pop. Prior to that we had been selling 2 bears almost every reset for a fairly long time (2 months maybe?).

In addition, we had been supplementing this by selling sunmotes, hearts of darkness, and nether vortexes. For a short time we also sold BT and Hyjal loot, however it is a bit cumbersome, and not something we actively try to do.

If there is a mechanic similar to those listed above, then yes, a guild can be 100% self sufficient without any member having to individually farm (unless it's for personal reasons).

However, with that said, it is very hard to sell stuff right now. Purely speculation, but it seems that a lot of gold has been taken out of the system, or people are sitting on very large stashes for no apparent reason. In addition, the fact that content is a joke allows anyone to do it, and consequently, there is no market to sell items (BOE epics already hitting rock bottom prices).

We've sold the occasional achievement (e.g. 2k for just running Malygos), and some gear, but most people want the rare best-in-slot items and for one, those don't drop that often -- but more importantly, our raiders still need them.

Even selling Sarth3D mounts is difficult (Admittedly, our asking price is steep -- 25k -- and Turalyon is cheap.) Even so, I know some people can afford it, but I am curious as to how much gold is in the economy.

I have a feeling that items such as the Travelers Mammoth, Grand Ice Mammoth, Mechanohog, etc - have proven to be extremely large money sinks that are taking a great deal of wealth out of the economy. That combined with the fact that a Isle of Quel'danas does not exist at the moment. The influx of gold to the economy we seen at the end of the expansion was like no other, and I'm not sure Blizzard will introduce another quest hub like that again.

Anyone had any experiences trying to make money on a guild level since Wrath launch that they'd like to share?

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Guide

Efficiency

DownTimer

Download DownTimer from WoWInterface

I wrote DownTimer. It doesn't have a lot of options, nor has it been updated recently, but it doesn't need to be -- it's a very simple mod.

It shows you how much time you've spent out of combat and how much time you've spent in combat since its last reset.

It's a good way of objectively tracking how much time is being spent unproductively week to week.

MagicMarker

Download MagicMarker from Curse

As I mention in Pull! A Guide to Faster Raids, Fusion doesn't actually mark most pulls, so I haven't had tremendous experience with this mod. But it comes highly recommended.

MagicMarker lets you quickly mark targets just by mousing over a trash back while holding a modifier key.

If you want, you can have it learn from you as well, by configuring the priority and crowd control methods on a per-mob basis so packs are marked consistently from pack to pack and night to night.

RaidCooldowns

Download RaidCooldowns from Curse

Download RaidCooldownsDisplay from Curse (as a raidleader you want both of these)

This is a nice little mod that tracks what raid-valuable cooldowns aren't available and when they will be. It helps remove some of the vent chatter in trying to find out who has lust up or what battlerezzes haven't been used yet.

You can configure which of these to show:

• Druid: Nature's Swiftness, Rebirth, Innervate, Challenging Roar
• Hunter: Misdirection, Feign Death
• Mage: Counterspell, Ice Block
• Paladin: Divine Shield, Blessing of Protection, Divine Intervention
• Priest: Pain Suppression, Fear Ward, Guardian Spirit
• Rogue: Cloak of Shadows, Kick, Distract
• Shaman: Bloodlust/Heroism, Nature's Swiftness, Reincarnation, Fire Elemental Totem, Earth Elemental Totem, Mana Tide Totem
• Warlock: Soulstone Resurrection, Soulshatter
• Warrior: Shield Wall, Last Stand, Pummel, Challenging Shout

If you have guildmembers who won't run oRA2 so you can see their cooldown status, they can just download RaidCooldowns which is very lightweight. It broadcasts to both oRA2 and RaidCooldownsDisplay.

Health/Mana

Grid

Download Grid from Curse

Download GridManaBars from Curse

Grid is my personal choice in raid frames simply because of the incredible information density. While it natively doesn't show mana, you can also get GridManaBars to add that information.

