Guild Achievement System Brings the Ban-Hammer on AIE

As you will recall from my earlier series of articles on how to build a successful guild, I am a member of two very large guilds on Earthen Ring - US. My first guild on Alliance side is The Illuminati, which has 396 characters as of this writing. A very big guild, to be sure. But The Illuminati is dwarfed of course by Alea Iacta Est, my horde side guild better known as the largest guild in the game across all servers. AIE has 6792 characters right now and is a fantastic community of gamers who are a great resource for leveling, professions, grouping, and anything else you want to do in the game. There has always been some problems with AIE and the guild interface, which is only designed to handle 500 characters. Nevertheless, AIE got along just fine and nicely asked Blizzard to fix the problem if they could, despite it being very low priority.

However, a blue post yesterday shattered AIE and fellow mega-guilds like Taint, Goon Squad, and others. As of patch 4.0.1, which looks like it will be next Tuesday, all guilds will have a hard cap of 600 members. You will not be able to add more characters unless you are below 600. Which means AIE, as of next week, will not add another new character ever again. No alts, no rerolls, no friends and no players that have been removed for being inactive for a few months. Not one more player, unless AIE gets below 600 members, which will not happen until the servers stop running in all likelihood. So while AIE and other mega-guilds will not have their rosters fractured or culled through at this time, they also will stagnate from here on out in the existence of Azeroth.

While I disagree with blizzard on disallowing mega guilds after 6 years of setting a precedent with them in the game, the real problem is how they've brought this change about. There was literally no warning, and AIE is thrown into absolute chaos right now as the officers deal with another big challenge. I'm sure they will step up to the task and keep the guild moving on, but that's no excuse. The stated reason is actually that Blizzard cannot or does not want to handle the additional work of tracking individual statistics for more than 600 characters when figuring out guild achievements. Reading between the lines, they don't want to make people flock to mega-guilds who will earn guild achievements faster. Or if you take a pessimistic view, this is just a lame excuse for them to do something they have wanted to do for years, which is kill the mega guild.

However, AIE is one of the most active communities of WoW players because many of them listen to The Instance and talk actively about wow to their friends, more so probably than non-listeners of the major wow podcasts. While they throw around server load like it is a major concern, they are allowing AIE and other mega guilds to continue existing while fixing the guild interface and achievement problems for everyone, mega guilds included. So they fixed the problem, but undercut our guild at the same time. And make no mistake about it, there will be some kind of backlash, whether it be at Blizzcon where 300 AIE guildies or more are planning to attend, or in public forums such as blogs and podcasts. There will be public comment on this, even if it does only affect 0.1% of guilds (a misleading number because there are a massive amount of players in those guilds compared to the many bankalt guilds and personal guilds).

The real fix to the problem is good game design, and specifically good achievement and guild perk design. Guild perks from achievements should not be major draws for people to a guild, they should just be time savers and nifty other benefits that allow you to make the game slightly easier. Think of these like heirlooms, not talents that must be had by everyone. The achievements should be designed so all serious guilds including small raiding guilds can get all the available perks within a few months of cataclysm's release. Sure, the large guilds will get these perks a bit quicker, but that will not matter as long as the perks are not must-have items. The simple solution would have been to remove all mega guilds (defined as guilds with more than 600 members) from getting any realm-first type guild achievements. This levels the playing field for those with fewer members, and stops the world from becoming a bunch of mega guilds.

In reality, Blizzard has the power to make the guild interface work, as proven by their assertion that it will now work for guilds of all sizes post-cataclysm. However, this decision is a result of plain lazy achievement design. Remember, achievements were added to the game in WOTLK to give people something else to play for, something else to enjoy. Now achievements are being used as a pitiful excuse to slam some of the best communities in Azeroth. AIE has recently transcended warcraft and is moving into other games such as Eve online, and it's all because the community is supportive and great. Taint is a wonderful community of gay, lesbian, transgender players who support each other in game and out. And all the new players who come into cataclysm as wow 2.0 will never get to experience either of these communities. Now I understand there will be sister guilds and networked chat and people will prevail with workarounds, but it will not be the same as having one guild for all your members.

