Guild Meeting Outcome
Ok, so last night we had a guild meeting. We had the officer portion first and then moved into the general population meeting. What follows is a summary of what was discussed.
Overview
When I was in officer portion of the meeting, I started it off by asking “Who here thinks the guild is really healthy and doing great?” Nobody there thought so. They are right; STNY has a bunch of problems that are slowly sucking the life out of the guild. We identified a number of things that are contributing to this, primarily though they fit into two categories: poor communication and self-oriented attitudes. Our guild, up to now, hasn’t really enforced a focus or a guild direction. This isn’t working and we’re changing it. PVE is our main focus, and most of us enjoy PVP on the side. As such, we will have to make sacrifices to progress, and PVE needs to be the top priority. I’ll discuss the implications of this more a bit later in this post. On to the communication aspect of where we are having problems…
Communication
Officers: We’re not doing a good job on our end of the deal. We aren’t setting good examples, we’re not communicating amongst one another, recruits, or the rest of the guild. I appologize for this. I’m awake and I’m going to try to get the other officers awake and actually doing stuff here. In this vein, one of the changes we’re going to make is make 2 flavors of officers (able to be determined on the guild tab in-game). The first flavor is the officers who are willing and have the time to put in the extra effort necessary to get the guild running smooth. The other flavor will be more of an honorary position in the guild (due to long term commitment, or what have you). Each officer will be able to determine which they want themselves to be in. The ones who decide to be active and get their hands dirty I’m going to expect to start picking up slack that is not happening now. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Communicating with applicants
- Running raids to get people geared
- Posting on stny.org
Class Leads: We want to establish some individuals in the guild who are balls-to-the-wall about their class and have them push the other people in their class to play at the peak of their ability. I’d prefer to pick individuals who are non-officers for this, and we already picked some from the guild. These people are going to be responsible for getting the communication within a particular class flowing. The first task I gave them was to obtain the contact information (Real Name, e-mail, IM, and phone number) for everyone who raids from their class. After that I want them to figure out what each of the members of their class needs to perform their best. Then they can give that info to the officers to get some raids together and make sure these needs are being met.
- Druids
- Hunters
- Viridian
- Mages
- Euge
- Paladins
- Serpa
- Priests
- Rogues
- Ambushed
- Warlocks
- Softball
- Warriors
I’ll update this portion more as we fill in the details.
Guildmate-to-Guildmate communication: In order to facilite this a bit more, we have two new changes.
1. The stny.org forums. We are going to require everyone to make an account, and if need be we are going to require that people check it at a regular interval. A ton of information gets lost in the fold because people aren’t keeping up to date on guild affairs. This is the primary medium with which to do this. These forums are still in a beta quality. I made a special forum specifically for bugs relating to how broke it is (and I’m sure things are still very broken).
2. We are going to require every member of the guild to be online in Ventrilo if they are in the game. This also implies that you need to have a mic. We need people to stop being strangers and forming into little cliques if we want to succeed. We understand that everyone doesn’t always want to be chatty, so there is a Quiet Channel you can go to if you want to listen to music or such.
Self-oriented VS Guild-oriented
This is another large problem area in the guild. When you look at our guild roster, we’ll have a few people in this instance, a few more in another, a few in AB, a few in AV, or whatever. During primetime, in the evenings, this needs to change. This means that if you are in PUG instance trying to get gear, and a guild raid is being formed, you are expected to offer to come along if need. Even if that means leaving an instance you need something in to help out with one you don’t need anything in. This also means, that if you are PVPing, and we need you, you are expected to AFK out and come help us. It’s time to start putting the guild above and beyond PUG groups, your own loot, and PVPing. Now, this doesn’t mean that if you need something you say in guildchat “Please help me do this” and then complain to an officer later that nobody dropped what they were doing to help you. What this means is you talk to your Class Lead, explain what your character needs, and they will relay this information to the officers. The officers will the proceed to coordinate a raid and then post it on the schedule so people can show up and get what they need.
I’m sure some might be worried that we won’t be PVPing anymore. This is not at all the case. However, if we PVP, I expect it to be as a guild or in spare time. Not when people need your help.
Another aspect of this self-oriented stuff that is hindering us is specs. For example, about half our raid will be shadow priests. This is unnacceptable, when we only should be bring at most one shadow priest. When we were trying to beat Rag, the mages respecced Frost. Priests aren’t the only class this is a part of, and it comes down to the general attitude of what we are trying to accomplish here: rather than logging in saying “what can I do for my character, login and think “what can I do for STNY”.
Officer Merit
The other large change we are going to make, as it will help enhance communication, encourage people to work for the benefit of the guild, and also solve some problems with loot is we are switching the loot system to officer merit. Systematically, it will work similar to how we do things now. Here’s the process.
- Boss dies
- Loot Officer links drops
- Item will be linked
- If you want the item, you send tells to loot officer, WITH THE ITEM(S) YOU CURRENTLY USE IN THAT SLOT
- Officers look at various data points, discuss the merits of the people who want it
- Person who is chosen to win, loots
We’re going to still keep the spreadsheet, but we’re going to add a few more columns too it so we can make better decisions about loot. One of the big additions is we are going to count how many non-farm status raids you come on the previous week. So the next time we do a farm status instance, the people who are doing non-farm status raids are going to get a big boost in terms of loot. We are also going to start tracking when the last time you get loot is. This way we can make sure people aren’t going forever without getting this. We will still post these spreadsheets and will most likely make a specific forum on the new forums just to handle issues that may arrise from this switch. There will be more clarification on this in the days to come (we haven’t even worked out all the details of it yet ourselves).
Summary
Here’s the main changes you need to be aware of:
- If you are in WoW, you have to be in Vent
- You have to have a forum account, and check both the forums and this site
- We now have class leaders, who will be guiding you in-game
- We are switching to officer merit loot system
- Two officer flavors, one for active officers, one for passive officers
- We now expect you to help the guild above all other activities
Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments of this post or on the new forums. Let’s get out act together, put the fun back in the game, and start kicking ass again.