Or you can do what I do: tell grid to make a white box in the corner of someone's grid frame if their mana is below 30%.

There are many other optional Grid modules, I would suggest searching on Curse for them

XRS

Download XRS from Curse

XRS was far more useful back when every shaman was a healer, but it still has its uses. It shows 8 different types of bars:

• alive
• dead
• health
• mana
• range
• offline
• pvp flagged
• afk (needs oRA2 or CT_RaidAssist)

You can further specify by class or group number. For example, I used to have a bar that showed the mana of all priests, paladins, druids, and shaman.

While it no longer has quite as fine-grained usefulness, it's still a great quick visual check to see the raid's overall status before pulling.

RABuffs

Download RABuffs from Curse

As far as I know, this is functionally identical to XRS for raid status.

Its buff status monitoring is somewhat better than XRS's, however.

Debuffs

Utopia

Download Utopia from Curse

While not as good as the TBC-era mod "Demon" (aka pDebuffList), Utopia still takes up only a small amount of space.

It creates a row of debuff icons that are in one of three states:

• Dimmed - your group cannot apply the debuff
• Red - you group can, but it's not up
• Normal - the debuff is applied

You can also mouse over each of them to get a tooltip explaining which debuff category it is and what your raid can do.

Wipe Analysis

Recount

Download Recount from Curse

Recount is useful to show not just dps done and healing done, but details like who did how much damage to what mob (which is useful when learning Sartharion, if you are trying to emphasize non-AE damage, for example.)

It can also show how much each person healed on, for example, a tank.

Expiration/Grim Reaper

Download Expiration from Curse

Expiration allows you to see the lines leading up to someone's death.

It's a great way to either disprove "But we were spamming heals on him!" or to support the healers assertion that, yes, the tank really did just get one-shot and there was nothing they could do.

Grim Reaper from Curse

Grim Reaper is a similar addon to Expiration, with a slightly smaller graphical footprint. YMMV; pick whichever of the two works best for you.

FailBotDownload Failbot from Curse

While not an analysis mod per se, it certainly helps stop debates over who did or didn't just die to a void zone, who did or didn't just fail dancing on Heigan, and who did or didn't just eat a lava wave.

It can announce to any channel you choose.

LoggerHead

Download LoggerHead from Curse

LoggerHead is also not an analysis mod in and of itself, but it enables analysis: it will automatically start and stop the combat log when you zone to and from raid zones (configurable.)

Then you can upload the combat log to services like World of Logs and WoWMeterOnline.

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Audience

Do your raiders complain that raids are "slow"?

Do you find that trash drags on for hours?

Does your guild spend half the raid AFK for one reason or another?

Guide

Motivation

Why should you care what speed your raids run at?

Slow raids lead to bored raiders. Bored raiders lead to more mistakes. And mistakes make raids drag on for hours.

Learning to raid quickly speeds up farming nights and progression content, since getting to the hard boss faster gives you more time to practice.

During progression periods, Fusion raids five days a week, a little over twenty hours, and yet keeps up with many guilds raiding six or seven. We do this, in part, because we have a culture of moving fast and using our time in raids as effectively as possible.

Speed isn't about DPS

Having fewer deaths and minimizing downtime will do more to speed up your evening than extra DPS.

In our speed clear we took four healers, two prot-spec'd tanks, and two DPS-spec'd players who put on tanking gear for trash. We can, and have, cleared Naxx with just 2-3 healers and 2 total tanks -- but that's slower than a well-balanced raid.

If you have too few healers and tanks, you can't pull as many mobs at once. Extra DPS doesn't gain you much because most of your time is lost standing around waiting for mobs, or killing those last one or two mobs. Increasing your DPS is fairly inefficient way to change how long it takes you to clear a zone.

Speed isn't about gear

While we have been clearing Naxx since launch, we by no means are all decked out in best-in-slot gear, or wearing gear from the next tier of content.

Speed isn't about yelling and abuse

Being focused has nothing to do with yelling and abuse and everything to do with letting the guild know what to expect and holding people to that.

