GuildMasterpiece Theater

She is mean evil, she has creepy hair like tentacles, and she shoots people with the bow I need.  Lady Vashj, I think I hate you.  All night long we wiped, got her down to 15% twice, and both times I just KNEW she was going down, but… she didn’t.  My guild was less than enthused at the end of the raid, and so was I.  And today is, of course, reset day… so if we want to kill her, we have to get to her first!

Sometimes at the end of those kinds of nights…you know, two flasks down a repair bill that will require an entire round of dailies to pay off kinda of nights… I just want to pull my hair out and sign off for a week or two while I throw down on some Hello Kitty Adventure Island!  But, I also really want that bow.  :)  So…. another new week, another fresh start of raiding!  And, this week, I think we will down her…

That is the kind of thing that is so hard as a guild master.  Keeping that positive attitude, ya know?  Remembering that even though everyone is ready to pull their hair out, it is just raiding, and next week the instance will be fresh and new for you to start all over again!  I really think that sometimes the nights of wiping can be just as fun as killing that boss as long as you are doing it as a group and having a good time when you do it!

I read lots of bad things about loot council but it works for Conclave. We used a loot system before BC which worked very well but was very labour intensive. Since BC we decided to try loot council. We keep track of attendance and loot received and go by that. If someone has scored tons of loot we might get them to sit out but thats not a common thing. Mostly, eligible people are just asked to roll on the item and so be it. We share out Tier pieces so people can get the benefit of their set bonus’ and if mains don’t want gear we let people roll for offspec. Offspec isn’t really counted as loot so its no biggy. Occasionally there is an issue where someone feels they should have been allowed to roll but thats usually sorted out quite easily afterwards.

Do you guys use a loot system and are you happy with it?

Hi guys

I’ll briefly introduce myself before heading off to bed :). My real name is Shauna and Im the mother of four kids (youngest just started school /cry) and also work about 30 hours a week for a youth counselling service and women’s health here in Australia.

In addition to that I run a successful raiding guild on Dath’Remar. Conclave (my guild) was started about a month after WoW was released but i haven’t been guild leader for that long. I think Ive held the reins for about 2 years but im not really sure anymore. We have cleared SSC and are just starting to work on Kael. Conclave has been through many ups and downs but one of its strong points is its ability to survive just about any disaster. We survived being on a US server (not many Aussies to recruit from), massive DC problems in BWL, people quitting the game/guild. We’ve struggled on some bosses for what seemed ages and dealt with the fallout from that, transferred servers and recruited more. Some are great, some were not so great. We survived two guild splits (small groups who needed something different to what Conclave could offer branched off) and still manage to stick to the guilds ethos. We have very little drama thankfully and in all, Conclave is a happy place to be.

New Recruits…? I can’t figure them out, bring them into Guild and the first thing they do is run to the Guild Vault and start asking for stuff. I clearly state our policy on Members and Bank access when i am recruiting someone, yet still they ask.

I have had 1 member that has been with us for about 2 weeks…. and he/she pst’d me last night and i quote “I have made bank deposits, i need 25 Gold”, he/she had deposited 3 copper ore and 1 Tin Bar… lol geezzz give me a break.

One of the hardest parts of being a guild master is actually starting up that guild in the first place and that goes double for anyone not lvl 70. The lower you are the harder it gets. So just how does one go about starting a guild? Your only lvl 20 after all, what can you do? Some people like to shove charters in other people’s faces hoping that they will eventually get 10 randomly chosen people who may have just misclicked the charter to sign and boom, you got a guild (without rather few members if not only yourself). Others like to bribe people with gold to sign and leave afterwards if they so desire. And of course, my personal favorite, the “we got tons of lvl 70s that will help you” ploy which is more often than not fallacious.

Well If you’ve got the gold you could very well go bribing others (had to do that a couple of times myself actually), but the best recruiting technique that I have found is simply going around the noobie zones and putting out adds for your guild and hoping that one of them will look at it saying, oooo that might be fun and join you in your noble crusade to 70 and beyond. Well that’s not too hard, but now what are you going to do with a bunch of low lvl players who can’t even do RFC yet?

Well you’ve got a foundation, now the real recruiting starts. Group up with people for quests and instances. Once and a while you will find a player that hasn’t already been recruited into a guild already, that’s your cue to pounce. After grouping for a bit and getting a vibe for the other person casually ask if the would be interested in you guild. If they say yes, great, if not don’t get angry, don’t pelt them with insults, be nice and courteous, believe it or not your reputation does exist in WOW; especially in your lvl range (which is where you want to be recruiting). If you are always nice and helpful more people will want to join your guild and soon enough you will have a group of your peers who can grind quests, run instances, or just sit around and role-play with you if that’s what you’re all about. Don’t forget to pay attention to those noobs though, in a couple moths they won’t be noobs anymore and one day you will wake up and realize that you have a walking talking guild.

