I Sheep Things…

Our guild is under new leadership.

We’d been under a lot of strain to start moving the guild forward. The most progressed members were quitting in favor of finding raiding guilds, and we were getting less and less ready to start making progress of our own. We’d gone beyond stagnating to sliding backwards. People were discontent and there was open fighting in guild chat. Some key members and an officer quit because of the quarrel. People were getting kicked, and friendships (including one of mine) were irreparably destroyed. Basically, things were going downhill FAST, and the guild was headed for a breakup.

And then on Thursday night, the stars aligned, and most of the key players on the guild were online at once. The officers started talking about how the guild could be saved. Most of us thought it couldn’t, and were actually considering where we’d go once the guild finally bit the dust. But then we started talking about possibly starting a new guild, one that didn’t have the problems of the old guild.

You see, our guild had a few major issues, that despite the goodwill and determination of the members, we weren’t able to fix for ourselves:

1) The GM was kind of a noob. And he was never around, he was young and kept getting grounded from WoW by his parents, so he’d disappear for long stretches without telling us. That meant anything that had to be dealt with on the guild-wide level never was. The officers who were active and who knew what they were doing couldn’t promote new officers if we needed them,  we couldn’t change the guild settings to fix things like invite problems. We couldn’t set up guild events in the calendar. Basically, the GM didn’t run the guild, and he didn’t empower us to the point where we could.

2) The guild bank was a disaster. I didn’t know the guild bank was such a big deal… I really didn’t. But it was. Without an active GM, there was nobody who could keep it organized. There was nobody who could prune out the forty thousand bandages someone thought they should put in there. Nobody could make new tabs, or name the existing tabs to give us an idea of how to organize ourselves. Nobody had enough withdraws a day to keep things tidy. And there was no control to keep ninjas from taking the good stuff, so nobody trusted it enough to put good stuff in. Nothing destroys a community like knowing anything you contribute will be yoinked by a thief.

3) The officers got frustrated and abdicated. The first officer, Drelor the ret pally, decided WoW was eating his life and quit the game. The second, Frost, decided he was never going to get to raid, so he promoted his alt – a less than 40 holy pally- and shipped his main out to greener pastures. The third, Kes, got his account hacked, had to reroll because his main couldn’t be saved, and then burned out and quit the guild after a personal quarrel. That left Nael and me, recently promoted and clueless with a deteriorating guild on our hands. Bad stuff.

4) The guild lacked direction. We didn’t have a goal, and people knew it. It was depressing.

5) Everyone could invite, so we were constantly swarmed by ninjas. It was still depressing. Our GM had the theory that “more members is better” without regard for quality.

6) Promotions were given out based on time served. This led to people with no business being guild officers clamoring to be given the spots the old officers had vacated. With Nael and me, of course, unable to promote them because our permissions were too low. Delightful.

So we quit. The whole guild, basically in unison, said: “We want to play together, but we need a guild with rules and structure and a leader who logs in now and then.” And we formed a big raid group and met outside the gates of Orgrimmar to sign our new charter. Since we were going to be the same guild under new management we kept the guild name basically intact. We are now Blood Tide (where the old guild was Bloodtide). But we changed the tabard completely, where the old was a blood-drenched red with heavy black accents, we went with grey and white for the new, with an upthrust spear emblem. It’s a clean slate and a fresh start for us!

The leadership team is as follows: GM is Naelian  on his new main, Corridon. Co-Leaders are myself and Kes (who was persuaded to return because he loves a challenge, we hope it will cure his burnout and return him to us soon!). We’ve made a staggered tier of officers, we have a few captains who are in charge of recruiting and etc. We have a few lieutenants who can be conflict mediators and run things day to day. And we have a new rank of Guild Quartermaster, to personally babysit the bank. Our resident undead Rogue, Roogles, has made the bank his personal baby, and he’s threatening to Cannibalize anyone who messes with it.

Rank and file members start as recruits who have no bank privileges to avoid ninjas. They progress to soldier, who have no invite privileges, again to avoid ninjas. And after long service (the current ones had long service with our previous incarnation) they can progress to Veteran, and earn the privilege to invite members. We’re still gonna be casual, and we’re still gonna support leveling, but we’re not gonna support run-begging or gbank ninja-ing anymore.

And lastly, we’re working on a satisfying end-game for our higher level members. We set up a guild website to facilitate communication. We’ve run two 70 raids to prepare ourselves for the big leagues and work on communication, showing up when scheduled, etc: Karazhan on Thursday (in the midst of forming the new guild!) and Zul Aman last night. The 70+ members are gaining good experience from it too, so they can join our new minted 80 raid team when they ding. We’ve got a chain heroic event scheduled for Wednesday for gearing up our new 80s, and we’re planning to make our first endgame raid next week with a foray into OS. We also did a great AV premade and got a bunch of us the Alterac Blitz achievement!

The changed atmosphere in the guild is startling. We’re all walking on clouds right now. We seized control and made the guild what we always wanted it to be anyway. Lets hope the honeymoon period continues a long long time! As one of our guildies recently exclaimed, “My How the Tides have Changed!”

And just as a sidenote, and probably the first of many, if you’re a new 80 on Kel’Thuzad and you want to raid VERY casually but don’t know how to get started, look me up: Myrhani. We need cloth wearers of all sorts, hunters and shamans, and any kind of heals. We’re set on tanks and melee dps and plate wearers in general.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Drama, Guild, Raiding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.