It's about setting expectations that raid time is focus time, and the faster you get done the better.

Most raiders are happier when they don't feel like they're spending half the night waiting for someone else.

Faster raids are about...

Three principles:

• Minimize Trash
• Minimize Downtime
• Lead Effectively

Minimize Trash

The biggest mistake people make is dismissing trash -- raidleaders and raiders alike. The bulk of your time in an instance, unless you're working on a hard boss, will be spent clearing trash.

People going afk, not giving their best, or otherwise dragging their feet will slow down your raid far more than anything else.

Impatience is a virtue

Your biggest asset as a leader or a puller is your sense of impatience. Don't tolerate idleness.

...Recruit impatient tanks

Your tanks (or hunters, if you pull with a hunter) set the pace on pulls, and the best way to speed up trash dps is to pulling trash faster.

Consider having a "trash tank" if you have an eager but less senior tank who you know can keep up the pace.

Make sure the tank is responsible however: raid frames or some method of monitoring health and mana are critical. Pulling when half the healers are dead, or everyone is at 10% mana will just lead to wipes and frustration.

See the list of Raidleading Addons if you need some suggestions of what to install.

...Be an impatient raidleader

Your raiders' attention will drift if you don't keep things moving forwards. Have your other officers help keep the raid moving forwards if you're tired or aren't prone to impatience yourself.

If you need to, set target clear times for each wing and use the stopwatch in game (/sw) to remind yourself to remind the raid to keep moving.

Expect your tanks to tank

All tanks have AE tanking capabilities right now and taunt has a range. Expect them to keep pulls under control -- there's no reason not to AE easy trash.

It can help to have a tank play "catch": he is responsible for noticing mobs shooting off after an eager mage and taunt them and bring them back onto the fold.

Your plate classes can throw on tanking gear on trash even though they're DPS spec and help keep things under control.

Deaths will happen

Death is a fact of life. Handle it. Have a rezzer assigned for incidental trash deaths if you need to. A death isn't a reason to stop pulling, and rebuffing isn't a reason to stop pulling.

Make sure your tank and raidleader have raid frames however: A pull that just wiped out 3/4ths of the healers due to loose mobs means you take a small break unless you want a total wipe on the next pull.

Don't bring extra healers and tanks

Running heavy on healers or tanks slows down the raid and makes people lazy. When there's fewer tanks and healers, people pay more attention since there aren't a lot of other people to pick up their slack.

We've noticed that we have more deaths, rather than fewer, if we run with extras.

This doesn't mean sit them and don't let them raid: encourage them to get DPS specs and gears and rotate around who is healing/tanking and who is DPS'ing that night. It's a good way to give people variety as well.

Minimize Downtime

The second major principle is removing "dead" time during your raid.

Handle loot quickly

Loot distribution consumes a huge amount of time for most guilds.

Regardless of your system, Consider using master looter so everyone else can clear trash while you assign loot.

If you use DKP, have your master looter be managing DKP also, so only one person is tied up.

If you use /random, encourage quick rolls and keep moving.

If instead you have a loot council, like we do, minimize the number of people involved in decisions. More than 4 or 5 is unwieldy, and there needs to be someone empowered with the ability to say "We're doing this, end of discussion."

Only the really big-ticket, high upgrade items need a lot of discussion time, get used to making fast decisions for tier tokens and normal-sized upgrades in under a minute.

Plan AFK breaks

Plan breaks so people know what to expect.

We raid for 4.5 hours a night, so we always take a 5-10 minute break after flasks drop the first time, which is about the halfway point.

When people know there is a break coming, they are less tempted to take random breaks.

Ignore AFK's

When AFK's do happen, they shouldn't slow you down.

For the most part, you can keep moving even if someone is afk or disconnected.

Use ready checks

Don't ask "is everyone ready to go?"

Do a ready check either with the Game tool or saying "Everyone move up to me."