Congratulations! you survived the creation process and you did it on hard work and a friendly attitude (did I mention that’s important). If you are true to your guild and honest to your fellow players you will find yourself surrounded by some of the most enjoyable people in Azeroth!

He does notice! He DOES!

A little history, I have been reading the Big Red Kitty Blog now for quite some times. I think he knows what he is talking about when it comes to hunters, and I have definitely learned a LOT from his posts. A couple of weeks back he posted this post, and I just so happened to be looking for the perfect blog to start up about all things warcraft, but I hadn’t come up with the perfect idea. Well, when I saw his post, I knew what I had to do! So, I quickly got to work on a blogspot blog, and posted a couple of things. When my husband the web designer saw what I was doing he jumped on it, and I got my very own website!

Well, today it got a little cooler. I logged onto my computer, checked my email and went to browsing my daily reads. BRK is on that list, so when I saw he was doing a link post, I quickly started scrolling looking for us, and there we were! AHHHHH our first link, and it was from BRK himself! How fun is that? I mean, he called me a guy, (wow, he fixed it… and groveled.  That’s almost enough to make a girl roll alliance… almost…) but still pretty cool, eh?

This is just crazy.  Why hasn’t blizzard done anything to stop this yet?  People think they have protected their account and that everything is fine, and then all the sudden… You log on and watch an officer clear out the guild bank.  This is crazy.  This is just stupid.  Why isn’t there something as simple as a password protection on the guild banks to stop this from happening.  I mean, it looks like a giant vault, why not have to click on some numbers in order to open it with a combination type thing?  That is my official blue suggestion.  There should be a keypad that the GM sets the combo to, and people have to click a series of numbers (not type them… then the keyloggers would get the password!) in order to access the bank.

Why, you ask am I posting about this?  Because my bank was hacked.  I feel like the keyloggers literally wait until I am logged off for the night, and then log onto this officer’s account and clear out my entire guild bank.  The thing is, it isn’t like we don’t get the stuff back, because we do.  Blizzard takes a log of your entire bank, and they are pretty cool about returning your stuff, but it just SUCKS.  Why would we even continue to use guild banks if this keeps happening?

So, I take a lot of flack. I feel like that is part of the job as a GM, sometimes you just gotta deal with unhappy people, etc. and that is how the ol cookie crumbles. My officers tell me a lot that I am just too nice, and for the most part I probably am, but I feel like keeping people happy and having fun with the game makes your guild a better place to be. I have fun running stuff, so that is how I enjoy my fifteen bucksamonth, but for a lot of people it is the fun of playing with friends, etc.

Sigh, I digress… the point I am trying to make here is I am willing to take a lot of flack from a lot of members, and deal with a lot of unpleasing situations, I think that comes with the territory, but what I am not willing to do is feel disrespected. I get this member tonight that tells me, “I just don’t like you, and I don’t like anything you do, but all my friends are here so I just put up with you.” My response went something along the lines of “Wow, that was a pretty mean thing to say to someone who spends so much time making this guild run.” To which he went on to tell me just how much he hated me, what a b* I was etc. My answer… I actually used the remove member button. I still can’t believe I actually did it, but I did! And you know what… I am okay with it… that guy isn’t in my guild causing me grief anymore, and as a result for my finally growing a pair… my guild is a happier place.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I am not saying /gkick is the first button you need to hit when someone pisses you off, but if they just don’t respect you and all the time you put into the GAME that they are playing. Then guess what… it feels pretty dern good to see “soandso has been kicked out of the guild by Cheetara.”

Hi yall, GanonIS here and happy to be aboard. :) Just made a guild with a new character on Shandris server called Order of the Storm and we are having lots of fun lvling together. I am curently power lvling my 40 mage with my guild and we have had some crazy fun. 2 years of playing WOW has taught me just how good things can get
and just how badly things can go wrong.

Have you ever had one of those nights? You come home from work, have dinner, deal with kids, etc etc etc and all you want to do is sit down, relax and hop on WoW to kill some things? That was tonight for me. So, i deal with it all, sit down with a drink, log into my server, and BAM, chat hits me like a ton of bricks.

[Server] Server Shutdown in 3:30

 …needless to say, i’m not very happy at the moment. So myself and 4 other people in guild decided to make alts on some server with a blessed populace. Eitrigg it turns out, isn’t down.

So, one hour, 3 rum and cokes, and 12 lvls later, i have a blood elf pally. This Blood Elf Pally cannot only SINGLEHANDEDLY tank/kill three mobs, but i can heal my group while they fight other mobs too.

 Guildies and i had a great time killing mana wyrms in BE land even though we kind of wished we could use our mains.

Moral of the story: change it up sometimes! as long as you do it together, your guild will never ‘wipe’

Oh, and in conclusion for tonight’s adventures in Alt-Land, Pallies are OP ^_~