So lazy design in a relatively unimportant aspect of the game (achievements) now leads to the death of growth forever in AIE and other mega guilds. I was planning to move either my shaman or my druid over to Horde side with the paladin to join AIE and have two main healers on either side of the fence in cataclysm. However, I wanted to wait for the new race/class combos to make the switch and it is easier to level on the alliance side with the sugar momma Ekat and the sugar Daddy Navar paying for everything the alts need. However, if I cannot join AIE, I will not transfer that character. So that's $25 out of Blizzard's bank account. And who knows, my limited interaction with AIE may eventually drive me away from the game. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment, and this comes at a terrible time as people come back for cataclysm after the usual doldrums breaks and they will not have that community to return to. In fact, most people server transfer or faction transfer to get into AIe with their favorite characters, but that will not happen anymore. That's money out of the bank account for Blizzard. Plus, even guilds like The Illuminati will likely start putting limits on people to 1-2 characters maximum, which stinks when you want to participate in a lively guild chat.

In fact, that brings up another possibility. Perhaps Blizzard wants to limit guild size to limit the usefulness of guild chat access in the mobile auction house application. Perhaps they do not want to enable a facebook-or-AIM like instant messaging service for the mega guilds most likely to use the service for that purpose alone. Again, this looks like they are willing to give up moderate cash gains to remove the major users from loading a service and making them design servers and systems well.

Again, I do not want to paint this like they are making AIE shatter immediately. But this is a ridiculous and unwarranted decision that has been made for all the wrong reasons, and Blizzard is simply not being honest with their consumers. That's just not right. And while we may be a small percentage of the playerbase, hopefully we are vocal enough to let Blizzard know that this action is in poor judgment, much like the idea to force forum users to use only real ID's was. Life will go on, but this blindside tactic by Blizzard is shocking to those of us affected and will not be forgotten when we are making the all-important decision on whether the good outweighs the bad in this game to keep on paying that monthly subscription.

If I'm in a particularly grumpy mood, my apologies. My favorite guild member in my alliance guild quit the guild for reasons I'm none too thrilled with. I'm certainly not going to take it out on guild leadership because they are not slighting me at this point, but my sense of community in that guild has also been seriously shaken this week. So it's a real shame, but both my guilds are currently leaving me disappointed, despite all that is good about them. Until next time, don't let bad judgment happen to you, at least not without a fight.

Building A Successful Guild Part 4: Secure Your Valuables!

Welcome back to the Successful Guild Building series! In part 1, I described how the foundation of a guild is the guild leadership, who must be strong or else everything else crumbles. In part 2, I looked at the parallels between framing the different rooms in a house and in a guild, setting up proper avenues for members to enjoy all the various aspects of the game. In part 3, I detailed how the outside appearances of your guild caused by your website and current member conduct affects recruitment and retention of guild members. Now we come to the fourth part of this five-part series on how to build a successful guild, and more specifically, securing the guild.

One of the most crucial details in constructing a house is figuring out what provisions you will make to secure the valuable possessions and people inside the house both when you are home and when you are away. You can have a beautiful house with well-sized rooms and a good foundation, but without some sort of security system, all of this can be for naught with just one bad guy. Continuing the metaphor, the same is true of your well-constructed guild in Warcraft. One only has to look on the major websites covering WoW or the official forums to see many tales of guild drama and people stealing loots from groups and guilds, also known as ninjas. Just like the robbers and burglars in real life, the ninjas are in your realm and they are always looking for a chance to strike at your weaknesses. So how do you keep them out?



The first step in securing a house is installing door sensors and window contacts to communicate with a security system controller. This way, you know when things are moving in and out of the house through all the possible entryways. In a similar fashion, guild leaders must set a framework for protecting guild assets, usually held in a guild bank. Thankfully blizzard has programmed in many ways to keep track of guild banks so that guild leaderships can implement security procedures easily. The first thing you will notice is the log tab on every bank tab the guild purchases. This is not a thing to be ignored, as you can check every day or two and see which members in the guild are removing items from the guild bank. Ideally, you will have an officer who takes care of keeping the bank organized, and that person needs to check the logs to ensure any suspicious activity (a toon always taking things out of the gbank every day, taking high-value things, etc.) is noticed and brought to the attention of the officers immediately.

