Forward: I have been giving a lot of thought to various styles of leadership, with regards to general guild implementation, raiding, battlegrounds, and social events. This is designed to be the first in a series that explores the ups and downs of each, and to generate discussion and ideas that any smaller guild can, hopefully, use to benefit their in-game experiences. This is planned as a community assignment of sorts, although no participation simply means I go through each of the topics myself without the benefit of others’ insight and hope that people find my comments useful.

Note: If you would like to participate but do not want to publicly provide any information please feel free to email me and state not to post who the information is from. Everyone has their right to remain anonymous!

The Goal:
Design a casual guild atmosphere that still provides serious raiding (2-3 nights a week, 3 or so hours a night), character development (as in helping others), and does not seem too “strict” to the average player. Assume 15 guild members.

The First “Assignment:”
Present an idea for guild structure, specifying officer roles and reasons for needing those roles (includes responsibilities, how to pick officers, etc.).

The Second “Assignment:”
Present the “guild rules.” This may be as simple as a handful of requirements for raiding, or even the one-liner “Have Fun!” The idea is to see how other smaller guilds are addressing guild organization and the underlying reasons.

The Third “Assignment:”
Focus on character development. How would you approach helping others become better players, or understand more about their class? (Note that saying “go read this website” is not what I’m looking for, I want to know how other guilds have addressed this issue themselves. Forum posts? Talking things over in vent/guild chat? Denying entry into instances until certain requirements are met?

The Fourth “Assignment:”
Focus on raiding. How do you establish who goes and who does not? Sign-ups? Are there requirements? How do you promote solid performance? Do you mark targets? Do you use crowd control? Basically, I want to know all about how other guilds approach raids from a high-level vantage point.

The Fifth “Assignment:”
Putting it all together. This is where I’ll take the best ideas presented, or the most popular, and pull together everything in the presentation of a guild charter/code of conduct/ruleset/guidelines… you get the idea.

As you can see, this project really does rely on participation from as many people as possible. I have the idea of starting up a new project that this may be related to (and no I do not mean starting a new guild somewhere, I’m content where I am) depending upon the level of interest out there. Hopefully I’ll garner a lot of input on these, and by all means if you want to participate and are unsure what I am after please ask for clarification. I’m going to try to wait two weeks to get the first “assignment” posted to allow enough time to get feedback to incorporate into the post, so spread the word!