small-guilds
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Hyperspace Beacon: Five tips for making SWTOR conquests work for smaller guilds
In my last column, I explained the shortcomings of the conquest system in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Despite the issues I have with the system, I still think it's a great way to encourage players to revisit older content, and most importantly, to build guild unity. I know there are some guilds on my server in which members don't even have to participate at all in conquests for that guild to appear on the top ten. But what about those guilds who don't have hundreds of members? What about those guilds who have maybe 20 or so members? Can they even compete? My guild has about 20 people who log in on raid nights; when the raid is done, maybe five or six will stick around. Now, I'm not saying that this is a healthy state for a guild (we are looking for more members!), but the few dedicated members pulled us ahead. For the last two weeks, our guild was in the top 10, and not barely in the top 10 either. This week we hit number seven, and the week before we were six. Here are my tips for how your small guild can get ahead in conquests, too.
[1.Local]: Readers dig into this week's stories
[1.Local] serves up a smattering of reader comments from the past week, from the sublime to the ridiculous.Nostalgia threads are among our reader favorites, so quite a few commenters this week chimed in on what Old World instances they'd most like to see made heroic (if such a thing were ever to happen). Readers chimed in on not one but two posts examining whether players should be embarrassed (or even ashamed) of their WoW playing. We chatted about whether or not the story behind WoW really matters and about cool things to do while we're fishing. This was also a week about preparations. We discussed shaping up smaller guilds for 10-man raiding in Wrath, and we talked about gearing up for PvP from scratch in the face of Season 4's debut. And finally, we had a rather hilarious take on hunter strategy – fuzzy logic, or no?Be sure to dive into the comments area of each thread (not this one!) and add your own thoughts – unlike your mama, we like us some hot, fresh backtalk.
Officers' Quarters: A crossroads for small guilds
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Small, casual guilds often have it the toughest of all. They don't have the numbers to run the 25-player content. They often have only a small handful of tanks and healers. With such few resources, how do you attract anyone new in order to maintain any semblance of a guild after people quit? It looks like life may become much easier for these guilds once Wrath of the Lich King launches. But that puts all the small guilds at a crossroads of sorts. What, this week's e-mail asks, should they all do in the meantime?Hello Scott, I am an officer of a guild on the Llane server on the alliance side. Our guild has existed for the past 2 years and have been very casual and most of us have become good friends through the course of the game. [. . .] We were clearing kara weekly at one point and since we are a very small guild, we only had 1 set of tanks and healers. The kara farming stopped when our Main Tank got all his drops and seeing that Kara was as far as we were going at that time, just stopped tanking to level an alt. He got bored and blamed us for not gearing up any other tanks. We were recruiting actively at that time and got a few other tanks, but we never had any set times for raids. This killed the spirit for the people who were new and they moved on to other guilds. Of course this hurt our numbers and we finally got back to doing Kara about 3 months later with the core group's alts filling in the tank and healer roles. A note about our core group . . . we gelled so well that we used to do Moroes with no crowd control and 7 out of 10 players in blues and greens. The group just worked and we made the best out of it. With alts tanking and healing, we got to clear Kara.
Guild size matters not, judge us by our size do you?
Our guild isn't large by any means. In fact, we're a tiny guild, although that's not for want of effort. The Rogue Knights has been around on Elune since beta, and has had a constant stream of very good players throughout our time on the realm. However, a while back a group of players decided to leave the guild, and since then we haven't quite recovered. How can a few simple people make the difference? Well, these players have gone on to form the core players in some of the largest guilds on the server, so you can see how that might affect our guild. Another reason we are still small is simple: we have standards. Not to say other guilds don't have standards, it's just that we are the sort of people that expect people to spell out their words in guild chat, to be kind and courteous to other players while in Azeroth, and expect them to help others whenever possible. These may sound like basic rules, but I have personally had to boot people from our guild for acts in instances or general chat that simply aren't nice. What this means is that the players that don't do these things, the gankers and the ninjas who happen to get invited to the guild, eventually these people leave the guild, either by themselves or by force. I see many of these players around the realm in my travels, and it is interesting how often they guild hop in their time in WoW. I think it comes down to expectations of players. Some guilds will accept players based on their class, gear, etc. Our guild, being the ultimate of casual groups, tends to focus on how the player interacts with others, in the guild and outside the guild. What this all means, really, is that in the end, there is room for everyone in WoW, but not everyone in a guild. While some guilds focus on player attendance, others focus on player interaction, and still others focus on nothing at all. What a wonderful virtual world, in which everyone is accepted, and all find a home. No, we can't all be in raiding guilds, but not all of us want to be in one.
