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[Column] General: 5 Tips for Being a Great Guild Leader
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Being a guild leader is hard. It’s really hard. In fact, it may as well be considered a full-time job in a lot of cases. Between knowing all of your members just like a manager at work, running websites and forums just like a standard website owner, and organizing activities for everyone like some type of deranged virtual event planner, being a guild leader can bring out the best (or worst) in anyone.
Read more of David Jagneaux's The List: 5 Tips for Being a Great Guild Leader.
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Comments
Allow me to replace your #1: Don't let your guild revolve around you.
Way too many times I've seen guilds that are organized and maintained by a single person who is the glue who holds the group together. Then, when that person invariably leaves the game, the guild falls apart without them, no matter how competent the replacements are. A group needs to be a group of people who enjoy playing together, just not a guild leader and his/her friends.
To avoid that you need good officers who you can hand things onto if you decided to leave, so delegation is a must. But try to keep 'participation' to a minimum. This is a guild not a parliament, they don't need to vote on everything and if you try to solve issues by discussion they will never agree.
You are the guild leader, one of your responsibilities is to decide.
Quite a decent guide and good to see MMORPG still remembers there is more to MMOs than levelling.
so many variables in a guild. my advice, pick your high ranked members well, not just based on their abilities for managing etc. make sure they understand this is just a game. of course it can be hard and even doing so won't guarantee anything.
my top MMOs: UO,DAOC,WoW,GW2
most of my posts are just my opinions they are not facts,it is the same for you too.
The key to sanity is to have a closed guild, no open recruitment and people have to EARN their way in. Guess that's why I have been in the same guild since UO back in 1997.
I haven't seen guild drama in years and the last few times revolved around what new game to move to lol. That is what happens when you don't just let anyone in and the guild is broken down into sub groups based on play style with a leader, commanders, captains and sergeants all being delegated to handle those under them.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Great article.
I think the key to a great guild is having a vision, appointing officers who share in that vision, and recruiting the right kind of people. Now days, I'm very leery of completely open recruitment types of guilds. Once the guild does get the right mix of folks, try to be inclusive with all your members.
Finally, if a guild leader has any hint at all that their game time may be very limited or that the game may be a short term prospect for them, for goodness sake, don't take on the mantle of guild leadership at all.
The best Guilds I've been in all had horrific leaders, except one very small more social guild that still got a lot of stuff done. What they all had in boatloads was amazing officers that organized everything from events to how loot was dispersed. I think it takes a certain amount of arrogance to want to be a guild leader but that arrogance isn't always coupled with great leadership skills.
Also having a clear set of expectations is a must. If you're a 7 day a week guild make it known from the get go. If you're a fairly casual guild that just does things spur of the moment make it known. If you do things ever tues, thurs, and sunday and the rest is free for all… you get the idea.
Oh and the worst thing ever a guild leader can do is think of the guild as a bunch of farming bots for their goals. I'd rather have a nonexistent leader than a selfish one.
Some good advice here. I'd flesh out some of the essential elements with:
- Have a clear sense of your guild's style (casual, social, raiding, leveling, etc.), as it's much easier to then draw boundaries around what's expected, tolerable, unacceptable.
- Always question the motivation of those who want to be officers; in my experience, slowing down the process of promotion for those who push for it prevents drama and loss of assets.
Honestly, if you aren't just chatting it up with your fellow guild mates when there is absolutely nothing going on, you're not really in a guild but a looking for group queue. The problem with most guilds is that they have a lot of members but few who actually speak to one another just to chew the fat. Guilds are about friendships above all else... when something else sits above that, it's not really a guild but a military unit. "Reporting for duty, sir!"
Recruiting is always the hardest part of guild leadership (especially in a game that's been running for a while). Incoming recruits can be difficult to find, and are frequently only drawn to larger guilds. Meanwhile, it can be very difficult to keep up with the number of players who leave due to the low roster size.
The most successful guilds will generally be those that had a cooperative formation right from the start. You really need multiple trustworthy officers and recruiters who all have an investment in seeing the guild succeed.
I just quit a guild, and subsequently quit WoW again because this guy annoyed me so much for this one reason that wasn't mentioned:
If you're going to be a guild leader that calls people out or whines about why we wiped . . . you HAVE to be knowledgeable about the game, mechanics, classes. You can't complain that so and so isn't pulling X dps if you can't understand that classes limitations on certain fights and how to read warcraftlogs.
If we keep dying to the same mechanic over and over, please stop saying that it's something else that's the problem. No, it's that particular mechanic (amusingly enough, it was a mechanics our leader was botching of course that he wouldn't own up to).
Eventually I got sick of seeing him be a dick to otherwise decent people and I left, even though I had never been called out on anything. Unfortunately, I was in this guild long enough in this xpac that it burnt me out on raiding again and reminded me of how difficult it is to find a good guild.
Extremely true, i've seen it happen often
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
Surprisingly not a bad list.
I'd definitely say that having a clear vision for your guild, recruiting the right people, and being flexible are very much important. Imho being a good leader is mostly a question of mindset. Being aware of the big picture, and steering the ship towards that ideal as much as is practical.
"Recruit the right people"
Blacks only!
Make sure to keep recruiting active because the same people aren't going to play the game forever. Make sure you recruit people that want the same as you otherwise it just becomes a bunch of random people.
You need atleast afew gaming friends you known for awhile from other games or even rl friends who play the same game as you because if everything ends up failing it's always going to be you and those friends which is a good worst case scenario to be in.
You can be anal if you want and say you have to complete this by a certain amount of time otherwise we'll find others who will but if everybody is on the same page then things like that are usually all good if you know what's expected of you.
Best tip just look at it like a managers point of view.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
team leading was too complicated ,so they made lfg.
raid leading was too much also ,so they made lfr
checking my crystal ball ,next expansion will introduce next gen NPC guild leaders.
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
Lords of the Dead has had the same GM for 20 years. Currently crushing competition in Wildstar and ArcheAge we have never had a year where we did not have an active Chapter.
He was one of 4 GMs invited to the AGDC in 2009 by Trion (a write up covered by this very site. http://www.lotd.org/threads/agdc-2009-wrap-up-guildmaster-panel.26464/).
He has published many articles of Guild Management, Leadership and the Art of War.
http://www.lotd.org/threads/hades-guild-primers.22357/
http://www.lotd.org/threads/hades-total-war-series.23977/
I suggest any and all GMs looking to succeed take note of what he's accomplished and what we as a Guild will continue to accomplish for another 2 decades.
www.lotd.org