What kind of problems do PvE Guilds Face?

What kind of problems to do PvE guilds face? I always pondered about this question. I have only been in PvP guilds and never really had a PvE guild. I had to do everything by myself in pve as old guild leader has not even beaten prophesies.

I know that guild drama. Players not being able to work together in a team with others. Lack of decent players can cause a pvp guild to break up.

What I don't understand is what can cause a pve guild to disband. You could just sit in kamadan or noob isles and just spam for more players....

I recently saw that ZoS is the one of the oldest guilds. I never new about them or cared... I think they mostly pve... I see some law ranked players they have in HA and I have never faced them in GvG.

They claim to be oldest guild and is proud..... but what can really break up a pve guild?...

inactivity and bad fruits

One of the biggest things that can cause a PvE guild to break up is boredom. There's only so many times you can go through the game before you just decide to take a break. If several members do this around the same time, it can make forming guild groups difficult, and cause the still active members to break off and find a more active guild. The problem escalates as members return from hiatus, see there are fewer members, then they themselves leave to find a more active group. While this isn't that big of a problem in the larger guilds/alliances, it will decimate the membership of a smaller guild.

PvE guilds have a much harder time finding people that are on the same lvl as each other.

What I mean by that is there are so many different missions/quests/dungeons/titles/ect that finding 8 people that wish to move at the same pace in the same chapter doing the exact same thing together is almost impossible.

It was not like this in the begining, when it was just Prophicies I found many people that were at the same point in the story as I was, or who had secondary chars in the same spot or close to the same spot as my secondary chars. Waiting for people to catch up or going back a mission or two and bringing them up to speed was nothing back then.

Now its totaly random, you find people that wish to do hard mode missions, but they can be done in any order and no 2 people will need the exact same set of missions at the same time. Add to that newer players that still have not unlocked hard mode or aquired the primary quest needed to enter a mission or elite zone.

A vast number of people are farming, something that is most always done solo or in a small/duo setting. Wheather it is titles or ectos or green/rare items or just for gold they are all off alone. Convincing people to stop what they are doing to go and help you complete a mission that they don't need or do not enjoy can be a very hard task. Included in that is the fact that many people change the time of day when they are able to play.


Lastly for recruiting its not hard to find people to join, its getting them to stay in the guild thats complicated. People will join a guild that advertises "rebuilding" then leave within 1-2 days if they don't get help with a mission/quest the very first time they ask for it. Or if they don't find 10+ active people online everytime they log on.
Alliances also tend to kill off guilds as players find themselve talking to member of alliance guilds more often then people in thier own guild they jump guilds, consolidating, which sounds good but not everyone will jump.

Those such as myself that spent a great deal of time and effort to start a guild and fully equip a hall are very reluctant to leave, even if its dead. That being said I would never chose to be a guild leader again, the effort required in managing/recruiting/building up and keeping people happy is rarely appreciated and in the end can be detrimental to the fun you expect to have when you play a game.

Usually those guilds who sit in town and spam invites fall apart at the seams because they will let ANYONE into the guild. The worst are the people who start guilds then spam "Join my guild first 5 become officers!!!!" thats just asking for trouble.

The guild I'm in is quite small. We used to be big but commitments from those who run it and the like meant that maintaining it and keeping everyone happy just wasn't possible. So now we are down to a handful of regulars who don't really say much but keep going and a handful of friends who just want somewhere chilled out to play.

I've never been in a PvP guilds but I can imagine the good ones can't afford to let just anyone in and represent them. When you enter that battle the people in it are representing your guild. Whereas if a PvE guild goes into FoW and starts screaming "NOOOB!" at the shadow beasts, well I doubt they are going to care.

Edit: I agree with Crom, getting people to stay is a real pain. Most people have tunnel vision and if you arn't helping them everyday then they leave. Although I'm never sorry to see the beggers go.

Excessive drama. Ive seen it time and time again. Some people seem to enjoy stressing the social ties that allow very different people to work and play together. Eventually people leave rather than have to deal with a drama-queen/king every day.

Yah after hearing half the crap about revo I decided pve guilds are pretty lame :P

Playing level difference and how to compensate for that. This is more apparent in my alliance than in my guild, though it's reflected some in the green text as well. I find myself in shock of how little some people know about basic game mechanics while I'm cruising through hard mode and still typing responses.

