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The Guild Counsel: How guild meetings can help your guild
I know what you're thinking after reading the title of this week's column. Why in the world would anyone want to have a meeting in-game when many of us spend our days in meeting for our work? But holding a short guild meeting every so often can actually help curb guild drama, boost morale, and bring your guildmates closer together. The relatively short time spent bringing the guild together can pay off later on by reducing time spent on drama created by miscommunication, low morale, and frustration. In today's Guild Counsel, let's take a look at why you should consider holding a meeting and how that guild meeting can improve your guild overall.
The Guild Counsel: Cutting back on wasted time
If there's one thing that every guild has trouble with, it's making the best use of everyone's time. When someone's soloing, she's free to play at any pace, any time. But when you're trying to coordinate groups and raids, it's a lot more complicated. Not only are there overall guild goals, but each individual has different needs and goals as well, and it's not always possible to nail them all at once. Wasted time is a quiet problem, but the worse it gets, the more likely it can be a potential guild-breaker. In this week's Guild Counsel, let's look at a few ways that players' time gets wasted and examine some options to prevent it.
Ghostcrawler on guild organization in Cataclysm
In response to players' concern over guild organization and management in Cataclysm, Ghostcrawler's been frequenting a thread answering questions about their design goals for guild leveling and why developers decided to axe guild talent trees. While you should definitely read all of his responses, there are a few points concerning the new system that really jump out: They didn't want to encourage guild-hopping, and forcing a guild to pick and choose among talents would have wound up suiting some players and not others (e.g. a guild leader picking PvE-oriented guild talents and alienating the more PvP-focused players in the guild). Hence the leveling system rather than the almost-inevitable squabble over which talents to get. Because only a certain number of people in the guild can advance your "level" at one time, there's a cap on the advantage a large guild would otherwise have held. "The guild bonuses used to be talents. They are now more like leveling spells. We call them perks now instead of talents. We haven't cut any content, but just changed the UI from boxes with prereqs to a list." The hazing ritual to get into Ghostcrawler's guild "is pretty dehumanizing." The upshot is that Blizzard's trying to encourage guildies to stick together and reap the benefits of a strong guild without punishing players who don't feel they've got any choice but to move. I was initially worried about guild talents for just that reason, and the "leveling" system sounds like a much healthier way to do this.
