With high activity around November when Wrath came out, things didn’t go on very smooth for our small guild. Around the turn of the year most people turned 80 and then many of us dropped into a hole. Activity is way down and when 3 of the most active members left for a raiding guild it didn’t take a day for the silent complains of many to make it to the guild forums.
The discussion did not end up in quite the usual troublesome manner with people trolling and flaming each other, instead people did get involved, proposed solutions and discussed them. People started taking action to save the guild from disappearing into inactivity. This is a great thing!
Sadly – but not surprisingly – there were also a few complaints directed at the “leadership”. When times are tough people always look for a scapegoat and “leaders” sound like the people that must be the ones at fault. Meant were the guildmaster and I – the two of us are the only people in the guild with the authority to kick someone, clean-up the guild-bank (due to infinite operations – which is 500 in WoW bank terms) and do a couple other things. About a year ago we tried to place the responsibility for the actual leadership on the shoulders of all veteran members of the guild.
It worked out well for our application process for new members. It works without any one person being responsible for directing the process. It didn’t work for “all the rest”. Those complaints – as they always do – hurt. In a weak moment I declared I really didn’t want to be part of the leadership and I just wanted to be another normal member – nothing special – even though the guild is still my baby and I really care a lot about what happens to it.
I am just ranting btw. This post has no big or interesting point beyond trying to explain what is going on in my WoW life.
So while there are solutions in the works for many of the most pressing issues and we still have a very stable core of veterans, we are also facing one major issue that is not easily going to go away: the guild is three and a half years old and the charter is in dire need of being overhauled. We should really rewrite the whole thing.
Old and new members alike tend to look there if faced with a “guild rules” question. More often than not the game and times and practices have changed a lot from our original outlook and a rule that seemed to make sense back then is just plain nonsensical nowadays.
The most prominent example is raiding. Raids have changed so much from what they used to be technically and how they are being executed within the social framework of the game that even our “non raiding guild” has been raiding actively and successfully ever since we had 10 people with a Kara key (well not quite since then but it does sound good that way?). Of course our raiding is still different from many other guilds that raid since certain important parameters in our guild life are still there (RL > WoW being the main one) and we are still trying to do all this in an informal and casual way in many aspects – while we are certainly beyond ‘merely’ casual in other aspects.
We need to reform the guild with a new charter and a mission statement that reflects who we are now and not who we were 3.5 years ago. It is scary, but we want to – for the first time in the guild’s existance – actively search for new members and try to recruit instead of waiting for people to come to us.
So here’s what’s doing in my WoW life … tomorrow night we have a NAX-10 raid scheduled – wish me luck, so far I have only seen 5 bosses on heroic Nax, still missing all level 80 5-mans and done only a single heroic instance (this past Wednesday).
