60+ Member Guilds: Success and Failure

My Guild is now at the 55 Member mark (GL and Officers included).

I'm very active in the Leadership of the Guild and have delegated responsibilitities to Officers as well as overseeing things to make sure they get done - stuff like Officers being assigned to get Members into PvP arenas and Officers to specialize in GvG stuff to lead teams. And two Officers aside to get people through PvE when need be to get skills and such. We did three GvGs yesterday and one today and have done lots of Team Arenas. Three regular GvG times are set aside during the week.

So... so far everything's holding together. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm spending wayyyy too much time with the thing. I'm willing to call people down as well as praise them and demote or kick if need be. I guess it's a good thing for 54 Guild Wars players that I'm single and don't have too much else to do at the time.

What I'd like to know is if anyone here is a Guild Leader of a 60+ Member Guild and how do they have their Officers and Memberships sorted? Does each Officer have a specific duty like mine do? What experiences have you had leading such a group?

yours sound very good =D

thanks

I'm pretty sure I'm doing what needs to be done, I'm just realizing what the Guild is becoming - 50+ members is a lot more than the 20 I inherited when I took over as GL and the momentum seems to be building. Hence request for input from others that have been there, because this is a first for me.

I guess there aren't a lot of 60+ member GLs here. Didn't know how common the member count was either.

Do you help your guildmates out?

like, do you help them get their armor, help them on quests/missions, help them reach their goals? If so, you seem like the perfect guildleader!

Do you guys gvg alot?

once your guild gets larger it actually becomes easier to hold together etc.

the hard part is growing a guild from a much smaller number. recruits dont just pop out of thin air. you cant just go cry guild lf people in major city centers cus you will only get nubs. no serious player will see your recruiting message and say "gee, thats the place to be isnt it!?" you have to go find them in pvp, bearing in mind that most players are already in guilds so you have to pry them away from whichever one they are currently in. because you are so small, they will probably leave. or if they dont, they will leave because you are too inactive, which is directly resultant from the fact that you are so small. you gvg to raise rank to recruit people, because YOU ARE TOO SMALL to get 8 people with the right builds on. Then take into account that whatever player you recruit will probably not be that great, so you will have to train them or live with their suckiness.

so in short being a small guild trying to grow sucks. you are in the easy part. dont complain

About having each guild officer do something special...

If you do plan on gvg's, make sure that you establish who's in charge of the gvg and who allows it. I say that you insist on having only the guild officers and yourself start the groups gvg. That way you won't get any trouble with random ratings.

Get to know what your officers want to do. We don't have a 60+ guild, but we have officers who do quests, answer questions, runs, price checks, trading, etc.

Seemes like everything else is doing fine. Best of luck to yah in the future.

I have over 130+ members guilds, I have 2 accounts and run 2 guilds. My first guild was established since May 05, so it's already over 6 months. My second was established like 2 months ago. Each guild have over 60+ pplz and we utilitized our forum daily. Since our guilds are so large, we established guild rules to organize internal. We also have monthly meetings with both guilds together. All my officers are mature adults and they work as a team alot. Also, we interview people before recruiting. So everyone are mature and active.
We set rules that noone is allow AFK over a week. so our active level are extremely high, more than 50 people each guild log on within 24 hours (total 100 ppls) and the remaining 20-30 members log on within a week.
I like my guild to be large cuz I like to team up and do many events together. We also concern that ppls think large guild will ignore minority. However, we offer many other guild activities such as casino night, jokes contest, etc to maintain a stong social atmosphere. Officers do not always have to help members all the time. Members can help each other in the mission when they are at the same stage. All we have to do is to show them the tricks on how to do the mission and they can show it to the others. Unless it's some tough mission likes thurderhead, we do it as a guild event.
About GvG, it's easier for us to practice builds since we have 2 guild halls. So your question is, " how do my members and officers sort?" My answer to that question is, both of my guilds have different structures. First guild majority members are PVE focus, so does my officers, they all have beaten the game many times and very experience in fow/uw/sf. My second guild majority members are PVP focus, same as my offciers, they are rank 3+ tomb players. Therefore, guild events will somehow different on the weekdays. I sort members and officers by their interests and abilities, and put them in the correct guilds. So it's much easier for the members to team up with other ppls.

" Does each Officer have a specific duty like yours do?" No, they all have the same duties and roles. I never specificly assign tasks unless it's something very important. They should know what to do to help our guild. Whenever they run into problems, we will have officer meetings and solve it there. It's all about team works and we all are adults, so they all know what to do. I don't need to control them. As long as they report to me and keep me updates.

"What experiences have you had leading such a group?" Well, I have real life management experience, my officers are all professionals and college students. Whenever there's a problem, I always like to hear both side before I make my decisions. I like to be fair and I like to keep everyone happy. About game experiences, I guess I don't need to say it more. I have 2 accts and i played both pve and pvp. so yea, I'm very experience in both side but I like to listen their feedbacks or suggestions. Sometimes, I learned something new from them hehe.