Having everyone move is better, since that forces people to be actively at the keyboard and not just tabbing in to click "Yes" and then going back to webbrowsing.

Having people actively engaged makes them more likely to respond quickly, and means when you move shortly, your raid will be ready.

Never ask questions everyone has to answer

"Is everyone ready?"

"Can we start pulls?"

Neither of these is useful because you don't care if people are ready, only if someone isn't.

A better question to ask is:

"Who isn't ready?"

Better still: never ask

Don't ask, simply tell:

"Pulling in 15 seconds"

Your raiders will learn to speak up if that's an issue.

Lead Effectively

The third principle is being a strong, effective leader. A raidleader is more than just a guy to yell when people screw up. He's also the one watching the raid's pace, handling errors, and making sure morale stays high.

Encourage tank/healer communication

You need a good rapport between your tanks and healers. Help build that by encouraging communication on vent so the healers feel energized, and not overwhelmed, and the tanks feel confident of their pull speed.

Having heals assigned to specific tanks can give the tanks confidence to move forwards to pull since they know they're being covered.

Delegate, delegate, delegate

Good raidleaders aren't just impatient -- they're also lazy, and they don't want to do all the work themselves. Raidleader just means that you're where the buck stops -- not that you do everything.

If you use a main assist, don't have him be the same person who is marking targets.

Have the healers coordinate amongst themselves so before you reach the boss they already know how healing will be arranged.

Tanks should know before they're at the boss what is going on.

If a class needs to coordinate interrupts or sheeps, remind them to coordinate it but don't do it for them.

Play well but have fun

There's no reason to accept poor play on trash -- and it's actually more fun to keep moving on a raid.

There's still space for joking on vent and for having fun -- what changes is people's attitudes towards what's actually going on with their game in between bosses.

Plan ahead

Don't spent 30 minutes before each boss "setting up." Expect people to review what they need to as they're approaching the boss, and just spend a brief period reminding people of important highlights before engage.

Reminders are okay

There's nothing *wrong* with your guild if you need to remind them details of boss fights or that this is a particularly nasty trash pack.

There's nothing wrong if you call out waves on Sarth.

Even the best raider has a brainfart on occasion, and when you're talking 25 people, the odds get pretty high that someone will screw up.

Raising Expectations

As you start to implement these principles, it's at first a bit challenging, but after that the raid grows into it, and people will start to assume raids always keep moving efficiently and they will pay more attention on their own.

But we'll wipe...

A common concern is "that's nice and all, but if we try what you say, we'll just wipe."

Sure, possibly. But you won't wipe for that long. People will adjust to the new pace of raiding.

Once you have your raid's confidence, the best way to understand what rate of pulling is best is actually *to* push yourself to the edge, wipe, and then scale back a bit.

You won't know your limits until you actually break them.

It gets easier with practice

Soon your raiders will become accustomed to moving more quickly, and it will take less prodding and nagging from you.

You can never let your own guard down -- if you are slow that night, the raid will be too -- but it takes less of a push to get things rolling when people's expectations of changed about the pace of a raid.

Don't ignore mistakes

An important part of being a raidleader is addressing mistakes.

You don't need to rant and rage over every slight error someone makes, but similarly you shouldn't ignore repeated errors or careless play.

Any guild can raid faster

If you're either a main tank or a raidleader, you can start doing this with your next raid. You don't have to wait to reach a particular dungeon, or to get the guild to some specific gear level.

Your guild *is* capable of it as long as you're willing to put in the effort.

And this doesn't take the fun out of raiding -- it means people spend less time on the icky stuff like trash, and more time grabbing purples and chatting with their friends.

Remember, it's not about being a dictator on vent and yelling at people, it's just about keeping the raid cheerful focused and always moving.
Don't sit there ahead of time on the boss detailing out every ability -- but a review during the last trash pack or right before the boss is great.

Advanced Tactics

This isn't for every guild, but it's definitely part of what makes us so fast at moving through dungeons.