Additionally, limits may be placed on how many items you can let a character remove from a guild tab per day. This can range all the way from unlimited to no access at all, thereby allowing you to tailor your level of security. Another method of protecting the guild bank is limiting access to trial or new members. Whenever a member joins a guild, they join at the lowest rank. You should, at a minimum, organize your guild into three ranks: officers, full members, and new/trial members. Full members have moderate or normal access to the guild bank, while new/trial members should have zero access. This can be set in the bank and guild settings for each membership level you have set up. Taking these simple steps when setting up your guild can stop most ninjas right in their tracks.

One example from my days with The Illuminati illustrates this point nicely. We had a new member come in on a Saturday morning a few months ago, and they were talkative and generally nice in gchat. The person even ran a couple instances that morning with other guild members to try and start building relationships. Then just a few hours later, he asks in gchat "why can't I pull these mana pots from the guild bank?" So I and a couple of officers explained the no access policy during the new member period, and the guy flipped out in gchat. "I don't want to be a part of a group that doesn't trust people...this is just not the right fit for me..." He then quit the guild shortly thereafter. It was so painfully clear that the whole time, he was hoping to loot the guild bank and run off with the generous contributions of many others. But just by putting the security system in place, it kept a disaster from happening.



Once you have the contacts and sensors installed in a house, the next important step is USING the system. You'd be surprised how many people forget to turn their security system on at the keypad before they leave the house. In fact, when my car was broken into in real life a few months ago, the cop was surprised that it was an actual break in because he had not had any thefts where the doors were locked in six months! For a guild, that enforcement is easy because once you set your guild bank security settings, they stay in place. However, the use of an officer to organize the guild bank and make sure items that need to stay in "Request Only" tabs do so. However, just like in my story above, you have to make it clear to your officers that these bank rules are to be strictly enforced at all times! There's a reason you went to all the hassle of protecting these digital goods in the first place, and you do not want to waste that effort.

There is another kind of ninja thief in Warcraft, and that is the account hacker. Whether by shoddy account-sharing or dealing with gold sellers, even your full-fledged members and officers can become prone to this hacking phenomenon. When it happens to an officer in a guild, the guild bank is just as vulnerable as the personal bank, AND Blizzard is less likely to replace an entire guild bank worth of goods because you failed to protect them. Malicious people may also try to take over your website and use your ventrilo server, so you need to be careful with who is entrusted with guild information. Thankfully blizzard has provided an easy solution to this problem as well.



This little guy here is a Corehound pet, and he is only active on accounts with active authenticators. The authenticator requires an owner to put in an extra 8-digit code while logging in, and this code changes continuously for each authenticator. This makes accounts with an authenticator nearly unhackable. Therefore, anybody with full access to the guild information and supplies (and the ability to invite members who may turn out to be ninjas) all can be secured from intrusion by requiring an authenticator on every office account. This is not much of a burden as the authenticators are cheap and the corehound can be checked every month to ensure the officers continue to use the authenticator. Full members may get hacked, but the damage they can cause is hopefully limited to a few stacks of items in the bank, and usually a hacked member will inform guild leadership within 1 day of the hacking. However, I highly recommend requiring officers to use authenticators to fully enable the security provisions you have put into place.



With the size of both of my guilds, the security systems are in place and working well to prevent an attack of the ninja. In AIE, the guild bank is not a huge focus of the guild because there are way more people in the guild than a practical guild bank can handle. However, to enter AIE you do have to go through a trial period where you have little access to guild chat and no access to the guild bank. AIE also purges the guild roster of inactive people after a period of time, and recently placed the Authenticator Requirement into place for all officers. Thus, even in a guild of thousands of members, AIE is protected from the smallest ninjas that may try to wreck the guild.



The Illuminati works on a much more reasonable scale of membership, but this guild is more than big enough to be a valuable thing to steal from. The Illuminati has a full six guild bank tabs, and the guild bankers organizes the items into those tabs from raw materials to pre-northrend to northrend and then to high-value raiding materials. Full members are allowed to take 3 stacks per day for the low level items, 1 stack per day of the northrend items, and must request any epic gems and eternals. New members have no access whatsoever, and this keeps the guild savings protected from any ninjas or hacked accounts. While I am currently unaware of any officer policy for authenticators, the guild roster and officer roster is maintained by removing inactive members in each field. Therefore, The Illuminati also deters the potential thieves from looting the guild's bounty.