All i have to say is, if you want your guild to become large and success, here're my advices: (I've learned these from my past experiences)
1) you are the leader, of course you have to log on most of the time and have weekly meeting with your officers. Keep everything in track.
2) forum Must Needed. cuz all your daily events, chats, contest, announcement, all over there. And Make sure all your members register and participate. To make them participate, created forum participate contest.
3) PvP guild got to have TS or Vent. If your guild dont have any of those, dont even bother to recruite experience pvp players.
4) Carefully picked your officers, cuz they are your backups. They have to step up and show some leadership.
5) immature players tend to create problem within guilds, so carefully pick your members as well. (ppls always ask for money and items, not a keeper) They should earn it from events.
6) create lots of activities and make everyone happy.
7) create guild store or trade forum, ppls can buy/sell items through the forum or get items from guild store.
8) Make sure you have long-term goal, (i believe this is important). If your goals is to make your guild long-term. Better prepare well before the new guild wars come out.

So I hope it'll help you guys out and good luck to you all.

We have two main divisions, each of which is at the 100 member limit. Because we are mostly a GvG guild, most of our officers are tasked first with leading GvGs and training people how to GvG. Others do focus on recruiting as well. We have a very active set of forums and we ask that people log into teamspeak whenever they are online in order to help keep the community active and together across our divisions (we also have a smaller more competitive division). We frequently guest people between divisions as well.

The main thing I would focus on with a larger guild is attracting and keeping mature players. Once you get a critical mass of these then it makes it easier to recruit and retain more. Another thing to consider is play times. With any guild its better if people see others on when they log on. With a large guild this is usually not a problem, but sometimes you'll get some folks who play on a vastly different schedule, and if there are not enough of these then they are bound to be unsatisfied with the guild. Try to get a critical mass of folks for various play times so that everyone feels a part of the larger group.

wow. good stuff to consider. thanks a lot for the input everybody

yeah, I'm shooting for the long-term goal. thanks again very helpful!

My guild is only 30 members but we do many of the same things. Our officers are mainly made up of the core members who helped form the guild with me. We do kind of have specific roles but we really haven't made them "official" yet. Some officers spend lots of time running characters, some spend time testing builds and others spend time farming for items for members. We ALL help members get through the tough missions and through ascension and beyond. One of our major goals is to get as many of the characters through ascension and to level 20 as soon as possible. We have Guild Council meeting on Teamspeak about once every two weeks. We have a PvP night every week and have a couple of officers designated to work on new PvP builds. We also have officers that work on builds for specific areas like UW and Sorrows Furnace. We are still growing so we are really working on how to classify and help new members. We do have cool contests every week or so to increase guild activity and morale. We are giving away a Superior Vigor and a Major Vigor in a screenshot contest and a Razorstone and a Superior Absorbtion in a Scavenger hunt later in the month. 90 percent of our members are adult and the ones that aren't know that we have high standards for behavior. We seriously don't like beggers in our guild.

One thing that I think is crucial to a good guild structure is a good guild web site. We use ours for general communication and scheduling all sorts of guild activities. We post new builds and info related to the game in here also and our officers have a locked area to discuss items that are relevant to the inner circle.It also shows new members that we are serious about what we do.

We don't spam recruit. We only recruit people we know personally or people who have ran missions with us that we feel are worthy of an invite. Anyone who wants to join must run a few missions with us (preferably on TS) to see how they mesh before we will give an invite.

Great thread! It helps to be able to share ideas.

our guild is pretty steadily between 90-100 ppl. i am only an officer though, the guild leader was really active in everything but now pretty much relies on officers and othe members to organized their own events. we have a planning forum and pretty much anybody can post and plan an event they are interested in. i think whats work great for us is that all new members have to approved by existing members and that all officers are elected, everything about our guild democratic so if a member doesn't like something its on them to put effort to change things.

never got the chance to thank you for the invite.

i love the democratic aspect of our guild. and the activity level in game and on the forums was defintly my main reason for joining and staying with the guild, even with my main interst in HOH and GvG i turned down a few rank <200 guilds simply because of these 2 things.

About AFK'ing...I rather have a member that's afk with a good reason(real life ftw) then some geek that is always on, but is afk ingame...going afk and leaving your computer on is just dumb imo.

So, you're saying that you'd kick people for having lives? Seems a bit harsh there, just for "activity" issues. I mean to say, isn't there some technicality such as posted absences?

I know our guild likes to have active members, but we don't punish those with over active lives. We all have our own lives, and expect that others do to.

Our rules are more along the lines of:: Be active at least one meeting per week, unless otherwise posted on the forums. And we won't even think about kicking someone till they've been un-active without notice for more then 3 weeks. Even then we keep their names in log just in case they come back, or wish to join our ranks again when their activity is back up.