We don't use raid symbols, we don't (often) use cc targets, and we don't assist.

Having your kill order be "target the nearest non-cc'd mob and unload on it" speeds up things considerably as long as your healers don't run OOM (since your melee and caster DPS can become somewhat split.)

Debuffs tend to work out, however, since your caster clump usually gets the same mob when they just do "target nearest."

Sometimes when it's a hard pull, we'll use raid symbols, but they're for tank convenience more than anything else.

If you still like raid symbols and kill orders, check out the MagicMarker mod -- it helps a lot with marking.

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Guide

10. DPS-spec'd plate can tank

You can run with 2-3 tank-spec'd players and have extra tanks for trash if you just ask your tank hybrids to wear their tank gear during trash and help pick up mobs.

9. Don't ignore repeated mistakes

While you don't need to rant and rage over each minor error, don't let repeated screwups be ignored. No one likes "that guy" who doesn't care enough to pay attention and causes wipes to the same stuff each week -- say something to him.

8. Have fun

No one will want to raid if you suck the fun out of it

7. Don't be afraid to wipe

You will wipe when first pushing your limits, that's fine. Don't make a big deal about it (unless it was a repeated stupid mistake -- see #9), just pick up and continue.

6. Don't stop for deaths/rebuffing

Unless you lost a significant portion of the raid, there's no reason not to resurrect the 1-2 people who died and just rebuff on the fly.

There's no raid buff so critical that you can't do trash without it.

5. Set goals

Set goals for clear times each week.

If you prefer to set your targets by wing/subsection, you can use the in-game stopwatch (/sw) to track it in real time.

4. Plan AFK breaks

When people know one is coming, they will wait. This reduces the constant revolving door of AFK's.

3. Be impatient

Always be pulling more trash if healers have enough mana and there aren't too many people dead (using an add-on to see health/mana status.)

2. Fast Loot

Even at "only" 5 minutes per boss in Naxx, you will spend a full hour on loot in an 12-boss dungeon.

Use Master Looter if you can't make fast decisions, so at least the raid can continue clearing.

1. Delegate

The buck stops with you, but don't do all the work.

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Guide

Minimize Trash

Both minimize the amount of trash you pull, and the time you spend on trash.

While at the start you may want to pull every pack to increaes your chances of getting BoP epic drops, there's no reason to continue to kill every mob in the instance after you have what you need.

Most raiders are in the habit of tuning out that stuff in between bosses that is called "trash". It's a popular time to take extended AFK's, both announced and unannounced, and to just play poorly in general. "Trash doesn't matter" is what one mage told me a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately the longer you spend on trash, the less you get done that night -- and a big percentage of that time will have been spent on trash.

The biggest tip for clearing trash quickly is having an impatient puller: as long as they responsibly pull (using an add-on to see health/mana status), having mobs in camp almost constantly will dramatically speed up your clear times.

Minimize Downtime

One of the biggest contributors to raid downtime is loot. Regardless of what system you use, it's probably taking up too much time. Time yourself next time: even if you take only five minutes per boss to do loot, that's 75 minutes of loot distribution for the fifteen Naxx bosses.

Ideally, use master looter, so at least you can start clearing trash while loot is handled.

Plan AFK breaks: one at the start, and one mid-raid. This will reduce the amount of random AFK's because people will know when they can step away.

Don't ask questions that the entire raid has to answer: "Everyone ready?" will take a long time to get answers. Ask: "Who isn't ready?" Or better yet, don't ask -- tell the raid "Pulling in 15 seconds" and let people speak up if they have an issue.

Lead Effectively

Don't let fears of wiping stop you from pushing your raid: there's nothing wrong with a few wipes, and that's the best way to learn what your current limits are.

Make sure you keep the communication lines open: your tanks and healers need to be comfortable with each other if you want to pick up the pace.

Don't get so tense that your raids stop being fun: you don't need to be a dictator in order to run efficient raids, and there's still lots of room for joking and relaxing on vent.

