Basics first …, 😉

What is a guild?

Guild is an association of people, not necessarily with similar interests that work together either with the same profession or in the same community. There is better and longer definition in Wikipedia. This article is about guilds in online games. And those guilds can be a very interesting or very dull place. They may be helpful or totally silent and pointless. There are lots of guild everywhere. Even in places where the server makes it hard or expensive to have a guild.

What is the successful guild?

• This is the guild, that is always active;
• This is the guild, that is always helpful;
• This is the guild, where everyone respects each other;
• This is the guild, that creates online friendships that stay;
• This is the guild, that is a place that everyone wants to go when having time online;
• This guild is not just community, it is your virtual family! Literally. You are even married there.
  

So. What do you need to create successful guild?

Active people. You can’t create a successful guild that has cold dead players. Players that come online once-in-a-week. Create a rule, that everyone not active will be kicked. Especially if the guild creation rules in the server has limited players per guild. And even more, if their “being offline” hurts the whole guild in games like Travian, where being offline for long is not obstacle for your cities being robbed or even devastated to the ground by enemy catapults. Regarding this – be friendly and open, but also harsh and direct – make a rule, that says “everyone, that is going to be active again will be re-invited in the guild“. It is that simple. Remove deadweight and invite more active players. No need to keep level capped officer that’s not helping the guild anymore. Leave him a polite message that space is needed for more players and to tell you, when he is going to play actively again to re-invite him. No one needs zombies in the guild. Even elite officer zombies, are still zombies.

Talkative people. VERY important. At least 3 of them must be online all the time. Why? Because it is boring to ride your horse between 2 cities and you want to see who is needing help, ask who is already in the city you are riding to etc. And more importantly -> more talks = more contacts = more friendship = no boredom = way to know each other better. Even if some members are NOT that much talkative and prefer to go solo, there will always be people who like the guild chat and will try to help others that need something explained or some hard boss to kill or simply need some hard to get/expensive resource and ask if anyone has it. This is extremely helpful when inviting newbie players. When they see the guild is friendly and helpful, they will stay. If the guild chat is dead, most newbie players will be afraid to ask questions. Less newbie questions answered = helpless disoriented newbies = (later becoming) clueless mediocre players = low quality guild = high level players leaving for better guilds = no high level players wanting to enter the guild. Period.

Mutual respect. If you want to collect community of different people who will ALL like each other – you will fail. It is impossible. Every person is different. You can’t tell them to like each other. Imagine a religious forum. There will be a strong presence of Christians, Jewish and Muslim. All three religions are based on a myth from the 5 books of the old testament. The myth of Abraham and his sons. They will form a majority in the forum. But those 3 communities do not mix well at all. You can’t force them to like each other. They will either build respect between them for the common good or they will split the forum in 3 uneven parts. First will leave the fundamental Christians and Muslim, forming their own forums and later they will be followed by the others, that simply miss their old friends or they conform with the decision of the majority. Same will happen to your guild, if you don’t moderate conflicts. Conflicts must be resolved. If they deepen – hatred and competition will lead to a guild divided in camps. You don’t want 3-in-1 guild. You want 1 guild.

Friends

Friends. Create as many as you can and motivate your officers or other empowered guild mates to invite and befriend as many as possible. How to do it? Just help them with advice, tank hard to kill boss for them while leaving them to do the final blow, give them few gold coins or good items without waiting them to ask, go after them and buff and heal them to make their in-game life easier, ALWAYS reply to their appeal if anyone from other guild is bullying them or using offending profanities. You know. The small things, that friends do for each other. This is the path to strong community and good leadership. Later, same those loyal friends will have capped chars with longbows and strong spells that will stand behind your back and will sow mass destruction winning a guild war or killing a boss for you. Get as many as you can. Friends are important. Breed, guard and guide them since level 1.

Spending quality time together. This is also part of the guild life. Make good guild meetings. Create competitions and set good and expensive prizes for the winners. There are some good ideas, we’ve done in our guilds in the last 6 years:

• Hide and seek. Everyone hides in one huge map. One is designated seeker. The person he finds is the next seeker, while the previous is given immunity – he can’t search for him again and even if he finds him – can’t designate him as seeker (but can gossip in private message his whereabouts). The contest is won by the fastest seeker. The reward was premium item gifted from the game shop. Provided by generous guild mate.
• Horse ride. Big round map. Every MMORPG has one. Imagine big map like Evendim lake in LoTRO. Everyone rides his mount. One cycle for premium rides and one cycle for normal rides. Fastest win. Can’t disclose the rewards 😛
• Guild fight. You divide the guild in tiers. Small tiers do not fight big tiers. Make a tournament tree in pairs. Every pair fights each other. The winners in each pair form new pairs. The losers go to the bench and watch. Each tier has its set of rewards. In most cases armors and weapons that are state-of-the-art crafted or rare/epic/legendary. Few times we’ve done monetary rewards of 2 gold for lowest tier to make their life easier (high tier players can collect 10 gold in one afternoon).
• Idiot train. One of the guild members starts walking in the city. Another one sets his char to auto-follow. Another one sets auto-follow on the second member. Another one sets auto-follow on the third  member…. make this with 2 dozens of players and start walking in the city while commenting usual stuff from your guild life and/or last Instance you’ve done together in [shout] or [town chat] or whatever is not-private and everyone listens. Believe me – Lots of people will like it and come and join. This can make even enemy guild friendly towards yours. It’s simply so funny and entertaining, that everyone forgets the bad stuff and joins.

