Communication is Key

We are well and truly back, it's been a couple of weeks since my last blog but I'm just finding my feet with this and have not committed to a regular schedule at the moment.  Especially as things are still quiet on server. 

Recruitment is going pretty well I have added at least 8-10 new players to the guild in the last fortnight, not bad for a pretty dead server.  I'm expecting the next week to kick off being a week before launch and the week after launch to be good also with many players returning hopefully to find as I did that their guild is a bit dead, and looking for a new one.  Hopefully many of my old guild mates will also return. 

Having been away I had forgotten the inherent laziness of people.  In leadership of my guild I think it's important to be fair, consistent  and upfront with people, to that end I put all the guild rules up on the website along with posts about what the guild is about, I keep the forum sections clearly labelled so it's easy to know where to look for things. 

Forum sections we have:

Guild Scope and Rules

Announcements

Discussion

Raids & Raid Rules

MoP Preparation

Gear

PVP

Social Events

Vice - Our Hordeside sister guild

Ok so not particularly a small list but you don't have to be interested in all of them.  For instance if you want to join the guild to raid then maybe check out the Raid and Raid Rules forum. 

But no people can't be bothered to tab out of the game a look at a forum.  I don't mind so much if some one is responding to my barking in trade, maybe your speaking to a number of people about their guild, maybe you just want to talk to a real person in the guild and get an idea about them first hand before deciding to join, fine.  Personally I'd never join a guild without having a look at their forum, but that's just me. 

What really annoys me is when people have joined the guild and you have to bully them into registering and answer each and everyone of their questions over and over again when all the info is on the website.  These are the same people that are always surprised when they miss out on things because they didn't know.  Take an active role in getting involved then.

Communication in a guild is a nightmare.  Really there is nothing that you can guarantee that people are going to see, or pay attention to.  The guild message of the day I'm sure must get lost in the addon log-on spam that most players will get these days and it's sadly lacking in functionality and character length anyway (actually I've just logged on and realised that it doesn't appear until all the spam is gone, so it's just lazy, ignorance then!).  Would be nice if the default UI gave and option to copy and paste a link  URL from it, I have an addon that does this but some won't.  Would be nice if it were a bit more prominent.  Star Wars had a pop up when you logged on that you had to click close, this is not the most elegant solution, and you can easily find yourself clicking it away without looking, especially if you were logging multiple alts, it did become something of an annoyance - maybe only pop up once a day or when it's changed?

There's also the guild calendar - more notification functionality on this would be of use also.  A little question mark in the top right hand corner is not nearly obvious enough for lazy tunnel visioned players who want everything on a platter for them. 

Some sort mail all accounts in guild option would be excellent, the tech must be there I've seen it with receiving pets and stuff from Blizz (they now only come to the first char I log on to, or possibly all until I open it). That would be an excellent way of directing your lazy guildies to actually understand what is happening in guild and get involved. 

All of these things are surmountable.  For instance in our guild, guildies only get out of the lowest rank and access to GB repairs if they register on the forum (which is also explained in another forum post, so they would know that if they went there), You can keep telling people to check the GMOTD though the day in /g to get people to look at it, although that sort of defeats the point, you may as well tell each player individually, a raid application to join the raid team also, forces them to go the website, aswel as ensuring that your raid team can at least work a web bowser and type coherent sentences, (well their name a least).  I managed to harangue my old guildies into frequently checking the website and the GMOTD, so it's a culture thing, but when you are in a heavy recruitment phase like we are now big banners pointing the newbies to how things work in your guild would be a large boon.