Council Chambers: Next Steps, Or “The Hows”

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.  

Whether you have been playing MMOs for five days or five years, if you are new to guild leadership, you will need to think some about the hows – how does one form a guild, what should you do in advance, and how do you make it work? All you need to go is go pay your money and buy a charter, right?

Well, there is a little more to it than that – perhaps not in the most basic sense, but in actually building a guild that will last longer than it took to find three people to sign the charter. So, how does one try to set up a guild that will work?

1. Make Sure You Have Enough Time to Run a Guild

Running a guild is very time intensive, even for small or casual guilds. Especially early on, you will be the main point of contact for anyone who is interested in the guild, or for any members that have questions. As you promote officers and gain stability, you will not need to be around quite so often. In the early days though, plan on being around at least every other night if not more – at least until you have gotten a good, reliable support crew of an officer or two to fill your shoes on the nights you are not around.

Even once the guild is established, you should try to still be a visible presence online. People get skittish when the guild leader vanishes for long periods of time – so even once the guild has been around for a while, it is still helpful to check in a few hours a week and be present for your members. If your time and availability change so that you cannot continue to do so, it might be time to think about transitioning leadership to another person. If you cannot commit a couple hours a week to the guild forming up, then I would strongly encourage you think twice, and perhaps consider not, forming a guild. Guilds are like gardens – beautiful when you invest the time in tending to it, but prone to getting clogged with weeds or overgrowth if you stop paying attention or lack the time to take care of it any longer.

2. Develop a Mission Statement

A “mission statement” is just business-speak for a plan, really. Basically what you want to do is make sure you have a clear purpose for your guild. If you are a roleplaying guild, then what sort of roleplaying do you do, and does the guild have a concept? It should. Some guilds are military guilds, others are centered around specific races or classes (all Twi’lek or Chiss, or all Bounty Hunters). Some are devoted to exploration, others focused on the Jedi or Sith code, or even a particular profession (a trading company, a crew of smugglers or pirates, etc). For a roleplaying guild, you should definitely consider the unifying theme that will support your roleplaying activities, membership, and events.

For non-RP guilds, you will still need a mission and purpose to scope out your in game activities and expectations. Are you an eight man only operations guild, or an eight and sixteen team one? Do you want to focus exclusively on progression operations, or will your group mostly be a social, family style guild for people that want to try out all the classes and stories and who will have a lot of alts? Do you want to focus your guild on PvP and warzones? These are all things that you should have a pretty good sense about before you pick up that charter and begin recruiting. One of the first questions prospective members will ask (or should, if they’re being selective and not just blindly joining guilds) is, “What do you do?” Having a mission statement will help you nail that down.

Once you have thought about what you want to have your guild do, try to write it up in a one-line format. This will be your mission statement – a single line that you can tell people when they ask, and make clearly visible on your website. You want it to be short and to-the-point because it is much easier for other people to remember or recognize that way. If you need a paragraph to explain to people what your guild is about, try to boil that down to one sentence. Our guild’s mission statement is:

“We are a society of explorers and adventurers who seek to secure and protect the most valuable artifacts and knowledge from falling into the Empire’s hands.”

It answers the “who we are” (explorers) as well as the “what we do” (recover stuff from flashpoints, operations, and questing). By saying it the way we do instead of saying “We are an eight man raiding guild that intends on running progression operations”, it also conveys that we are a roleplaying guild. As I mentioned last week, there is another example of a guild on my server that focuses on real life military members and families (though not restricted to the Trooper class) – their message is something along the lines of, “Name is a military guild for current or former members of the armed forces and their families”. Short, sweet, to the point, and it covers both who is eligible and what they are looking to form – a community for military gamers. Those are great examples to aim for – clearly stated, direct, with key information but not lengthy amounts of detail. Now – you will explain all the aspects of your mission statement in more detail elsewhere of course – but having a single slogan or advertising line is very helpful in conveying the guild’s purpose. Plus, it is much easier to post in general chat or recruiting forums that way, too.