That and the usual thing when more than one person is in the same place for an extended period of time. Drama and subversion, etc.

Inactivity (or the perception of it, by it's members due to):
- not a lot of events occurring within their time zone, thereby not giving them a chance to participate
- players not able to participate due to time constraints (length of the mission, elite area, dungeon is too long for them to invest time into in one sitting)
- titles (people involved in completing personal title goals to want to join in other group aspects)
- difficulty in consolidating the smaller guilds into larger ones (as was pointed out earlier, the reluctance to abandon smaller guilds that have full npc's, time invested in it, etc)
- drama (if there's bad blood between two players and it escalates, other players around them tend to choose sides then things start to fall apart from there. or if players just get sick of hearing it in alliance chat instead of the people going at it in pm's)

Those are just some things that come to mind, at the moment.

I have been the leader of my guild for over a year (2 years in july)

Problems start when you invite a new person in and they cause havoc and annoy other players, which in turn distrubts everything.
Now days it is much harder for PVE guilds, as most are already in guilds and a lot of people are leaving guild wars =\ ever since EoTn came out i noticed more and more people giving up and moving on (not a pop at Eotn btw just an observation)
Everyone at some point wants help with quests or missions, and sometimes 7 at once...if you pick people over others then they feel left out and may leave. If they leave numbers go down and more leave because there arent enough people to go round and help lol

Also lately i have had a lot of personal home problems...which meant i have not been playing much, that affects the guild also. (not a boast, just I am the guild leader and i notice people follow the leader and if they are offline it looks bad) I guess if you go into a guild and the leader hasnt been on for 3 weeks its a bit worrying lol

Over time though you do find loyal people/friends who stay no matter what :-) Luckily for my guild we have a few of those, without a couple of loyal people who want the guild to succeed, it will fail. A leader can not do it all by themselves you need trusty officers who can do the job also.
It depends a lot on the personality of the guild leaders...strict or too loose all makes a difference.

I remember the times when guild where not so political but now xDD its changed ^^

These are my personal observations and opinions though :-)

I think you are confusing PVE guilds with the standard of your posts.

Speaking for my own guild, the biggest problem has undoubtedly been defection to WoW. In fact, for the last year I was the sole remaining active member of my guild, everyone else have defected to WoW, the tasteless bastards.

PvE player through and through here. I was a guild-hopper for awhile, and saw a lot of guilds in the process of dying. Most guild death comes down to 2 things.

1. Inactivity: GW PvE is fun for a while, but eventually everyone reaches a point where they're "played-out". If you don't find ways to replace the guildies who leave with new guildies, the guild eventually dwindles.

2. Bad guildies: Letting just anyone join is a surefire way to kill a guild, because most of the people playing GW are breathtakingly stupid. You need screening of some kind. My guild, [CV], requires potential guildies to find our website, register to the forums, and make an application post with certain required elements before we even extend an invitation. And we don't solicit recruits in Local chat.

PvP.

My guild is slowly reverting to HA. 99% of the officers now HA on a regular basis. If you're willing to HA they give you an officer spot

Alot of PvE guilds tend to have a common goal. e.g. DoA fans. When that particular area of PvE dries up quite often the guild will aswell.

Problem with these guilds is if your not in the 'core' group you never get invited. To be a core member in most big pve guilds you need to have been there from the start/or extremely active.

As I'm a guild hopper, and a very casual player I've never been a core player for any guild, hence invites to elite areas were always non existant.

My guild is casual PvE (casual meaning missions/quests and the odd elite area run)

I suppose pve guilds face a lot of the same problems pvp guilds do.

- Lack of leadership. Immature leader and/or officers. Inactive leader and/or officers.
- Drama Queens. Guildie A hates Guildie B and the guild ends up choosing sides in the war. Again, this goes back to lack of leadership.
- Boredom. Guild is too small and rarely have active players. Events are scheduled and 2 people show up. Events are canceled.

A lot of the problems can be solved by strong leadership. My current guild will celebrate their 3rd anniversary this weekend. The guild leader position has changed hands over the years, but our current leader has held the position for over a year. (Possibly 2 years, but I'm not sure. That was before I joined).

Our guild isn't terribly large, but we do have around 120-130 members (split into 2 guilds) and is the leader in a 9 guild alliance although some of those guilds are extremely tiny.