Train your raiders to set up for the boss before you reach him and then do a fast review of the highlights right before engage. Don't feel bad if your raid performs best when you call out things like waves on Sarth or reminding them to get people off the walls on Maexxna: that's normal, all guilds are that way, and it's better to say a few words on vent than wipe due to a brainfart.

The most important thing you can do as a raidleader is delegate: don't handle everything yourself. The buck stops with you, but that doesn't mean you should do all the work.

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Audience

Any guild leader or officer interested in helping players realize that this is the right (or wrong!) guild for them.

Guide

How to Attract the Right Candidates

Too many guilds act like the world already knows who they are and how awesome they are, and the only reason everyone isn't pounding on the door to get in is because they haven't been told "hey, we're looking for your class!"

Back in my EverQuest days, we had a guild below us in progression called Dark Conquest. The joke in my guild was that their advertising slogan should read: "Do you breathe and play EverQuest? Then join Dark Conquest!"

My guild, Temerity, explicitly set ourselves out as a raid guild and everything about us was pointed at raiding, from the rules and regulations, to what we told applicants, to why people were tagged (or not.)

Dark Conquest, if you were into tradeskilling, told you they supported tradeskillers. If you preferred roleplaying, they told you they did a lot of RP. Raiding? Yup that too. Leveling alts? Definitely! The result was a guild that never made substantial progress and lagged behind the rest of the server as time passed. They also had a lot of drama over confused priorities (should a drop with +INT go to a caster, or to a ranger who wanted to make his tradeskillups easier?)

Every officer (and member) should understand why your guild exists and why you are doing what you're doing. Everything flows from that, including things like how you handle loot, how you talk to prospective members about the guild, when and why you gkick, etc.

Even if your guild raids casually (or doesn't raid), that doesn't excuse having no clue who you are other than "people who share a guild tag." (although if that's actually your definition, then embrace it and make it work!)

Throughout this article I will use two WoW guilds as examples: Fusion, my current guild, and Untold Prophecy, my previous guild, since both had strong identities but were very different.

Who are you?

Do you exist to raid and nothing else?

If so, you probably have a system like DKP or officer loot ("loot council"), or you /random but have high expectations on people "doing the right thing" when they roll. You have mandatory attendance with minimum attendance percentages. You might raid a lot. You probably don't ever recruit beyond what you see as the bare minimum of players. You care about how someone plays (and possibly also their personality.)

Are you a pure social guild?

If so, you might use /random for loot. You have a large guild with a lot of members. You might have multiple raid groups or might not even do much beyond a semi-organized 10-man once a week. You care most about whether someone is friends with someone in the guild and doesn't disrupt guildchat too much.

Are you somewhere in between?

Where in between, how much on each side? What things do you care about? What don't you care about?

Examples

Untold Prophecy described themselves as: A raiding guild for people with real lives. That catchphrase was the support for a guild structure that was focused around the high end of mid-tier raiding (they killed Illidan mid-February) but was explicitly designed around assuming people had real lives and WoW was not the top priority.

Fusion is an end-game raid guild, like many. Many top-10 US kills and a few top-10 world kills. We don't raid 6-7 days a week, however, and we never raid for more than 5 hours at a stretch, which already starts to make some differences between us and some other guilds.

Does your structure match who you are?

Once you've written down who you are, examine the foundations of your guild and make sure it makes sense within your goals.

The loot system is a very important cornerstone of any guild, if only because it seems to produce the most debate and drama no matter what system is chosen.

Untold Prophecy used DKP, because that worked well to avoid drama over favoritism, and let them handle raiders with widely differing schedules. They wanted loot to go primarily to those who raided the most, since that's what would make progress, and since the officers don't want to spend 80 hours in game each week, they try to cut down on the drama by removing opportunities for it to happen.

Fusion uses Officer Loot ("loot council") because they expect everyone to make 90% of the raids, so attendance shouldn't be an issue (therefore DKP is less attractive.)

