Posted by Lady Republic | 1 Comment

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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Posted by TwinHits | 0 Comments

United We Stand: Happiness Is Anyone Or Anything At All

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Happy New Years! I’ve decided my new year’s resolution is to become friends with all the other level 50’s on server.

Yeah, I know that’s ambitious and kind of ridiculous, but right now it’s not that hard because there’s only like fifty of us (even so, I’d say I’m only friends with about fifteen). But for me the point is the effort and the progress that I will make along the way, the people that I will meet, the experiences that I will have, and the joys that we will be able to create for each other.

This is really what brings us back to the point of online gaming: the people that we meet here are what make the game real and important. I think particularly at the beginning of a game’s life, a.k.a. the last few weeks for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is especially clear. Less people, less content, a less clear understanding of the game all make it more important that we meet others and build community.

Several nights ago I had my first TOR raiding experience. We went into Eternity Vault and Kragga’s Palace and cleared them both on normal. While half of this example is just to brag, the other half is to serve as an illustration about how important to is to build relationships with other people on one’s server. As much as I would like for this to be an accomplishment of my guild, it wasn’t.

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Posted by Lady Republic | 12 Comments

Council Chambers: Finding Space In Space

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.  

It is hard to believe that Early Access began almost two weeks ago. Where has the time gone? For me, I cannot claim any level 50s yet – I’ll confess to being a bit more of a slow leveler, especially in this game – but I have definitely tried to take my time, explore the galaxy, and more specifically scout out some potential guild or event meeting locations. This week’s question comes from Joey, who asked,

“Do you have any recommendations for large scale grouping in the game? Coruscant seemed as if it had a good deal of room, but I was wondering if there was something that could specifically be used for a guild hall, for example. Similarly, if other planets had conducive areas, Alderaan in particular, I’d love to hear of any information you had there.

Second to this; as I understand it right now, it is NOT possible to form groups with other players and gather on your respective starships. Can you confirm that this is in fact the case? Further, do you know if Bioware has any plans to change this, or dare I dream, implement some kind of guild capital ship system?”

These are both great questions, and something I have been looking for myself as a guild leader. Ideally, for events like meetings where members may be either high or low levels (and if they are anything like ours, have a slight tendency to run a bit late and need something close to the Fleet), you will want to scout out areas that are easily accessible to both high and low level players. In particular, I have looked to Tython and Coruscant for meeting locations, as both of these are fairly easy to get to for anyone as low as level 10, and so should provide fairly convenient access for members of any level.

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Posted by TwinHits | 8 Comments

United We Stand: Four Rules Of TOR

United We Stand is an Ask A Jedi series focusing on guilds, groups, and other communities in Star Wars: The Old Republic. By examining the communities that we form, we can create a stronger game for ourselves, build relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even change the world itself.

Yesterday morning at about 10:00 AM, I had a moment. When you know something like this is coming, it’s weird. You can’t imagine what it will be like once it has passed, what it will be like once Star Wars: The Old Republic has become a norm in your life. But, until that time, it seemed like it will never come. But, as my mouse hovered over the “Play” button beneath the carefully picked appearance bars, I took a moment to think about what I was doing. I was preparing to fully immerse myself in a whole new world, a world where I would meet people from anywhere from across the world to right across the street. I looked at the name I had typed in for years, and realized I needed to decide exactly who TwinHits is. We want to become what we want to be, and who do I want her to be?

Thus,  I want to share with you the “Four Rules of TOR”, four rules which I will play by, and I hope that you will play by as well. These rules are meant to encompass every action and every decision that you make, both within the game and within the community, and to guide us with wisdom towards a better game.

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Posted by Lady Republic | 3 Comments

Council Chambers: No Server For You!

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.  

Monday’s big excitement came with the announcement of servers for guilds in the Pre-Launch Program. As you can see there, as well as over on Massively.com, the TOR Universe was all abuzz with people posting their guild’s server placement, compiling lists of total servers for the game, and sharing this information with anyone and everyone they could.

The RP-PvP Dilemma

Unfortunately, there is one group left out of all this excitement and mayhem: RP-PvP servers. The problem is that when the Pre-Launch Guild Program was created, only three categories of servers existed – PvE, PvP, and RP. RP at that time applied to PvE servers only – just PVE servers designated for roleplayers and that tends to draw communities that enjoy playing their characters and acting as that character would, rather than their offline selves. RP-PvP servers did not exist, and were not listed as options in guild server selection.

Later, BioWare decided – in part due to requests from the fan community – to add RP-PvP servers at launch as an option for players. However, because this was a later addition, the option never became available in the Pre-Launch Program.  This meant that guilds seeking an RP-PvP experience either had to select just RP or just PvP, or to choose to form their own communities.

While it may not have been the ideal outcome that RP-PvP guilds would have preferred, they banded together and formed a remarkably robust community to help those guilds that enjoy roleplaying and player-versus-player environments to connect with each other and look to form their own server communities pre-launch. Initially, this was managed through the official forums, and many guilds connected there. Once the forums came down in preparation for launch, the RP-PvP guilds moved their organizational efforts to http://frag-world.com/forum. As of Monday, December 12, 2011, there are fifteen guilds represented on the Frag World forums, the majority of which appear to be East Coast RP-PvP guilds. If your guild is one of those interested in RP-PvP and looking to connect with other RP-PvPers, I highly recommend you head over to Frag-world and connect with those guilds to work on a launch placement for your guild.

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