We used to have a problem with time zones. My biggest gripe with the guild was that all the events were scheduled around 10pm EST when I'm logging off and going to bed. However with new members coming in and more activity around 7-8pm that has changed and it's not hard at all to find guildies to do stuff with. We're large enough now that about 20+ players are always online in the evenings thru out the alliance.

We've managed to avoid a lot of problems simply by not recruiting ingame. We're a Christian Alliance and so spamming in town tends to get us more idiots intent on griefing than good recruits. Although one of the guilds in our Alliance does recruit in towns and they've had good success there. For us, we rely on word of mouth and direct all interested recruits to our website where they can apply to join. As a result, most recruits tend to stick with us.

Anyways I don't mean for this post to sound like a guild recruitment ad. I guess my point is this:

There are hundreds or thousands of kiddie guilds that are started by kids that think being a guild leader is a way cool thing to do. These guilds will most likely go nowhere. The kid spams his "New Guild Assassin Ninja Pirates recruiting. KOOOOL CAPE!!!!! BE AN OFFICER!!!!" in towns for a week or 2 before getting bored or burned by bad recruits and disbands.

To avoid a lot of the pitfalls you should carefully think about what you want from your guild. Pvp? farming buddies? Elite mission runs? Or just a small group of real life friends? Do you want to lead your own guild? Do you enjoy being in a large active guild or prefer a smaller cozier one? Ask a lot of questions before joining a guild and also before inviting new members. How old are you? If you're a teenager do you want to join a guild made up mainly of adults or do you prefer a guild with a teen leader? If you're an adult do you want an 18+ only guild or one open to all ages?

Didn't [eF] change into a PvE guild when it got sold off?

Anyway, guilds disband because of lack of leadership and drama. Also inactivity and bad apples.

Bad seeds need to be taken out of the guild QUICK. If you let someone stay that is constantly begging, or asking for help every 5 seconds after you told them it would be about 30 min., it WILL drive away some of the more experienced and mature members. Once the good players are gone the guild is as good as dead.
And guild hopping........ARGH! How can you expect to know anything about a guild after being there for less than 24 hours? Hoppers are a huge waste of time.

Spamming for new players in Kamadan, etc is often WHY guilds self descruct. Having a lot of people doesn't mean shit if they are all griefers/inactive.
Quality over quantity my friend.


But yes, drama sucks.

As has been said, innactivity, lack of leadership, and drama are the biggest killers of guilds.

However I've found that having a core group of active friendly people can save a guild from all of this stuff as well.

Also keep in mind all of this stuff also applies to alliances as well

I've never seen this problem much with pve guilds. It's much more of an issue with pvp. All of the top pvp guilds have a core team that they do gvg/HA with. If you aren't part of the core team, you won't be joining their nightly runs.

Pve is much more relaxed. Typically we say "Doing FOW, 8pm tonight. If you're interested show up in GH. Once we see who's interested we form team(s) and fill in with heroes if appropiate.

I suppose your problem could be that the active players really don't know your skill level. If they are forming a DOA run they prefer to go with folks that they know are capable of completing the mission. If you guild hop then they never really get to know you and don't want to risk wiping because you turned out to be a 13 year old with exactly 20 skills learned on your character and 1 elite.

I've run into the same issues with my guild sometimes. We announce a FOW run and 2 or 3 kids always want to join the team. We welcome them, but they really aren't ready for elite areas. They have no elites and barely understand the game mechanics. So now we'll do some serious invitation only runs and some open training runs.

the biggest problem PvE guilds have is that the casual PvE database has brains the size of a rat's hole...
and if you're a rather new guild you gotta deal with this rather poor player base the PvE community has to offer...
if you finally got a decent player base to your guild the next major problem is doing things together. almost everyone is in a different place, with different personal goals and different campaigns owned...
if you're in a farming guild than doing things like FoW and UW are easier than DoA, Urgoz and The Deep for example as they're core areas. and all those areas actually require an entire party, unlike other farming areas that are done solo/duo or the rather rare trios(3 trappers or the famine farming) and 5 mans(havent seen those in a while, much better options available)

the matter of personal goals is of great importance here. as a guild you need common goals, so you can get the feeling of "achievement" but than each individual has his own set of goals.

if you solved all those than activity will be your next problem. you need really dedicated and worthy players to keep your guild in good shape, and PvE pretty much wares you out fast.

