Raiding and Choices

In my years of being a raid leader, I’ve come to understand that sometimes making choices for the better of the raid results in a lot of butthurt. Kinda silly, huh? I think so. First and foremost, let me say this loud and clear:

YOUR RAID SPOT IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT.

I even went for the bold touch to just ensure someone reads this.

Now, why is that important to note? It seems more and more that raiders are beginning to feel entitled to their positions. This is wrong. As a raider, you are on the team because your leader has entrusted you to be the best of the best for yourself and your group. You are expected to always come prepared, ready and with a game face. If you fail to bring those three simple things, then you are doing it wrong. No, really. You are.

I cannot stress enough how frustrating it is as a leader that people cannot follow the basics of raiding. It’s like the logic to it eludes them. When you are not bringing your 110%, you know what that tells us? It screams that you are only here to waste our time. Especially if you are one of those many people that leaders invest time, gold and ect to get you up to par to be part of the time. You not being a team player suddenly becomes a terrible and wasted investment on someone who could care less about the team.

Now, I am speaking so.. harshly? I don’t know, I doubt this sounds harsh. Regardless, I note things like this because I have to deal with them on a daily base. If I can get maybe two or three of you to take flight with these words, your raiding career is just going to soar! Also, I may or may not have had an issue with a raider in the past few days that resulted in punishment and he felt very entitled to what his spot.

For my guild/raid leaders out there, it’s very important to lay out the rules of the raid so that you have a foundation for your raiders to stand on. If you make that foundation as solid as possible, the more likely you are to avoid issues down the line. For myself, I always told my raiders that I can understand and accept that mistakes do happen, but if the mistakes are continued repeats, then there will be other action taken.

I generally warn people about 2 times before I really come down hard on them. I also give a day or two in improving performance to better help the raid and more importantly themselves. There are guild/raid leaders who have no patience, which is kinda sad to me because I think patience is like a requirement for this job, lmao. Anyways, a little time spent, some warnings and nipping things in the ass is always going to be the best way to ensure you keep raiders on track.

You alone have to stress the importance of the three things they need to bring. Set the example and help them when they falter! Hooray.

Recruitment! Who, What and How.

Hey, guys! Today we are going to be majorly productive! By productive, I mean that we are going to cover the great things about recruitment and how to improve on it for those of you struggling to add numbers to your guild.

First and foremost, you need to understand the three basics of recruitment. The who, what and how. We will do a complete breakdown of them in detail more than I did in the video to help give more guidance outside of my ramblings.

So, the who! Who!? Yes, who. As a guild leader, it’s important to figure out who you are. Your guild needs a clear definition of who they are to attract a crowd to your name. If you don’t even know who you are as a guild, then you are pretty much shooting yourself in the foot. We are going to use my guild as an example for this. When I started out Salvation, we were a roleplay guild only. We emerged as some sort of beacons of hope for change and being all for the people in Azeroth. We advocated for the betterment of the people and really used that as a driving force to launch ourselves in the community. It’s because of that we became very popular. We had a guild with a goal and a focus, both of which that stayed on the same course as one another.

As time went on, we became an RP and raiding guild and it did change our recruitment style a bit. However, we still held on that very first who of the guild and still do to this day. Without the who, no one will know who you are, where you are going or what you are doing. As a guild leader, you can’t afford to skip that part or you will be forever doomed to randoms with no purpose or drive to your guild.

Now, what. What, what!? Yes..

The what portion of this is going to be the backbone of your who. Once you figured out who you are, you need to give your supports through your whats. Like with Salvation, our cause was to give people second chances, help out Azeroth and fight against the evils. It sounds great on paper, but without anything in motion it’s a complete waste. We decided that since our focus was roleplaying, we were going to host rallies to get people motivated to our cause. Our server events went off great and we got a lot of feedback for what we launched. People noticed that we were making an active approach to rally up the masses to come out and be proactive with being the good guys.

It’s because of that kind of support, we were able to launch a string of other events that played on after the rallies. Great fun was had. As you can see, we did something that spoke volumes to our cause. When you are guild leading, you have to take that approach. I understand a lot of you are not into roleplay and certainly not all guilds are based like that, so we are going to talk about other supports to keep people interested.