So with just a few easy steps, all the hard work you have done as a guild building gold and materials to help raiders and new toons can be protected. Security might seem like something unimportant you can get around to, but you never know with people coming in and out of the guild when a ninja will arrive. Like the guy who tried to ninja the bank if The Illuminati, sometimes they are the nicest people and start off building relationships with guild members. Always stay vigilant and keep your officers vigilant as well. Keeping your guild out of the drama threads on the forums and news reporting websites will help ensure the continued success of your guild.

We only have one more installment of this Successful Guild series, and I hope to have that finished up very soon. Until next time, keep your guild safe and secure!

Building A Successful Guild Part 3: The Outside Appearances

Well it has been quite some time since this series was going, so it seems appropriate to give some link love! In part 1, I described how the foundation of a guild is the guild leadership, who must be strong or else everything else crumbles. In part 2, I looked at the parallels between framing the different rooms in a house and in a guild, setting up proper avenues for members to enjoy all the various aspects of the game. Now we come to the third part of this five-part series on how to build a successful guild, and more specifically, the outside appearances.



When constructing a house, you pour the foundation and frame the sides and the rooms, and then the fun really begins. As all the details you see every day start going into place, the outside of the house also becomes finished. As seen above, this includes everything from the entry doors to the siding to the roof. Even as the inside of the house stays far from finished, the outside takes shape and becomes an inviting appearance of home. The outside appearance of a guild is just as crucial as the outside appearance of a house.

Although a guild may have a group of friends who come together and grab all their in-game friends to get the roster going, every guild needs some form of recruitment because people inevitably move in and out of guilds, servers, and Azeroth itself. Whether you have your eyes on becoming a huge guild like the two I happen to be a member of, or just sustain a certain number of members, keeping a beautiful outside appearance is important. This will allow you to bring in new members and in the case of a raiding guild, have your pick of a number of people when you need that important resto shaman slot filled (or whatever else). So what do you need to do in order to have this inviting outside appearance?



Again one of the most important things you can have is a good website. Maybe someone on your guild sees players of your guild in Dalaran or groups with them in random instance groups, and they want to find out more about the guild behind this person. A simple google search of the guild name will hopefully lead them to your website, which you set up with various communication channels as previously discussed. But just as important as the forum discussions is the front page and what your first impression will be. If you are a raiding guild, there should be proof of your progress right there on the front page. If you are a casual guild, find a way to put your guild personality into the home page. Perhaps the guild schedule of events, or some member-submitted pictures, all adds to the overall effect. There should be some single person in charge of the website who puts their all into it, so that you encourage more contact from potential guild members and show off your guild to the world.

Just like in a house, these things on your webpage are windows into your special world of the guild. It does not matter if the inside of your guild currently looks well put together...



or if you have a bit of a mess on your hands...



These windows are what potential recruits will look at in order to see if they want to add your guild tag to their character. Another way to form a good appearance is the conduct of your members in Azeroth. There should be some conduct policy put into place, as you do not want your members being the guys in tradechat sustaining the "anal chuck norris" conversation. Indeed, how your members behave when they are not in your presence reflects on all of you, and you need to find a way to communicate that message to members. The best window to view what a guild is like is to see how their members operate in the game. If you have members who helpfully answer questions in tradechat, pitch in to help people while questing, and treat people well in instances, your guild will be very well-though of. We all know the guilds on our own servers that you would not want to be associated with because they get made fun of in tradechat or people just hate them for various reasons. Thus, maintaining your outside appearance must be a hybrid effort between your website and the conduct of your current members. After all, they would like to meet new people and make more friends, presumably, so this should be a top priority.