But those are NOT the players I want in my guild.
If I was to recruit in outposts it would be outposts in the 'high-end PvE' areas.

The main reason for a PvE guild to disband is bad leadership.
Directly followed by inactivity.

Bad leadership is attracting the wrong players to the guild and keeping them there.
Recruiting in spamadan for example would mean lots of newbie questions and that would annoy the guild and alliance a lot. That's because we focus mainly on hard mode and elite areas.
It also means observing what's going on and remove trouble from the guild.
Trouble could be in guild or in alliance.
In my previous guild there were some players who did fit in the guild but not in the alliance.
In the end I split the guild because of an alliance incident.

Inactivity is different.
A leader or officer can be very active but regular members have to participate.
I've seen officers who organized events that went bad because not enough players showed.
Inactive guild leaders are bad.
When I was second in command in my old guild I got a lot of questions when our leader became a lot less active. It caused people to leave, specially those not in the core.

Malice is also right about the core group in some guilds.
Those can be very active but also hard to get into.
Being very active does help to get in them but also the way you participate in the guild.
The core group does not only do things amongst themself but will also be active when not all who are in the core are on.
Participate with them, either by chat or teaming up when they need extra players.
Managing a guild with a core group is one of the harder things a leader has to do because it does influence the guild in a lot of ways.

Leadership is key and Officers must have an online presence, but in my opinion:

Drama is the guild killer.

Drama comes when the officers only hang out with other officers.

Drama comes when members can't get a regular group with the people that get the most XP and loot.

Drama comes when the new member is a RL girl and more than one guy in the guild wants to get next to her.

Drama comes when guild seems to have no goals or direction.

Drama comes when members make suggestions that the officers don't consider.

Drama comes when officers make decisions that members don't understand.

These are things that get talked about between members, and burn in their hearts, and they complain or whine to others; Then there's a ton of "He-said-She-said" BS until it festers like an infection.

Suddenly, a half dozen people leave the guild (to start their own guild usually). WTF?

How do you keep the drama down?

Still working on that one, probably why I don't have my own guild.

I(we) have ran my(our) pve guild like the Knights of the Round Table for a year now. We all make the decisions and there is not one person over another. Prior to this I had a pve guild that I ran with a rank system and a lot of rules. Following are some ways not to have your guild break up:

1. Inactivity: Both were/are good ways to run a guild but you have to have a "core" set of players (atleast 8-15 on at one time, not counting you). The rest can be filled with the "school players", "weekend players", or "I can log on once in a while players". We currently have 89 on the roster but about 50 are the "I can log on once in a while players". When they do log on, say hi to them and ask whats been going on. Be personable with those and they might actually start playing more. As a guild we decided a 1yr inactivity is the max, then we free up the roster space. The most we actually had was 1 player ever hit that. All the others go a couple months and then jump on.

2. Drama: Keep rules to a minimum, no adult wants to be policed by a teenager or vice versa.

3. Officers: Run the guild with ALL officers, with atleast a 30 day trial. If the person leave prior to 30days, atleast you or your officer will then understand he did not want to be in the guild. You will see that this not only helps your guild grow, but you form new friendships and the like. (i.e. I have been playing with my buddy for a year is it ok if I invite him? let them invite and make sure the 30 days are there.) Make sure people party with others that are still in the 30 days, even if it yourself.

4. Be upfront with a new person. If they start asking for gold right away be upfront with them. If they keep asking kindly take them off to the side. If it keeps going thats when you boot.

5. Help each other out. If someone is going for a title help them. If you have players that run thier heroe with bad build help them give them build to help out. Help them get runes for thier heroes and main chars. I have had 4 guildies ask how they can they ever get FoW armor when they dont have the money. I have taught them how I made my little scratch(I dont considered myself rich in money in the game, but rich in friends that will help you when you need it) here and there, id the whites anywhere in the high level areas to get more value out of the item, showed them how to do the DFNP UW Wa/Me run, and show them other farming runs.

6. Guild Leader. Just dont be an jerk and let the players have the most important thing with Guild Wars. That is to HAVE FUN!

These are some of my honest opinions on not having issues in your/thier guild.