This isn't to say both guilds couldn't swap loot systems and make them work, but it's a good example of careful thought by each set of officers about what best fit the guild.

If anyone ever tells you they have the "best" loot system", they have an agenda. There are systems that are better than others, but it's always in some context. High-end raiding context, social guild context, raid group context, "group of friends" context, etc.

Do you have enough officers? One danger in more casual guilds is that "that guy" ends up running everything. Pick your officers carefully, so you don't burn out officers because the rest of the officers are also playing casually. If you care a lot about having a lot of input, then having the guild involved more directly in decisions and/or a lot of officers may be important.

Do you have too many officers? If it's important to you to move quickly, then having only a few officers will be better, since they can make decisions and move on without a lot of debate. Just make sure you have enough coverage so the guild doesn't stop moving when one person goes on vacation.

Are raids run appropriately? If you say you're a guild of friends, your raidleader shouldn't be yelling on vent each time someone lags a bit behind.

If you say you're a progression guild, then repeated raid-wiping mistakes shouldn't be ignored, and bad players should be benched, not tolerated because of who they know.

Does your recruiting message match who you are?

No one cares that you're recruiting "only the best."

We know you require consumables.... need people to make your raid times.... are looking for low-drama members. What *else* can you tell us?

Think of your guild in terms of qualifiers and distinguishers. Most guilds just list the qualifiers -- "You must be this high to ride this ride." They're the nuts and bolts about when you raid, what content level you're on, what classes you're looking for, and that you "want quality applicants who know their class."

Include what makes me, an applicant, read your post and say "wow, I could fit in with those guys" beyond "they need my class, yay!" Those are the distinguishers and that's how you convey your guild's character and style ("who are you?") and attract the people who will fit in from day one.

For example, Fusion feels its distinguishers are:

• We raid fewer days/hours (5 days @ 4.5 hours/day) than many at our progression level
• We have a long guild history of focusing on fast, efficient clears (e.g. clearing T5 weekly *while* clearing T6 and still getting in the top ten for US horde)
• We have a respectful raid environment (humor does not come exclusively from bashing of various minorities, nor is every minor mistake handled by being chewed out on vent although we do make sure mistakes get corrected and are public when needed)
• We run a tight roster (the guild ran at ~28 members for a long time)
• We don't 'raid stack' or swap for fights unless there's really no choice.

That's what we want in our recruiting message. Just saying "HAY GUYZ WE'RE GUD APP TO US" won't work, particularly in a world where so many guilds have progressed in the current content.

Does your recruiting process find people who fit in?

Two keys to help avoid recruiting mistakes:

Vent interviews

Even if you call it a chat rather than an interview, do it. Spend the 15-20 minutes to have at least 1-2 officers or leads talk to the prospective members. It makes them feel more valued, and also gives you a heads up on any issues early. If you don't use vent, then have a chat in groupchat.

An example in Untold Prophecy: applicants were encouraged to look elsewhere if they wanted a guild that was going to push for server firsts, or if they wanted to have long, chatty raids. At only 15 hours of raiding a week, the guild wasn't hitting server firsts except when the guilds that raided more screwed up, and this saved some member churn.

In Fusion, applicants are asked things like what other video games they play, because general 'gaming interest' tends to be an indicator for WoW skill. They're also asked a variety of open-ended questions because Fusion cares very deeply about personality fit, and getting someone talking is the best way to figure that out.

Tag early but provisionally

If your guild can handle potentially detagging an application, don't leave applicants untagged the entire application period. It's hard to learn about an app when they spend a month untagged, and it's hard for them to get to know you as well.

1-2 weeks in gchat and most people start to relax and you see the rest of their personality that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. It also lets them have far more member interaction than an apps chat channel gives them, since they can easily join groups, pvp premades, etc.

The hardest thing as an officer other than gkicking a member is gkicking an applicant -- but you end up with a better guild in the end when you give people a long period to interact with your members before you commit to a full raiding position for them.

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