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Leaders of Guilds, lend me your EXP!


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(I went to post this in the guilds sub-forum, but I guess that's not a thing outside of the LFGuild section so uh- here I am!)

Introductions, I'm Lavren ingame and I've been co-running a medium sized guild in this game for about 3 & 1/2 years now (the guild itself has been around since 2011).Over the last two years or so we've transitioned from a Guild Wars only guild, to more of a multi-game community with the aid of a Discord server replacing our traditional forum and skype group chat gone are the days of waking up to 500+ skype messages, 50% of which are just keysmashes.

It's come to that time of the start of the year "state of the guild" review when I and the other 5 leaders get together and brainstorm what we can do to keep things interesting for members, and reliably active as we continue to change. I wanted to make this thread because after reading up some rather outdated threads and blogs on guild leadership/managing communities, finding useful Guild Leader resources or relevant experiences is like drawing blood from a stone.I'm not making this thread to judge , or to dredge up past drama- I understand every guild has different standards and expectations of their members so there's not going to be a one-fix-all solution, but perhaps by talking about this stuff it can be helpful to others in similar situations!

I'd be very interested to hear from other guilds and clans, what you do, and have done, that has worked (and what didn't work) in keeping members interested and active, how you tackle burnout amongst leaders/officers, periods of stagnation when there are several months between content releases, and different opinions and stances on recruitment- whether actively spamming map-chat or sending "cold call" PM's to tagless people, or passively putting an advertisement up here in the forums/reddit/guildex etc and waiting it out.

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I will be honest with you. I don't believe in multi-game community. Such a community simply has a very weak social core since members are spread out across games. It also very hard to manage such a community if people do jump from game to game, it also reducing different games' guild activity level and even skill level.

Now, I assume you are talking with focus on gw2 community. Well. We did nothing much, just continue what we always been doing - raid, wvw, fotm etc.. The thing about game is, people will quit if things get boring, it is inevitable. There are people that do stay for the community but it is minority and they become your core social group. it really is just part and parcel of a game cycle or in this case, a guild cycle. You simply just replace the people that quit and keep moving on. Eventually, your guild will reach a point with those constant recruitment and strike a internal balance of this typical guild cycle.

As for those lottery or whatever ideas that blogs always suggest, those are worthless to old guilds. For old guilds, is all about striking a balance alongside this cycle of people quitting, returning, new blood joining, training up while hopping to build up further or maintain your core social group.

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I come from the background of leading a Casual community which has a very high revolving door turnover. We see roughly 100-200 players a year fade out and about another 100 return to the community. We have never removed inactive members and do our best to stay in touch with them. But with Gamer ADHD taking over the modern gamer it is near impossible to keep someone focused on 1 game like we did back in our DAOC / WAR times. There is just too much distraction. The key is that you continue to fill the gap of players that are exiting with some new faces.

We at Gaiscioch also have a rotating Eldership team where our officers / trusted advisors are not a permanent position. We scale it up and down as needed based on the number of active players we're dealing with. All of our elders know this going into it that they're filling a role that may not be needed in the future. We also began to diversify away from Single Chapters to now running dozens of adventures in other games too. The key is to keep your community in front of people as they play other games.

I don't think keeping 100 people engaged in a single game is as easy as it used to be. Thats going to be a challenge and from my experience the more you try to force something the worse it implodes in the long run. Let people follow what excites them and you'll have a much happier community in the long run. You can see our "Year in Review" at:

You can see what we've done as a community at: https://www.gaiscioch.com/Be sure to click on the Adventures and Marketplace areas. Those are two of our members favorite sections.

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I've been part of a multi-game guild for over a decade now and GW2 is the 5th or 6th game I've seriously played because of the guild.

@"ParagonPaladin.7516" said:Over the last two years or so we've transitioned from a Guild Wars only guild, to more of a multi-game community with the aid of a Discord server replacing our traditional forum and skype group chat gone are the days of waking up to 500+ skype messages, 50% of which are just keysmashes.
I miss those days, our guild forums had over 300,000 posts, but social media killed the forum experience.

I'd be very interested to hear from other guilds and clans, what you do, and have done, that has worked (and what didn't work) in keeping members interested and active, how you tackle burnout amongst leaders/officers, periods of stagnation when there are several months between content releases, and different opinions and stances on recruitment- whether actively spamming map-chat or sending "cold call" PM's to tagless people, or passively putting an advertisement up here in the forums/reddit/guildex etc and waiting it out.

Keeping members interested and active is the single hardest thing. The only method I've found that consistently works is getting them to buy into a common goal. For certain games for us this was literally guild wars, wars with other guilds with pking, espionage, and other role-playing goodiness.

That's harder to pull off in GW2 because there's no open world pvp. Your guild hall is probably maxed and guild missions are a tedious chore. Spvp and fractals are limited to 5 players and raids are 10, so those don't help. Most world bosses and metas are also a cake walk. It's worth looking at content people wish they could do more of, but nobody organizes. You do have a couple options:

  1. WvW, can get dozens of players on a map and run guild builds. The alliance system will make this more rewarding when launched. This is a super common thing people organize, but it's still a load of fun. Especially if you bring in normally pve players and train them, you'd be surprised how many people love it once they try it, but wouldn't other wise. Consider a mix of open field battles and attacking objectives. Also consider switching guild missions to wvw and trying to accomplish those.
  2. Triple Trouble is a hard meta to pug, and if it fails you can burn a guild world event to try again until you get it.
  3. There are players interested in Serpent's Ire in Vabbi, which is also hard to pug mostly because it's obscure.
  4. Bounty trains through PoF are rare, and you could be known as the guild for that.
  5. Some neglected maps are actually super fun and profitable. Dry Top is underappreciated, yet a T6 map drops loads of loot and is hard to achieve. Depending on the weekly map bonus rewards, Cursed Shore or other Orr maps/Frostgorge can drop a ton of loot by farming events.

Burn out can be tackled by identifying members interested in leadership and mentoring them. Allow them to take a leading role in organizing things. You or another leader might start doing WvW runs twice a week or Dry Top T6 runs on the weekends, but if you see certain rank-and-file members really enjoying organizing them, allow them to help and maybe run it during some of the nights.

Warm calling is better than cold calling. Your guild organized a thing successfully, people saw it and want to do more of it, and will join your guild.

The PoF guild hall is the rarest guild hall, so owning that might buy you some recruiting credit.

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