Council Chambers: Fostering Interest In Your Guild Pre-Launch

Council Chambers is all about the ins and outs of guild leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Each week, we’ll look at running and managing a guild through good times, bad times and everything in between.  

Within the last week, the developers at Star Wars: The Old Republic pushed out the third, and final, phase of the pre-launch guild deployment system.  In this third and final phase, the system checks to make sure your guild has at least four members who have pre-ordered the game in order to create your guild for you when the game goes live.  With a little over a month now between phase 3 and launch, one of the biggest questions for many guilds out there will be how to not only recruit folks and secure their pre-launch spots, but also how to retain them.

Last week, we talked about advertising a guild through the Star Wars guild forums and how to begin building membership for your new SW:TOR guild.  This week, we’re going to talk about the other half of the recruitment effort – holding and maintaining interest.  No matter how great of a recruiting drive you make, if you don’t find ways to keep players engaged and interested – they don’t stick around, which leads to even more time being spent on recruiting.  So while it’s very important to recruit new members, it’s also key to make sure the ones you’ve already recruited feel like a part of the group.

Finding things to do to engage members before the game is released is tricky.  The easiest situation is for those guilds who are moving over from another game.  Provided you’re active elsewhere, you can just keep people talking, interacting, and doing things together over on the other world until you’re ready to make the big move.  Maybe you’ll continue your current raiding, PvP, leveling, or roleplaying elements right until launch, or maybe you’ll have a winding down time where you focus on achievements, social games, or other things.  Whatever you do, the main thing in this scenario is to ensure the officers are continuing to provide activities to keep players engaged and participating.

That said, not every group is moving over from an existing game – there are plenty of guilds out there who are brand new and forming up specifically for Star Wars: The Old Republic.  In these cases, you don’t have an existing game to foster cooperation and camaraderie through – so what then?  In those cases, one of your primary venues to reach out to the membership will be through your guild’s forums.  If you for some reason don’t have any set up – it’s worth considering.  There are a few ways you can do this – through a privately hosted server, one of the many guild-hosting sites such as Enjin, Guildlaunch, or Guildzilla, or even the Star Wars: The Old Republic guild launch system.  When you form a guild on the swtor.com website, the game automatically creates forums for your guild that any member can access – just navigate to your guild’s home page on the site, and across the top will be a link for Public Forum and Private Forum.  In the public section, any swtor.com community member can see and browse through the messages and posts, where in the private section, where only registered guild members can access and read the posted content.  One thing to keep in mind with the swtor.com guild forums is that these will be closed two weeks after the game launches – at the present time, it’s unclear whether the devs will re-open them after improvements, or shut them down as a part of the game that is no longer needed.  (You can read more in the Guild HQ FAQ here.)

It’s up to you how much content you want to put where, or even what that content may be.  It may just be conversational topics, links to fan sites and articles (like Ask a Jedi), or you can set up polls to see what hours people will play, their favorite race or class, which Star Wars movie they think is best, or anything else.  The important part is to give people things to talk about and check in about.  If you’re providing activities through your guild forums, that will help keep members engaged and provides them both something to do that is game related, but also helps the various members get to know each other a little bit before the game.  This is important because the more people get to know each other, the more integrated they are and the better sense of community they’ll have with each other – and that ultimately can really be a factor in why people choose or stay in the guilds they join.  The more you can make a place feel like home, the more people will want to call it home.

If you’re still really stuck for content, you can do some basic web searches (or Facebook, for those that are FB-savvy) and come up with all sorts of gaming quizzes and polls, favorite book questionnaires, and other surveys along those lines.  It’s amazing both how many people will take the time to fill them out, as well as how much you can learn about your friends from reading them!  So that’s another fun activity to help people get to know each other and to provide new content to keep members actively engaged in your guild pre-launch.  Just copy one a week or so, drop it in your forums, and then check back regularly to see the results.

The last thing some groups have been doing is sponsoring voice chat sessions – again, to help keep folks engaged or try to introduce players to each other in the month or so before launch.  This does require some sort of voice chat software – Skype, Mumble, Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, etc – but holding a hang-out session can be helpful to keep people together during this period as well.  It may be once a month, or once a week – again, that’s up to each guild.  It can be designed as a guild meeting, for people to gather and plan out the guild’s direction, or it can just be an opportunity to talk and catch up.  Heck, it can even be a karaoke contest – a guild I knew in another game held a once-a-month karaoke contest on their voice chat!  Again, the main thing to be thinking about in your planning efforts is what sorts of activities and things to do you can provide to your existing guild members, so that they stick around in your SWTOR guild and are ready to go at launch.

What have your guilds done to maintain interest during the pre-launch period?  Any ideas that worked really well, or ones that fell a little flat?  Feel free to post your successes and not-so-successful adventures below!  Otherwise, I look forward to fielding any questions about guild management topics, comments, or suggestions for advice and discussion in the coming weeks.  See you next week!

Got a question for Council Chambers?  Drop a line to Lady Republic at ladyoftherepublic@gmail.com or post a comment here, and you may see your guild questions answered in a future column!