I know you love your guild – but how much do you love your guild?

Don’t worry, you can change names to protect the innocent, you can be as vague as you want to be, or you can be as specific if you want to be if you love your guild and all of the people in it. A lot of us absolutely love our guilds and everything about them, and a lot of us absolutely hate our guilds and are only sticking around for one reason or another. What’s your story?

Every guild has issues, there’s no doubt about that, but I think I can attest to the amount of guild drama that any person has to deal with tends to center around why your guild does what it does.

Are you in a hardcore raiding guild? You’re likely to have loot drama, raiding drama, and benchwarmer’s drama – you know the kind, where people have to sit out raids and get upset because someone they think doesn’t deserve the raiding slot gets it over them, or because the shaman got that epic mace instead of the rogue.

Is your guild a casual, friends-only guild? You’ll probably get social drama: “Why did she say that about me?” “So and so doesn’t like me and doesn’t invite me to heroics.”

If you’re prepped and ready for those things, you’ll probably enjoy your guild experience much more than someone who’s in the guild for a different reason. For example, the hardcore raider who joins the social, casual guild, only to gquit a week later because they’re not running heroics every night and raiding three times a week. Or alternatively the socialite who wants to make friends who joins a hardcore raiding guild that treats their gameplay like a job will naturally find themselves wishing they’d never applied after a week or so.

Me? I love my guild – I’m definitely a more casual player, looking to run dungeons and experience content at a leisurely pace – I don’t need to raid three times a week – maybe here and there on the weekends. I’d rather make close friends than have a character decked out in epics, but I don’t think you have to sacrifice one for the other.

So what about you? What’s the secret to finding a great guild, and what’s the secret to staying happy? Have you found the perfect guild, or are you still searching? Shout it out in the comments!

I’ve known a number of people who gave hardcore raiding a try and left in favor of a more laid back casual guild environment: a group of people who were friends as well as teammates, where people logged in to do more than just hit the scheduled raid time. The huge hulking raiding guilds are usually comprised of people who are more serious about the game than they really are about being social with one another (yes, I realize there are a number of exceptions to this), so some players are confronted with the choice: raid and progress, or make friends and play together. Don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of room in between these two, but most people will come down harder on one side or the other. This isn’t really an RP, PvE, PvP issue – there are plenty of people who come down on either side regardless of the game style they prefer. But let’s talk about the casual, friendly side for a bit.

I’ve been in a number of guilds since I started playing the game, some of them incredibly personal, some of them ridiculously impersonal and hostile to new people, some of them so insular that you could never penetrate the wall of clique that was already there, some of them warm and inviting. All of them however have been largely social guilds with light, casual raiding – never more than once or twice a week, usually weekends when everyone had some time off work or school. But one thing that’s happened to nearly all of them is that the casual simply grows too casual – people start drifting off, leveling alts that aren’t in the guild, the raids go from stuffed so full people have to get benched to so empty they’re cancelled for months at a time, and eventually to the point where you can sign on during peak hours and there’s no one there.

This happened in a guild that I ran for a while, and again in a guild that I’m happily a member of because I have many many friends in it. So this brings me to the question: how many of you has this happened to? Lots of people love casual guilds, but how casual is so casual that you’re willing to leave it for another guild-even if you have friends in it? Is there such a thing as a “too casual” guild, or is that the very definition of casual, and “casual raiding” is an oxymoron?

I’ll admit that partially this is me dealing with my own thoughts, but partially I’m curious how universal this experience is. Fire away in the comments, and I’ll include your responses in a follow up post later!

Loot rules for guilds vary about as widely as guilds do; more often than not no two systems are truly alike. Even so, most of them can be traced back to some similar system, like the widely used and adopted DKP system. WoW Insider wrote about SWAPS this week, a new system I hadn’t heard about before, but what about your guild? What loot distribution system do you use? How do your raid leaders decide who gets what?

Our guild doesn’t really have a system, and perhaps that’s one of the defining factors of a casual guild – the people who make the runs get to roll on anything they want or need – need if you need it, greed if you want it or no one needs it, and usually our folks are good enough to ask up front “mind if I roll need on that?” and we can scorn them if they shouldn’t or approve if they should. It’s never really backfired on us.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been the occassional “but that’s a bigger upgrade for me than the person who outrolled me” drama, or the ocassional confusion from people who are filling slots on a raid with us. But while that works for us, the biggest raids we’ve ever organized have been 10-mans.

If you’re in a raiding guild, how does your guild handle loot? How do you manage pugs? Do you think the rules would be different for guilds running 10-mans versus 25-man instances? Does your guild’s loot system work for you, date back to the old days of 40-mans, or is it fundamentally broken? Let us know in the comments!

Good to be back and writing. To set things off on the right foot, I figured I might as well shoot straight for the big one and bring you my ultimate list of Top Six Guild Names We Could Live Without. So, without further ado I bring you… the LIST:

6. “Cliche of Place” guilds. “Defenders of Azeroth”, “Knights of Stormwind”, “Killers of Hearthglen”. “Heroes of the Horde” are chewed out, cliched, and as unique as Ford F-150s in Dallas, TX. Your guild name should stand for something, not just your inability to think of a good one.