We use our forum alot, means by alot alot. if you afk because of your personal lives. You can post your away notice in the forum. and our officers will keep your name in it until you come back. The reason why we do this because we want people particpate in guild. means by joining events and talk in guild. Not just people like to stay in guild and sign on once every other week to keep themselve in it. We want people be more social and particpate on events. Not just staying in guild because they like the cape. If you truely like the guild and you are not as active (maybe you have mid-term or finals coming). Just put your away notices in the forum. That's all. Do you rather have an active guild with noone talk at all or join events or particpate the forum? or have a very social strong members who like to talk and do things together?

same, but it depends.
people who have a history of activity in my guild and have been with it for a long time, i assume suffered form technical problems (one member came backf ormt he dead after being gone a month, cuz his comp died out).
but if you've only been in the guild for 3 days and you go afk for a week w/o notice...GG.

While we do remove inactive folks in order to make room for new folks, if someone wants back in when they get online again they are automatically allowed in. We don't kick people from the guild due to inactivity, we just remove them from the current division and usually send an invite to another division. This helps us have nearly 200 active people on during any given 24 hour period. But of course now we are opening up a fourth division now, this one focused on Tombs. Gotta put all these people somewhere . . .

Wow... 200 active... You guys MUST rely on a good web forum to keep up with everything. What type do you use? We have ours on Guild Portal, but I actually prefer different forums for ease of use and features that I don't see on Portal. Portal is ok though. It has the whole package and the price is reasonable.

A suggestion for those very large guilds that use multiple guilds as divisions of a whole, or just have an extreme number of active members: (this is only if you haven't done so already) Check with your members, and see if anyone has a computer that can keep a dedicate TS/Vent server up at all times. This will help tremendously as constant way for everyone to stay in contact reguardless of thier playing times, and mebers/officers can set up secondary servers as needed for specific group activities. I was going to do this for my guild, but of the 40 or so members, we're down to about 2 of us active daily, and 5 or so active weekly, so I think we can do without.

We have very active forums and a very large dedicated TS server that members are required to be on when online. This really helps with communications across our now 4 divisions (we just added a dedicated HoH division).

Large guilds fall for the same reasons small guilds fall:

Immature pissants.

A tightly knit group of friends, however large, is the way to go. Simple as that.

I would have thought it was due to not enough pie to go around though!

Seriously, I agree that mature folks help a lot. We have a 17+ age requirement and that seems to help some.

I used to lead a guild with 100 people. (this was of course before the 100g per invite cost). It was insane. I had some very helpful and dedicated officers. But it was just too crazy to do stuff. Guild chat was like the trade chat in LA d1...crazy full of spam. You'd have to turn it off if you were doing anything like a mission. It was a very um...interactive guild, where people would talk to each other a lot, but we never really did any good GvG or PvP because there were a lot of beginners and out high level players weren't that good. I eventually turned over the guild to one of my officers and just made the guild that I have today. The 2 member guild with only my 2 accounts on it. Quite peaceful...

hummm

Spammers on our Guild Chat are asked to take it to Local or Whisper if there are more people on at the time. By now they've seen a few people removed from the Guild because of that behavior, so whether it's fear of removal or respect for the Guild Leader, they usually hush up. One of my officers was really helpful with one case in particular - he pulled them aside and talked to them in the Guild Hall for a bit. The problem member was quiet for a couple of days and then started again - they are now kicked.

I held my first Progress Check with my officers in our Forums and it's really something else. I suspected a couple were wearing the title and not working with the Members and I found out that some of them have been working with the Members but not having much luck in their efforts. Now that the rest of us know they are having some difficulty achieving their goals (like getting members into PvP) we can help them out. Good suggestion on having weekly meetings, here. It keeps the Officers focused on their responsibilities. I did have one Officer voluntarily step down - still an active Member but he didn't feel he had the time to put towards it. Personally, I think he just wanted to actually play more and have fun, so his stepping down was good and respectful of the Guild and our efforts.

i know exactly how it feels to have a small guild. our guild is currently 9 members...not enough diversity for gvg, and no one will jump on board precisley because we are so small. i have recruited one good player out of the last 3 i tried to recruit, i guess thats pretty good odds though. and this guy was only available because his guild just fell apart. *sigh* i wish my guild could grow...

To all with little guilds , Tip-
Never EVER say recruiting, (ur guild name), FIRST 5 BECOME OFFICERS- dont say that, 1/3 of ppl are noobs that join, 1/3 of ppl leave like at max 2 days after, the last 1/3 of people kick members of ur guild then leave. There are only 2 ways to start a successful guild, 1- start with ATLEAST 5 of ur friends that u trust and u know wont leave the guild just becuz its not "big". Or tombs alot until ur rank atleast 6+ and recruit rank 3+s and people will like the fact its a ranked guild so no noobs in the guild(which is another reason why people wont join).