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Council Chambers: Breaking and Fixing Things

AAJ Goes To Austin

A week or two ago, BioWare announced plans for an upcoming Guild Summit, to gather leaders from a number of the more famous guilds and the community as a whole to talk about the status of guilds in The Old Republic.  AAJ will have two members there – Reedyn, our Healing columnist, will be there on behalf of his guild, and I will be on site representing Ask A Jedi – so in lieu of this week’s advice, I would like to ask all of our readers out there what questions you have for the BioWare team that I can present on your behalf, or what information you are hoping to get out of the summit so I’ll know what to look and listen for.

Questions, Please!

Please post any questions or issues you want to know more about at the summit in the comments below, and I promise I will gather them all up and see what I can do about getting input.  We will be soaking and poking throughout as much of the information as we can while on site, bringing you as much news as possible about the plans BioWare has for guilds in TOR, and also asking any questions or raising any concerns you have about guilds as well.

From my perspective, I’m really looking forward to learning more about the overall plan and visions for guilds and communities within The Old Republic.  I am as excited as the next person about the possibility of guild banks and guild housing or ships, so I will definitely be on the lookout to learn more about these features.  I would also like to hear if they intend to implement a guild leveling system, as I have some fairly strong – and not favorable – opinions on these based on my experiences managing a guild elsewhere when these were rolled out. Allow me to say a bit more on that, as an example of a “good idea gone horribly awry”…

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Council Chambers: Take Me To Your Leader

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.  

Hello, and welcome to this week’s Council Chambers. We took January a bit “off” in terms of our primary purpose of guild leadership and advice, to spend some time focusing on new or prospective guild leaders and officers and cover some basics about how to start a guild and look for people to help you with that project. This week, it’s back to our core mission of working with guild leaders, officers, or members to help solve their guild challenges and dilemmas.

Chief of Staff

Since we ended our last entry talking about officers, I’ve decided to pick up again with an inquiry that concerns guild officers – and in particular, officer burnout. Overworked writes,

I’m having a blast playing SWTOR, but after just two weeks, I’m getting a little something like burn out due to my guild. This guild has been a labor of love for me, and was truly driven during the pre-game to create something special that would attract tons of members and be a really successful guild to last for years to come.

Even though I’m not the GM, I was the one in the forums trying to create energy for the guild, get members involved in creating the guidelines, decide how the guild would work and interact with the rest of the community. Now, the game has launched, and on top of all the work that goes into setting up the guild, I’ve discovered that no one was doing anything to recruit – so I’ve taken up that job as well, spamming in general to help grow our membership. I feel like I’m running the whole guild by myself, and even though it’s small right now, I feel like there’s a ton of work to be done if we want it to succeed.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill here, or is there something I can do to encourage the others to step up? How do you cure officer apathy?

Officer apathy, officer burnout, officer inactivity – while these may all happens for different reasons, the end result is often the same. There’s still a ton of work that needs doing for the guild – recruitment, forums maintenance, scheduling, roster maintenance, member management, plus any other activities that the guild runs – but for whatever reason, there are fewer hands on deck working on it. This often results in those remaining officers shouldering more and more of the work to keep the guild afloat – and the frequent result of that is even more officer burnout, as those officers become overwhelmed and can no longer keep up.

So, what’s an overworked officer to do?

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Council Chambers: Good Officers, Apply Within

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.  

To wrap up our Guild Formation series, I wanted to spend a little more time talking about officers – in particular, what to look for when hiring or promoting them.  (You’ll notice this nicely dovetails into the next couple entries about guild advice!  So stay tuned.) For the majority of TOR guilds, you’re just getting started in this new game – for some of you, your guild was established through the Guild HQ before the game launched, for others your guild was ported over from another game, and for some of you, your guild may be a brand new one formed since launch.

Regardless of how you got your start though – good officers really can make or break a guild.  You want officers that are responsible, fair, active, and reliable.  To make it even more tricky, being an officer isn’t even a paid position! Even so, having reliable officers that you can count on to manage the roster, deal with issues when you are offline or not around, and who can support you and the workload that goes with running a guild is a tremendously vital asset for any guild leader.

