Guilds are tough to manage in World of Warcraft. You have players who actively try to tear your guild down from within, players who are apathetic to anything the guild is doing that isn’t for them, and a ton of attrition to get through to get a core set of players to join. However, with the right mindset and some luck, you can start and run your own guild without much trouble.
Introduction
The basics to creating and maintaining a good guild involve one simple idea: a common goal. Everyone who joins your guild should have the same goal that you have and your guild needs to be actively developing the ability to or already contain the capacity to meet that goal. For instance, if your goal is build up a solid roleplaying guild, then you need to be a roleplayer yourself and invite only people who want to roleplay the way your guild wants to roleplay. If your goal is to down hard mode instances then you need to be capable of doing hard modes and the members you invite will need to be as well.
Everyone has different goals, but I’ll break them down into two basic groups. “Casual” goals are generally related to the social spectrum of things like roleplaying, chatting, or just cooperative anything goes gaming. The other is the “hardcore” goal set which mostly involves raiding or PvP as a primary focus. There is a big difference between the way you’d run the two types of guilds and we’ll focus on both below.
Leading a Casual Guild
Getting a Casual Guild off the Ground
The most important thing to a casual guild is usually being attractive enough to get likeminded players to join. The hard thing is getting enough people into the guild to make your guild seem fun and energetic, but not invite enough people that it’s just another one of those “Barrens Guilds” or guilds that show up, hang out for a week, and disappear as everyone leaves to the next spamfest of a guild.
My best advice is to seek out and get your friends to join. You’re going to have to keep everyone in your guild entertained, give everyone something that they can do with the guild (instances, RP events, etc.), and maintain the initial disputes and small bubbles of drama that show up in your fledgling guild. Having a core group of friends to help accomplish these things will make your guild much more successful.
Generally you’ll want to spam guild recruitment at first to get people into your guild. It’s a bit sleazy, but you’ll often find a few people who are legitimately interested and make wonderful additions to your guild. My best advice is to screen people by having a bit of a chat with them. If they don’t want to talk to you about what they’re looking for in a guild then just /ignore them and move on. That’s the best way to weed out the strange idle people who randomly join and leave.
After you get people in your guild you’re going to want to be active, especially at the start. Host events, coordinate raids, help people, and do everything you can to make people feel like they’re part of the team and that there is a benefit to being in your guild. If there isn’t anything in it for them then they have no reason to contribute and therefore they move on.
Establish a guild website (GuildPortal works, but something with a real domain and real forums is better) early on and get people to register. Setup your rules (like how loot is handled, what officers do, invitation rules, guild bank rules, etc.) on your website and link the information to all new people. Get an active forum going so that players have a way to talk even when they’re offline and to help coordinate things.
One thing I highly suggest you avoid is taking donations or asking for help to pay for things. Front your own guild banks slots, tabard fees, etc. Many people do not ever want to think about donating to a guild that they don’t know a lot about and you can kick off some early drama when money comes into play. If you’re not a high enough level then you’ll probably have to ask people to chip in, but if you do keep it as something that’s voluntary and only if you want to. Don’t beg or spam for it or you will find that your new recruits will be far more likely to jump ship.
Keeping a Casual Guild Going
Being guild leader can be tough especially if you lose sight of your guild's purpose (click for big).
The number one reason people leave social or casual guilds is because they have no reason to be in them. If there is nothing for them to do with the guild then there is no reason for them to stay with that particular guild. So you have to make sure that you and your officers coordinate things for the guild to do as a whole. This can range from making sure RP events get off the ground to organizing and leading raids. You have to make sure your guild is active. If there aren’t a lot of people on at the times that people play then you’ll need to invite more. If there are too many people on then you’ll want to curb invitations for a bit.
One way to keep people excited about a guild and to help make the guild self-sufficient is to promote contributors to higher ranks. People like having more power within a guild and love the feeling of being rewarded for helping lowbies or doing really well in a raid. Make sure your guild structure allows for some form of advancement for everyone. An alternate view on this is to only have one rank and have everyone treated equally, which works well if you want to establish a mostly social guild.
Avoiding the Casual Drama
Most drama in a casual guild comes from random disputes between members (like loot drama in a 5-man or someone harassing someone else). You can avoid headaches early on by setting up clear rules and making sure people understand them. Not only should you set up clear rules but you should also have a system of punishment for violators and make sure it’s easy to understand. Get rid of any bad apples before they ruin the bunch, but do give them a chance to redeem themselves first to avoid looking like a power-tripping dictator. I find that establishing a three strikes and you’re out rule is generally sufficient to weed out the drama llamas and the people who just screwed up because they didn’t know better.