In Alea Iacta Est, this challenge can be more unique thanks to the size of the guild. In fact, AIE has people in every walk of life and ends up having members at the forefront of every scene in the game, whether it is Arena, Battlegrounds, Raiding, City Raids, or RP Events. AIE has a fantastic website, which links in some news on the front page, has clearly defined information for interested recruits, and links to the things that bring most people into the guild, that being The Instance podcast and the related forums. Once someone clicks around the website, they will see that AIE has little groups of people doing everything, and this information invites people right in to experience it. The forums are the real selling point though, as you can see just how special the community is. For example, one of the guild members passed away recently, and the outpouring of emotions and heartfelt responses are enough to shake you at your core. You don't expect a group of people gaming to come together like a family, but AIE manages to do so and shows it right off for anyone willing to look in the windows. As for in-game conduct, the leadership keeps their ears to the ground and takes care of problems that crop up quickly and efficiently. When reports came in that certain guild members were acting rudely in the new LFG system, the leadership jumped into action, finding out who was being offensive and encouraging members strongly to be ambassadors of the guild everywhere they went. While it is true that AIE's size causes the guild to be viewed unfairly at times, once you look in the windows and give the guild a chance, you see how great it is. The guild keeps growing thanks to the outside appearances, and it's a good thing.



Meanwhile over on alliance-side, The Illuminati has taken a recent stance of staying about the size they are. We already are the biggest guild on the server for the alliance, and the guild leadership wants to keep a tight-knit sense of community on some level. Nevertheless, people come and go all the time and it all starts with the website. The Illuminati website clearly shows the main raid progression and schedule, snapshots from guild members, and some recent forum posts so a visitor can jump right into what is going on right now. The forums might not be as well-traveled as others, but the website invites people in to see what we're all about. In game, the Illuminati has not really needed to keep a conduct policy per se, but the guild leadership will take action to make sure nobody in the guild is doing anything silly in the world like treating people badly or unnecessarily spamming trade chat. These efforts continue to bring in the recruits to refill the membership rolls when others must pass along out of the guild for various reasons.

So the outside appearance of a house and a guild can invite people in and keep your public guild reputation positive. This not only helps bring in new members, it also helps your members join pick up groups for raids and things, because their guild tag starts to carry a positive meaning or connotation. The best compliment I've ever heard in game for our guild is being added to an endgame PUG raid because some other guild members had left this raid leader with a good impression of us. As the series continues to the final two parts, we will look next time into protecting or securing your guild. See you next time!

Building A Successful Guild Part 2: The Framing

Welcome back to our investigation of how to build a successful guild from the ground up. As you will recall from Part 1, the foundation for a successful guild has been set with proper guild leadership and officers. Today we discuss the next step of guild building, which is having a proper framework for the various activities of your guild. As always, you can appreciate that building a framework for a guild is much like building a framework for our house, so liberal showing off of construction pictures continues!



After placing guild leadership and officers in power, your next step is deciding just what your guild needs to cater to. For smaller guilds, there may be one or two aspects of the World of Warcraft game that you group to focus on. One example is a hardcore raiding guild, which typically runs 30-40 members in order to have enough front liners and substitutes to consistently run 2-4 raids per week. Those small guilds are perfectly OK having a house framed for one to two rooms overall because that's all the members are interested in. However, as a guild increases in size, more thought has to be put into how the different focuses of your members will be accomodated. I liken this to the process of planning the number and size of rooms in a house. My wife and I only have 1 child to date, but we are building a house that will last us a decade or longer. Thus, we must plan rooms for future children and build enough rooms to accomodate our future needs.


Is this my room? Wow!

So if you are planning a raiding guild, then there's not a lot of thought that needs to go into the framework. However, most people reading this will be members of much larger guilds. Off the top of my own head, a large casual guild will have members who may be interested in each of the following things: PvP battlegrounds, PvP arenas, PvP twinking, endgame raiding, casual raiding, achievement hunting, leveling and questing with multiple characters, roleplaying, and perhaps even other aspects of the game I have missed! Even if you start out by just catering to casual raiding and leveling characters, eventually your membership will grow and have these other interests. Rather than having them skip off to another guild or in my analogy, buy another house, wouldn't it be better to plan ahead and build the proper framework at the beginning to be able to support these varied interests? I believe so.