Guild website. With forum. Rank lists, ladders, trade or market corner, possibility to attach in-game pictures with curious stuff etc. Also very important and very good community building approach. You may think of the website as another nuisance you need to remember the password for, but imagine the hours you needed to wait last time when there was server maintenance or game update? Where did you go then? The guild site is important. You may share experience or ask for help. It is also a good place for “working people” to visit at work hours just to say “Hi” and check when and where is the next Guild war or the next Guild instance/skirmish/raid. You can also share who are your alt-characters in the game, so the people may recognize you. You can also post good stuff for sale, that will remain IN the guild. Some market systems in various games allow sales to guild members only – but not in all games.

Few generous people. There are a lot of MMO games that are free2play, but the premium items cost real money. There are also altruist human beings, that don’t care about money. They will actually BUY and gift premium stuff for other guild members. With real-life money. If you find those breed of online gamers, establish sturdy relationship with them. They are not your guild bank or something. You don’t want to milk them like cows. But you also don’t want to lose them, because they are the best asset you have. Give them officer ranks and let them play on your side. This is the best you can do for this breed of good people.

A dozen of capped helpers. They don’t need to be online all the time. They may be your main or your friend guildmate’s old main chars. But you need heavy tanks to kill boss monsters for your weaker low-level guilders. If you want successful guild – you need to have capped chars inside. If you need more space in the guild and don’t play your capped chars for a while – create another guild with -elite suffix and make guild-union or guild-alliance with them. Thus you have 2 guilds. One for normal members and one for elites. Elite guild may also be for guild wars only and membership there can be the best reward for dedicated guild members.

At least few power levelers. This is also important. Even if your guild rules forbid power leveling, you need few of them. And I can explain why :). You will level up one char. Okay. Good. You will level cap and equip all the best legendary junk you’ve found. Good. Now you have excellent Paladin, that can hold 10 demons in check while the archers and mages behind you pump them with arrows and iceballs. Very good.

Now you want to try harder char like burglar/bard/cleric/assassin or whatever else is out there. They are good in single fights, durable and strong. But they don’t have good mob skills. Leveling is very slow, and you want to have this char capped fast, so you can enter next guild war or raid as support. But… you need months of leveling. That’s why you can get one of your guild mates with good mob skills to help you. You make party with him/her and you both go to a place with very high level mobs. You watch and follow while your friends makes the kills. The XP is awesome and you get few levels in a matter of half hour. You only need to make prestige quests and some other important drop quests that you like, instead of doing ALL the quests or being stuck at some level with only ONE repeatable DULL and BORING quest. Some games allow EXTREME power leveling, when character level 1 can benefit from killing a monster level 100. Most of the games have cap though. You don’t benefit from monsters 5 levels below or above your own level. Nevertheless – the power leveling is still possible with a friend with good and fast mobbing skills. He/she gathers 20 monsters around you with kiting and kills them with a single spell, round slash or cloud of poison arrows. This is easy for you and you can also do it later for other players with your own capped char. It is for the good of the guild.

You. And not exactly You, but You. Let me explain. Do not in no case, virtual, verbal, by wet fantasies or whatever other method of self-praising address this guild as YOUR guild. It is not. You cannot build community by saying ME, Mine, My etc. Communities do not work this way. Even if you are the guild founder or leader – address the guild as Our guild, We, Us. If you are not *that* grown up to share power and responsibilities – simply go solo and don’t bother creating a guild just for your own ego and self-esteem “Hey guys, I am the guild master of blah-blah-rangers in P.R.I.D.E… (It) is Some-Incredibly-Neat MMORPG” (Pride is SIN) … “Come join me, so I can benefit from your membership, with guild buffs and weekly guild rewards” (but will never share them with you) etc. We’ve already seen such “supreme leaders” rise and fall. One of them lost interest in Fiesta Online and left to WoW. Never transferred guild leadership to another guild member, because “this is my guild and I have It as my own child“.

We all left and created Redemption. It is still there for Us. One of the most active, best and oldest guilds in the server. That’s because we are community. Not just one person. Even if someone like me leaves the guild, someone else takes the place of active-helper-powerleveler. The warrior falls, the community survives.

So lets summarize:

• ~3 chatters.
• ~3 power levelers.
• ~12 capped people.
• ~3 generous helpers.
• “You”.

~= 20 people who need to be online often. This is the core of the guild. If the roster allows officer roles, those are the people that deserved them by their persistence and dedication to this guild. Give them officer rights and ask them to invite more active people, some of their friends, some of their acquaintances in other guilds, even members of their former guilds or members of enemy guilds that wish to defect. People that are proven to be team players and active participants of the guild life.

With this friendly bunch – You can’t fail 😉