We both know that officers are in it for the power or the phat lewtz the guild is not likely to be successful in the long term as the members realize there’s two tiers of players.

Lastly, I fully agree that WoW guilds are volunteer organizations. That places emphasis on my point that if you don’t keep your players and officers happy they will move on. The trick is finding those leaders who can be happy with the way you run things.

I don’t have anything against our GM, but I don’t get the impression that he’s particularly approachable. In that if I ever had a problem with the guild, the first thing I’d do would be to speak to my Hunter class lead, because from where I am to where the GM is there’s a pretty big gap of sorts.

The Hunters in the guild are all pretty close-knit, but perhaps because of the class lead system we end up needing spokespeople for better communication. On the exception of the folks I’ve befriended during my stay in the guild, I don’t know the other class leads very well either.

It’s probably just me, but almost all of the successful guilds I’ve been in have GMs that are main tanks, most often a Warrior. And they all have the mount from Attumen. And an Amani War Bear. ….

This sums up my feelings in a nutshell.

When it comes to guild leadership, unlike real life, I find it best to have ONE person making the calls. Keep an open democracy as much as possible, but that single entity (GM/Raid Leader or whatever you deem it in game) needs to be calling all the shots.

As you can see with today’s current struggles in the US and world when too many people have a say in how things are run, chaos ensues…

Keep an open mind, but be firm and just with your decisions (as well as consistant).

wowbloggers last blog post..Stuck in the World of Warcraft

wowbloggers last blog post..Stuck in the World of Warcraft

wowbloggers last blog post..Stuck in the World of Warcraft

As for mideval guilds, the work by the craftsmen were interchangeable, but the members themselves were not mobile and it was very easy for the master to control ones ability to perform their work and earn a living. That said, craftsmen and guilds were the extreme minority as the typical person lived in a villiage working the land for someone else hoping that they would leave enough of the harvest to make it through the winter. As for my comment on replacable, there are dozens of players that can fill whatever roll you fill in a guild. In mideval times, if a craftsmen departed for whatever reason, it took years to replace their talent. Bob dies to the plauge and Tom can do his work, but you are still one person short and overall production declines.

What you get is responsibility, and some people enjoy that (no really, they do). I find that the people who stick with leadership positions over the long haul and do well in them have something of a caretaker personality. They don’t want loot/power/adoration–they just want to do something the right way.

I think that’s why my fellow officers haven’t left for more progressed guilds (we’ve just now cleared T6) even though they certainly could. Players who make good officers tend to be idealistic in a sense–they want things to always be better, more fair. But they’re also disciplined enough to actually do a little work. Usually, they are people who manage others in real life, large or small-scale (parents, teachers, businesspeople, etc) and have picked up a sense of how well-run organizations function.

I also don’t think, bearcat, that you’ve got a good fix on the medieval guild concept. Perhaps I should have explained the comparison a bit more clearly. It’s kind of the point that every guild member’s work is interchangeable and indistinguishable–so each craftsman is in a sense mobile, and “journeymen” did in fact move around a bit. The masters dictate the style, not the individual artists working for them. There’s a good reason there’s so much stuff labeled “workshop of Palma il Vecchio,” etc. in museums. The hand of the individual is extremely hard to trace.

I believe that it is the job of the guild master to dictate the style in which the guild runs itself, but that it also the job of the GM to share around the decision-making with other well-informed responsible players. Otherwise, if the GM gets a bad cold and is out for a week, the whole structure might crumble.

Warcraft guilds, unlike their mideval counterparts, are comprised of highly mobile, easily replaceable members. That includes the officers and the GM. We found guilds, lead them, or join them for the simple reason we beleive we can accomplish our individual objectives better with the guild than with another or solo.

Delegation only works when you have the carrots and sticks requried to ensure the person you are delegating to will do what needs to be done. The only carrots and sticks you have in WoW is satisfying a persons in games objectives.

Therefore when selecting your officers you need to ensure that the guild you are offering to share leadership with accomplishes their personal objectives. If not they will not be a good officer for your guild.