Each room in my future house has been planned with as much care as possible, meaning each room has a purpose and is sized and designed to serve those purposes. Thus, we have a large great room or family area because this is where we will spend most of our time together as a large unit. For most guilds, this "great room" will be endgame raiding, whether casual or hardcore. You need to ensure that there's enough framework for the raid group or raid groups to be organized and run. This means electing officers or members to become raid leaders and assistants. These raid leaders will be tasked with all the minutae that the guild leader and officers may not be able to handle for each separate group of members in the guild, such as scheduling raids, notifying members, deciding rosters based on signups, and actually running the group on raid night. There's a lot to worry about, so you'll need trusted people to be the framework or the walls of your guild.



In addition to the great room of the house, you need to make sure you have a framework for all the remaining interests. If PvP content is not that important to your guild, then perhaps you only have one officer who organizes guild-sponsored PvP events for those players. In other words, make sure you have the room for PvP, but don't waste time making it the second biggest room in the house if that's not where you see your membership leaning. The same goes for achievement hunting, roleplaying, and all the other niches I listed above. The key is to have someone always in charge of those areas. For smaller interest groups these can be handled by existing officers from the foundation of the guild, but for larger interest groups you simply have to elect members to lead these fronts. Otherwise the guild leadership will eventually forget one part of the playerbase and will not be able to accomodate their needs, thereby leading to part of your guild moving out of the house. This brings me to another point. You know what's missing in the above picture? Insulation.



Putting this insulation in ensures that everyone who is only interested in certain activities in Azeroth can focus on those without being dragged into other activities or groups. If you have a messageboard or forums on your website, organize it so that the roleplaying folks have a place to roleplay, the PvP content folks have a place to organize arena teams or battleground grinding, and the PvE content folks have a place to organize raids or achievement hunts. Nobody wants to fish through 20 raid announcements to read one roleplaying entry, and vice versa. You also need to ensure that different people are accountable for the different interests of your guild, thereby insulating the problems if they do occur. Obviously you have doorways between these insulated rooms in order for people with shifting focus to move around the guild as they see fit. So with all of these metaphors in place for the framing of a guild, let's take a quick look at my own guilds and how they accomplish this aspect of the successful guild business.



In the Illuminati, we have a messageboard on our website that does split the various interest groups into rough categories so that they may communicate more effectively. There's different rooms for planning group questing, 5-man dungeons, and 10/25-man raids. There's a separate section for roleplaying as well as another for encounter strategies. While our guild does a little bit of PvP content, we don't focus on it so we don't include much of a framework for discussion and organizing events in that realm currently. As for placing people in charge of those areas, we have Cantique who writes regular roleplaying entires for our website and also encourages RP activities. We have a small handful of raid leaders who are in charge of scheduling and running weekly or monthly events for engame raiding, as well as one event leader who runs more fun events or achievement hunts. These leaders are completely separate and insulate the different interest groups in the guild. Although The Illuminati is definitely slanted towards PvE and roleplaying, there's the proper framework of people and communication alleys to meet these objectives.



In Alea Iacta Est, we obviously need a framework on a much bigger scale. If The Illuminati is building a $100,000 house, AIE is building a $5 million mansion. even though there's a lot more framework required, AIE provides just that on their website and with their leadership. The AIE online forums have six clear categories: general communication, PvP/Battlegrounds, Raiding, Roleplaying, Class Forum (caters to class-specific strategy), and Professions (like our own bartering or auction house within the guild). As far as running raids, the website lists 33 different raiding groups which cater to different times and days of the week. Each of these raiding groups has an independent webpage on the AIE site and independent leadership you can contact to get involved with that raid group. Everybody is insulated where they want to be, and there's leadership in position to organize those achievement hunts or raid teams or battleground pre-mades. There needs to be independence to run these events and members are given that independence by allowing them to organize groups in the forums or start their own raid group website on the AIE site. So the AIE guild successfully chugs along thanks to the proper amount of framework to hold such a large group of people with every interest you can imagine in the game.

Again, the framework is a bit more exciting than setting a foundation, but it sure does not seem sexy or fun yet. Nevertheless, to keep your future house ready for your family's needs, you need to plan your rooms and frame/insulate accordingly. In a guild this means putting the proper members in place to organize the interest groups and providing proper communication channels for the varied interest groups to express themselves in. In life and in Azeroth, it's better to plan ahead than accomodate/fix later.