3. Consider a Website

Websites are incredibly helpful for guilds, whether brand new or well-established. It does not need to be glamorous or fancy (though a well-designed website does wonders for recruitment). However, it provides a central repository for any key information that you want people to know about your guild. TOR provides in their official forums a guild recruitment listing, where guild officers post information about their guild, its officers, and usually a website. This is so people new to the game (read, at this point all of us) or looking for a guild can read through these and see what interests them – and often, they will go to these websites to learn more about the guilds that interest them. Plus, it makes it much easier when someone in game asks you what your guild does – send them to the website and let them read through the content there first, and then ask them to follow up with questions. Finally, websites often provide a great tool for setting up guild forums or posting boards for members, as well as applications.

A couple weeks ago, we talked at length about a number of hosting options for websites and forums for your guild.  Feel free to go back and peruse that article if you still do not have a website, or even to look up some examples of other guilds and their websites when designing your own. I definitely do recommend setting up a guild site though, as it is a tremendous help in recruiting and advertising your organization.

4. Go Get That Charter!

Right – so are you still with me? We discussed looking at your time and availability in managing a guild, developing a mission statement or theme for that guild, and then considering a website for your fledgling group. Once you have considered all that and still want to move forward, then full steam ahead! The actual mechanics of forming a guild in game is ridiculously simple, especially compared to all of the above advice in deciding how to do so. The first thing you will need are four willing participants in a group or party (including yourself) and 5,000 credits.  Head over to Coruscant (for the Republic) or Dromund Kaas (for the Empire), and talk to the Guild Registrar. The Guild Registrar in both cases is located in the Galactic Trade Network Area, behind the kiosks. For the Republic, the NPC’s name is Lieutenant Kyndern, and for the Empire you will be looking for Kalthir. Once you talk to either gentleman, you will be prompted to select a guild name, verify the founding members (those in your current party), and confirm you are willing to spend 5,000 credits in doing so. Accept, and voila – you now have a guild!

We will go over guild management in depth in later articles, but for now we will cover the very basics. Guild functionality is fairly basic in game right now, with advanced features coming in a future patch (ETA unknown). As it stands, you can promote and demote members, add or remove members, set member notes, set officer notes, and create a Message of the Day, or MOTD. Most of these functions are handled by hitting “G” to open your guild window, then either clicking the “Details” button in the upper right corner, or right-clicking on the line item and selecting the option you want. You can also create or remove guild ranks, and provide access and permission to those ranks; this includes things like allowing certain ranks inviting privileges or removal privileges, or setting who can hear officer chat or read various notes. In our guild’s case, we use member notes to list someone’s main character and/or crew skills, but you can put a variety of information here to help your members navigate the roster.

Once you form the guild, I would definitely recommend taking some time looking under the hood to get familiar with guild controls and mechanics – it is terribly awkward to have someone you want to invite to the guild only to ask them, “Can you give me a few minutes while I figure out how to invite you?” (AKA, don’t be me!) Poke around through the guild UI, limited though it is, and make sure you know how to run the basic functions. Then go ahead and look through all the existing permissions for each rank and make sure they match what you want members of that rank to have, and make any necessary changes to those permissions. From there, it really is just a matter of maintaining or updating as needed!

Conclusion

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff to think about! Well, nobody ever said running a guild was easy, right? However, if you spend a lot of time up front, in the early phases, about exactly what you want out of the guild you’re leading and set up standards that members can follow, it will really help save you time and energy down the road. A lot of these things are good to think about whether your guild is brand-spanking-new, or a pre-existing guild that you’ve just taken over as leader or recently ported over to TOR from another MMO. Setting up clear guidelines on who your guild is, what they do, and who they will admit as members is extremely helpful in keeping the foundation stable and solid.

Next week, we will talk about recruiting in more depth. This will cover everything from setting up and processing applications to how you get the word out about your great group of people.

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