Sunday 23 September 2012

Officers Club


As the run up to the launch of Mists continues, and given the importance of communication (see last blog post for more on that)  I thought it would be a good idea to get my officers together and get some actions happening.

In my guild I don't like to make people officers just for anything.  There is a lot of effort that goes into leading a guild and I figure if you want some authority in the guild you may as well contribute to running it in a meaningful way and take some of the load off me.  I implemented this when I first set up the guild, however I could probably have done a better job.  The aim this time is to make a much more collaborative leadership team that won't mean that the guild dies if I decide to take another break from the game for whatever reason.  To that end I have assigned the following jobs to the current officers.  In case I haven't mentioned this before we are aiming to make 2 10 Man raid teams for MoP content.


Raid Leader - I will lead 1 of the raid teams which means we need someone else to lead the other.  This person will be responsible for building recruitment, scheduling, Calling tactics, picking the rosta and all manner of other things that come with raid leading. Including making some posts about tactics for new bosses. I imagine that will be shared between myself and the other RL.

Raid Assistants X2 – for each team the raid leader will have an assistant, a Sargent major if you like, someone to keep the troops in line during the raid, also to deal with EPGP be master looter as well as ensuring to post World of Logs for each raid.  World of Logs is an out of game raid analysis tool that allows for post raid reflection and is handy in troubleshooting.  I may speak more about this in future posts.

Chief Financial Officer (CFO )– Responsible for the Guild Bank – deciding when we need a new tab deciding what to keep in it and what to get rid off, what permissions to give each rank of person in the guild, including how much guild repairs to give everyone and also for selling stuff from raids and keeping the balance nice and healthy.  Annoyingly the functionality for assigning permissions to the GB and the respective guild ranks can only be done by the GM.  Would be nice if I could just assign him the power but hey-ho.

Social Media Officer – Responsible for setting up Facebook and Twitter pages and also running them and getting guild members to follow them. Ensuring that there are guild tweets and FB messages to keep our troops informed, working with the Raid Leaders and Community officer on what messages need to go up there, and also ensuring our forums are kept tidy with irrelevant post deleted or archived. Also ensuring that we are following some good and interesting people that talk about the WOW in order to keep everyone up to date on what's going on with things like the weeks news and latest patches and all manner of information about the game.  My girlfriend was kind enough to take on this job and has set up our twitter feed.  @VirtueHellfire if your interested I'll be using it to post messages and communication to my guild hopefully pointing them to the forum, which I'm sure they'll be unable to click on the link since navigation to a forum is beyond most wow players it seems (again see last post for more on that).

I'm also looking to find officers to do the below jobs also:

Community and Social Events Officer – Ideally a non raider so they can focus on things to do out side of the raid. Achievement runs, Mount Runs, As well as just keeping the guild friendly and a nice buzz.

Recruitment Officer – I would expect this person to work closely with the raid leaders about there requirements and also with the community officer about what sort of social people we want in the guild and the social media officer about what messages we need to get out there for recruitment. So they will be responsible for barking in trade, keeping post on our forum up to date about our recruitment, and also making posts on the WOW realm forums to try and get people in that way. Also for setting the expectations of new guild members and to be a point of contact for them if they any questions about the guild answered.


With the lack of the Community and Recruitment officers the other officers need to pick up these jobs in the mean time.  The essence of this weeks meeting fit in to categories below. 

Recruitment

Some of the officers already have recruitment macro's but I asked the rest to get them.  I like a variety of macro's to get peoples attention therefore I asked everyone to write their own and to pay attention to if any one is whispering them following posting it, if not Change it.

Building Community

Pulling a group of people together out of trade chat and any other means is always challenging trying to build a community spirit.  Especially at the moment when we are not raiding regularly.  One way to get to know your fellow guildies is to do shared activities.  So I've asked me officers to be champions of co-op play - always ask people to join them in whatever your doing, scenario's, dungeons, anything!
Also I can't be expected to come up with all the ideas myself and again I'm trying to build a collaboration here to I've asked them to be creative - have a think about ways to get people interested in doing things and get them scheduled and promoted. 
Communication is Key and all the information people could want to know about our guild is on the website so I asked them to know where things are themselves, post informative and valuable post and direct people there when they have questions.
Another idea I had was to designate a little corner of the world as Virtues, who's know if Blizz will ever do player housing but in the mean time there should ba a nice quiet place that we can all hang out in and maybe all try to get back to at the end of the day.  For me at the moment I like the Shady Lady in Stormwind,  and I have designated this our unofficial Guild Pub for the moment until we get in to Pandaria where upon I'm hoping we can find a convenient corner there.  If your on Hellfire come on down there you may see me or one of my plethora of alts at the bar.

Raids

Gave the chaps just a bit of an update here, we currently have enough raiders for one full team, we therefore need to recruit all roles and classes for the other.  Ideally I'd like to do this before we start raiding as I'm keen to avoid a A team and B Team Mentality and have taken great pains to never refer to the 2 teams in such a way.  My plan is to go for the first raid a month after launch thereby allowing everyone to enjoy the content and also get a few more people in the guild who have returned for the new Expansion. 

Raid Leader

I requested the other Raid Leader started looking for good vids of the raids - I suggested Yoggs Cast and Learn to Raid as a starter.  Also Icy Veins is an excellent resource.  Myself and the other RL will probably divvy up the tactics posts therefore I requested he look at the type of post I have done previously and try to replicate that style.  That style being - a link to a Video, a link to the tactics on Ivy Veins and then a super boiled down version for quick reference.

Raid Assistants

In order to assist the RL's the RA's need to get a few things done.  Firstly Get addons, Raid Buff Status a handy in game head up to if people have all the buffs they should, have eaten and are generally ready to pull the boss.  EPGP (Dkp reloaded), for use in distributing the loots about and making it fair.  There are other systems out there but this has always struck me as the fairest as the amount of effort you put in to the guild has a direct effect on the amount of loot you get. 
Also I requested the get set up on World of Logs - a simple task but it needs doing.

Chief Financial Officer

Again to try and get some community together and to keep the GB full of cash for repairs I asked our CFO to undertake a guild lottery.
The premise would work like this, we charge some cash for tickets, which is mailed to the CFO in game.  The CFO makes a post with a list of numbers and assign names to those numbers based on the amount of tickets someone has purchased.  At a designated time and place we all meet, (down the guild pub perhaps) form a raid group and the CFO does a /roll.  Who ever has that number assigned on the forum post gets 50% of the ticket taking and 50% goes in to the GB.  There other officers suggested that we could offer other prizes from the GB also, for maybe 2nd or 3rd place, which sounded sensible to me so I have left it with our CFO to do something about it.


So with a couple of outstanding points all the guild infrastructure is back and should be working correctly soon.  The only thing we need now is recruitment which is still being a challenge.  Hopefully after Tuesday this will be easier.  If your on Hellfire EU and want to join us then let us know.  Also if you are anywhere in the EU and just want to raid with us then with the new Battletag system that maybe possible also. 

As an aside the Theramore Scenario launched this week.  I have to say I was rather disappointed.  I'm hoping that the other scenarios and 'different ways to play the game' pet battles, Farming, challenge modes and the rest are not such a let down. 

2 comments:

  1. How is it all working out now the new dungeons are up? Getting many Virtue guild group runs?

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    1. Yeah we're spmming through them as we all level up. Done all of the 7 dungeons challenges this week so that's good. No sceanario's yet but we'll need more at 90 before we can do them anyway.

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