As a guild leader for a raiding guild, I’ve learned that support comes through proof. For PvE, it’s going to be your achievements, bosses down and things like that. PvP guild leaders need to lay out their credentials, honors, ranks and ect. Both guilds should also post like consistent times where they do certain activities, like raid or rated BGs. a raiding guild wants to lay out the days and times they hit content so it looks like they have things in order. Same for PvP guilds. Maybe your PvP guild runs a solid 2-3 hours on battleground weekends and then a weekday is reserved for rated BG night. You just want to show people interested in your guild that you are have all your chickens in order. That’s going to be key.

Moving on now, how. How the hell are you going to put your name out there when you figured out the who and what? Well, good thing you are not just limited in how you can advertise for your guild. I’ve seen all in game, out of game and external sites used to post about a guild. We are going to break down all the different ways you can do the how and ways to make your guild seem appealing in it all.

In Game Features

With in game features you have two sure ways of recruiting:

• Guild Recruitment Channel
• Guild Finder

Guild recruitment channel is not always used too much anymore with the new guild finder available, but I still see posts going through it on my server. So, we are still going to cover it. Blizzard chat only allows for 255 characters per entry and you need to be mindful of that. Of course, you can always use more macros (And yes, I said macros because I doubt you want to rewrite your ad every time), but you don’t want to spam the channel and get too wordy.

For Guild Recruitment when I post, generally I put up something as this:

<Salvation> is currently recruiting casuals and roleplayers alike. We are an RP and raid guild with many opportunities. Level 10 required for membership. Please seek an officer to discuss further about the guild.

Simple and to the point. Sometimes people add their guild website in there, it works out as well. You want to give them a bite of your guild, not the whole meal. Get them to come to you and want to be interested in the guild. Bait them basically. Now, you can be creative about it and I encourage it. Just be unique, but keep it as simple as I had mentioned.

Now, guild finder. For those of you that don’t know what the guild finder is, allow me to show you!

Guild finder! Yay. As you can see, that’s a current picture of Salvation’s little info box on there. Of course, we hit 22 during our guild meeting last night so that’s about the only thing incorrect in there.

To access your guild finder, open the guild tab > click INFO tab > click on RECRUITMENT TAB > fill in the blanks. Simple and easy!

As a breakdown, lets go over all of it. You can see where Salvation’s interests are checked off. Obviously PvP is left off because we do not actively PvP as a guild. We do get involved with RP-PvP events, but we do not care to really engage in that aspect in the guild. I left it checked off for a reason because we don’t want to appeal to something we are not into. You need to keep that one in mind too. Don’t check off everything for a big audience. Check off what you need.

Now, availability. My guild is very active all days of the week. If your guild is more of a weekend guild with high activity then, you may just want to check that off, but it is not a make it or break it deal if you hit both of them. I know that some people really want active guilds all days of the week, so if you are checking off all and you do get a bite from someone like I described, make sure you tell them that you are only really active these days and ect.

Class Roles, I check off all because I don’t really think it matters either way. Especially if you are taking in casuals too. For raiding, I get more detailed in the next box.

Level, really up to you. I allow all levels, others just want strict 85′s.

The information box. Same concept here with the guild recruitment channel post. Just be simple, hell you can use that in here.

And there is your ways to use in game methods to your recruiting advantage! Yay.

Out of Game

This can get a little confusing, but when I say out of game I am only referring to the World of Warcraft forums.

This is your basic look at the WoW forums, you can easily navigate from here to your server and/or the guild recruitment link to post up about your guild.

I screen-capped my own recruitment post so you can get a general idea of what I did. It’s pretty self explanatory.

So as you can (hopefully) read over, the rcruitment post is organized. You can see that I listed my who first. Who is Salvation and then began to list out the what we are. I kept the flow going, being a bit humorous in the post too. It’s key that you add a bit of character to your post because that will help it shine a bit more. You can see in the last picture I caplocked and bolded one of my officers in jest because I kinda forgot to add him to the list of officers. My bad! But do you see how it just kinda added a bit to the post? Be creative.

In my final words, what you do with your recruitment is going to make a statement about your guild. Keep it positive, stay motivated and show people that you are a driving force with your guild and you will be good to go.