Let us begin by looking into the qualities that seem to make a good officer.  This can be tough – some are easy to measure (time online, for instance), and others can be harder (how does one measure maturity?)  Ultimately, it’s going to be a combination of observation, current officer consensus (for guilds that already exist and have officers), and a bit of sixth sense or gut hunch thrown into the mix.  Below is an initial list of qualities I usually request from prospective officer candidates.

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Council Chambers: The “Wheres” – Come Play With Me!

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.  

There you are. You’ve got a guild, a website, an application, rules, a mission statement, and a set of criteria to apply to any applicants. Hmm, it seems like something is missing….Oh right! Members.

Now, I am going to preface this post by saying, a brand-spanking-new game is always in interesting time to be starting a new guild and recruiting new members. On the one hand, TONS of people are looking for a guild! On the other hand – people at this stage of the game are very flighty in general, and there is a lot of new character rolling and re-rolling or guild-hopping as people search for their perfect home that takes place early on in a game’s life cycle. Things will get a lot better in about two months from now, but right now it might involve a lot of member turn-over. So keep that in mind, and don’t become discouraged if you don’t have a solid stable of new members ready to go. Even then though, you should still try to start building a name for your guild and trying to get the word out. But – how?

The first tool you have at your disposal is the official forums.

No please, don’t leave!

I know, I know. A lot of folks despise community forums – and often for good reason. The WoW server community in particular is known for being….how to put this politely….well, as Obi Wan Kenobi said about Mos Eisley, “a wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Anonymity can breed a certain “je ne sais quoi” as I call it (mostly because there really isn’t a word for it that I like to use in polite company); Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade call it something else that’s also fitting. The point is, official game forums are not always the most friendly and helpful lot out there on the wide world of the interweb, so it can be rather scary and daunting to use them and post. It is far too early to know how our own TOR forums will be in the long term, but based on other games it’s likely to be a mixed bag. However, it is one of the first stops a lot of new players will make when looking for a guild. So you will want to stop in there, log in with your guild leader or officer toon, and put up a post.

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Council Chambers: The “Whos”, Or Who Will Your Members Be?

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.  

Once you have a concept, mission statement, and website, it’s time to think about adding new members. How will you handle recruiting? Recruiting is one of the most important functions of leading a guild, and one of the factors that most often contributes to guilds falling apart. You are only as good as your members, so I strongly encourage to think carefully about who you want to recruit for your organization and what ideal sorts of players you are looking for.

You Want Fries With That?

In general, they say you can either do something fast, or you can do it well. It is easy to grow a guild if you just blanket-recruit and take anyone who says “Yes”. Unfortunately, that will probably not get you a good quality player base, and it is doubtful that sort of recruiting will enable your guild to remain active and healthy in the long term. Instead, I suggest taking it a little slower and make sure that you are focusing your recruiting efforts on players that fit the model of the guild you are trying to build.

On that note, think about any restrictions you want to set on prospective new members. Now that you have a mission statement, you should have a pretty good idea of what your guild is trying to do and the niche they are seeking to fill in the community. The next step is to think about how this applies to your membership, and what a prospective member would be.

Points to Ponder

Some common questions you may want to decide are:

• Will you have a minimum age limit? Some guilds require a certain minimum age. This can impact everything from the sort of language people use in chat, to hours of play (for example, younger players often have more daytime or late night availability than older ones).

• Do you want players to have a minimum level of raiding experience and/or gear? This comes up with more advanced raiding guilds – they often require potential members to have a minimum level of gear, or experience raiding in other games, to ensure that new members will be able to keep up with their level of operations content and progression.

• Will you accept alts? There are two kinds of alts – the first kind are the alternate characters of your existing members. The second type are when new members have their main character in a larger, more established guild or an advanced raiding guild. It may be on the same server as your guild, or another server entirely. Think about if you’re willing to take new members who may spend significant amounts of their online time playing elsewhere, or if you want players focusing exclusively on your guild.

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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.

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