5. Ümløût åbüße – if you can’t spell it without putting accent characters all over the place there’s three reasons. Either the original name is barred from being used, someone else already grabbed it, or you’re just in love with bad 1980’s Amiga BBS jargon. Accent characters stopped being hip when Mötley Crüe sold their second album.

4. Fad names. “Two Draenei one Cup” was funny for a week.  “QQ Pew Pew” for two. Ain’t no more.

3. The “Daddy took me to the movies” guild name. “Spartans” was a good name before 300 was released. “Browncoats” still is, because only insiders get it. It ends there. “House Hufflepuff” is as unlikely to attract players with anything but a two-hour playtime allowance on weekends, after chores and homework, as “Fellowship of the Ring” is.

2. The “what’s so bad about it?” name. “Sapped girls can’t say no”, “Come in the Van”, “Naga stole my bike”, “Your mom is a Horde” are – at best – immature jokes that stopped being funny about a second after they’ve been uttered the first time. Should you find yourself still finding them funny I recommend a deep and long soul searching.

and, finally,

1. Any guild named Drama, Nihilum, Death and Taxes, Aftermath, Premonition, Death Wish or any of the other so-called “bleeding edge” guilds, unless you’re the original. Naming your guild after one of those not only shows a lack of actual creativity, it’s the WoW equivalent of a slightly pudgy teenager wearing a Chicago Bulls 23 shirt and thinking anyone will mistake him for (or think him capable of playing like) Michael Jordan.

So much for guilds. Next time we’ll talk about the top character names that should get their owner kicked in the bee-hind.

Well my (now former) guild, of which I was a charter member (one of the first 5 folks) has unceremoniously dumped me, without so much as a whisper or mail in-game.

Not that I wanted flowers or a “Dear John” letter, but the original Guild organizer had left to pursue interests outside of Azeroth and I had never done much with the group, but I did trade some items and run some quests, so I wasn’t a complete unknown.

Now, unfortunately, I’m getting messages left and right from folks I’ve never met recruiting me to this guild or that. I think I’m better off – especially since I’m a haphazard-playing, tanking Druid – to just finding random “friends” and enjoying the game that way.

Is my guild assessment wrong? Should I have done more? Is it wrong of them to dump me this way with no notification? Is it kosher to just invite folks willy-nilly to a guild without playing alongside them first?

I actually feel sad a bout this.

The good thing that happened this weekend was that I had a second character hit 70, and my main got attuned for Karazhan. The bad thing that happened was that guild drama is escalating, and this morning I removed all of my alts from the guild, including the level 70 hunter. (I left the lock.)

I’m reading about a lot of guilds who are going through the same issues; everyone from Tobold to wow_ladies are posting the same things.

Pre-TBC, I wrote about the changes to guilds build around raiding 40-man instances that TBC was likely to cause. And you know what? I was wrong, and I was right. Guilds are imploding, but it seems to be for a reason that I never anticipated: previously supportive guilds dividing out into haves and have-nots, per Tobold’s post.
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After I logged on last night, someone in my guild asked if anyone wanted to run ZF.
“Oh good!” I thought. “A guild run would be a nice change from the PuGs I usually suffer through.”
So even though I’ve been trying to run Mara more lately, at lvl 51 I still had Divino-Matic Rod that I needed to get out of my quest log. So I grouped up. It was me, the inviter (lvl 54 priest), another guild member and two others.

We get into ZF and start working our way though. Things were going ok, I suppose, until we got to the temple. Yeah, you know the part where you release the prisoners and all hell breaks loose? Suddenly we get:
“BRB guys i’m mad thirsty” from the healer.
WHAT?!
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Well, as you know if you are a member of a raiding guild, or if you read WOW-related blogs (why else would you be here?), Blizzard has made the announcement that Burning Crusade instances will be capped at 25 players rather than 40 for current endgame instances. If your guild is anything like mine, there has been a lot of talk and consternation about this change. From the smaller guilds, and the casual player base, of course, the reaction has been much more positive.

I’m split on this issue. For our guild, which is based on having enough people to do 40-man instances 3+ times a week, I think it will be disastrous. Everyone is working together in a well-disciplined team, and although there are always more players on than there are spots for, there just aren’t enough for two good groups of 25, not to mention the issue about putting most-skilled players in both groups. This issue will split large guilds.
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I’m thinking about transferring characters to another realm. My main raids several times a week, and I spend most of the rest of my time on alts, which are unguilded. I solo a lot. As these alts reach endgame, I’d like to raid with them, but in most raiding guilds alts a) aren’t welcome in MC/BWL, and b) can’t compete with mains for drops – fair enough, I admit. But these are characters that I spend a lot of time playing. I’d like to be able to raid with them. And that brought me to the decision that I’d like to join another guild with them.

I like the idea of serious all-girl guilds, although I personally haven’t seen any strong ones. Which led to the thought that perhaps I’d like to start one myself. (eek!!!) Bad idea? Possibly…perhaps even probably. Read on, and tell me what you think.
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When dealing with an online economy, you can expect an amount of scamming to come with the territory. I had considered myself impervious to scamming until a few months ago. What follows is a cautionary tale…
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