What's a lesson you've learned about how guilds should be run?

DroneTheMask

I thought I'd break away from the usual posts around here.

I'd like to see what peoples thoughts are on how guilds should be run. Something they'd like to see less of and what they should see more of - lessons from being in guilds just as well as running them.

What's something you've seen and thought "Wow that's kinda impressive. More guilds should do this!"

Noaani

The main thing I've learned about running guilds is that guilds should have no requirements from their members.

This is not because they shouldn't have expectations from them, but rather because a guild should only be recruiting people that have a play style that fits what the guild is doing, and so new members would automatically meet what ever requirements the guild would set.

If you have new members that aren't meeting those requirements, that is a recruitment issue.

Azherae

I've learned over many years, and been very explicitly reminded lately in Throne and Liberty, that guilds which only clump together because they 'need numbers' or 'think that's the way the game should be played' or 'want to keep up and aim for the top', don't last.

If they're old and have massive systems in place for integrating new members that's different, but the 'Day One' guilds, the guilds that just recruit as a 'way of making friends', but actually want to get random people from Global into the guild first and supposedly 'make friends' with them later, just fall apart.

And I don't think it's an exaggeration either, it's obviously not all of them, but on my server, all but one collapsed, two if you count the fact that the big one that was actually alliance sized, is now guild sized, 'only' losing 75% of its membership.

By contrast, I find that guilds that provide ideas, 'content', and ways for their members to understand the goals of other members, thrive over time, but I have less confidence in that since I don't get to see all the inner workings of guilds that seem to grow slowly and stay together (at this point I'm talking about other games like groups in Elite Dangerous or even BDO, regardless of what one thinks of that game, there were decent guilds there).

So I guess it would be my very biased view that guilds can do really well by 'offering activities or content' (depending on the game, obviously just 'offering to do the best content and rapidly get people progression' should be excluded here) and waiting to see who they attract based on that, then just... keep that up and try to deal with any effects of interpersonal drama on the guild activities.

I say bias because I am usually the one in charge of 'offering activities or content' so of course I think/want to believe my role is important, but my guild is small and doesn't have as much interpersonal drama effects to worry about. Still, I've seen some others have some really solid success in games over the years. A lot of people play RPGs to 'project' their role, and in games where people have real 'roles' within their guilds/the wider community, the guilds involved seem to thrive, to me.