Now that I have a finalized plan for this series, I can confidently say that we will be covering outside appearances and membership recruitment next time. The final two parts will follow, covering securing your guild and putting those finishing touches on a successful guild. See you next time!

Building A Successful Guild Part 1: The Foundation

Today I begin an investigation of how to build a successful guild, with some pictures thrown in to show off the exciting process of house building I'm experiencing IRL. Now I will say that I've only spent significant time in one guild, but over the course of 11 months in the game I have acquired stories and knowledge from other folks as to what makes guilds work. I'm also positioned as a member of the largest Alliance guild on my server: The Illuminati, as well as the largest Horde guild on my server: Alea Iacta Est. Both guilds appear to be stable and managing their big size well because of a few key factors in each guild.

Note that AIE has 1600 active members (and 4800 overall) according to Wow Census and The Illuminati has 187 active members (347 overall), so each presents a whole different scale of size. The Illuminati would only be the 6th biggest Horde guild on the server, but the fact remains that these two guilds top the population charts and that presents some unique challenges, especially considering both guilds are obviously geared towards all kinds of players. Each guild has hardcore raiders, complete casuals, PvP gurus, etc. So that's the background on the two guilds I will use to illustrate examples of my point.

Building a successful guild is like building a house. Each process has many things to take care of, else the guild/house crumbles beneath you. Each process take a lot of time, and a lot of work to do correctly. Yet if everything falls into place, the benefits are fantastic.

The first step of building a home is setting a proper foundation. Without the proper building blocks in place, there's no way anything of substance can be supported over a long period of time. In the World of Warcraft, a foundation of a guild is the guild leadership. This encompasses a good guild leader as well as the officers/assistants making up the core leadership group with the guild leader.

A good foundation of a house handles the weight of the house with strength of materials and great care in the placement of supporting beams and columns. A good guild leader handles a successful guild by having strong fellow leadership around him and great care to understand where support of more officers is needed for his guild and putting good leaders in those positions. Without this strength and great care, a certain section of the guild could collapse for lack or organization and leadership, leading to a possible exodus of players that could cripple a guild.

While the foundation of a house is not something people generally show off or praise, when the foundation begins to break, it becomes a huge problem for all the details people do care about (the rest of the house). Guild leaders are a special breed because they not only have all the qualities I just listed, but they also don't mind having all their hard work be ignored while people enjoy everything built above them. That's not to say guild leaders get no credit at all or love from their guild members, but they certainly don't get as much credit as they deserve generally.

When the guild leader bolts from the guild or crumbles by not taking care of his responsibility, everything else falls apart because the foundation is no longer there. Sure, it may take a bit of time for the house walls to break or sink into the soft earth, just like it may take a bit of time for the guild to spiral out of control and break apart...but losing a good guild leader without a replacement foundation will eventually lead to guild disbanding.

In The Illuminati, the primary guild leader is Vowain. Vowain embodies all of those foundation-like features one could hope for in a guild leader, and it shows in the growth and stability of the guild only 1 year into its existence. Vowain deals with guild issues head on, and he is not afraid to be strong and make the hard decisions when necessary. Vowain has surrounded himself with some officers, including a "second-in-command" Magus as well as a handful of Regents or guild officers. This core leadership group is properly sized for the guild and takes on additional important roles we will cover in later installments of this guild-building experience.

In Alea Iacta Est, the primary guild leader is Maui. Maui also embodies all of the foundation-like qualities of strength and care that you wish for in a top officer. AIE operates on a whole different scale, but Maui has placed a proper amount of officers around him to manage the load of the nearly 5000 members. There are Imperators, or a set of 4 other guild founding members, as well as 4 Praetorians, which are the core leaders who manage guild resources and policy issues since Maui cannot be expected to handle all of them in such a large guild. The day-to-day operational leadship is handled by a group of 32 Centurions. More Centurions are added as the guild grows in active membership so that someone is around to handle conflicts and other guild necessities. Maui and this leadership group keeps the behemoth guild running smoothly.

So while putting together the foundation or group of officers may not be the sexiest thing to start off with when building a guild, not taking the proper steps at the early stages of guild development will produce cracks or weaknesses in this foundation that may eventually lead to the whole guild crumbling into nothingness. Next time, we'll discuss guild membership and outside appearances.