How do Guilds get so large? Tips on creating a large following for guild.

RealHeadhonchoe

hello all who take time to click,

I currently play on Ps4 and created my own guild ( The Grimm Lords ) a while ago. Its decent size and the momentum of members has slowly dwindled. Im also apart of 4 other guild that have 500 members. I realize that a lot of large guilds have been in the game for a while, but other large guild just pop up and get massive followings. Im asking any guild aficionados out there for tips on how to create a large following for my guild. Im not emperor or have ever been one, but is that what it takes?

any Tips would be greatly appreciated!

"have *patience*, all things are difficult before they become *easy*." - Saadi

Sincerely, Nord and Elder Scrolls vet,

RealHeadhonchoe

Ruckly

Popularity and utility I think are the two mainstays of a good guild. Be popular and useful and success will follow. -Ruckly

Tasear

It's simple provide a purpose for your guild. I have seen crafting guilds, housing guilds, theory crafting guilds, role-play guilds, All female guilds, cult guilds, all sorc guild.

Option b
Just randomly invite people and see who says yes. Start in starter zone right by that boat.If they are lvl 1 or 2 they are new to game. As max level characters can skip to lvl 3

Ideas
Roleplay guild that puts on shows in houses or areas and charges audience for coin. Guild mates would be the actors.

Tekillya

Just think what would keep you in a guild. Think would make others join your guild. Figure that out and your all set.

Tekillya

If you started off strong but died try to ask people that left why to get a idea of what was wrong.

Tasear

Tekillya wrote: »

Just think what would keep you in a guild. Think would make others join your guild. Figure that out and your all set.

Some people just stay in a guild out of habit.

Tekillya

I know it is hard work leading a guild. When people can have 5 guild choices they may stay in 4 and let the 5th slot to check other guilds out.

Tasear

Tekillya wrote: »

I know it is hard work leading a guild. When people can have 5 guild choices they may stay in 4 and let the 5th slot to check other guilds out.

Guild system remodel 2018 please

Chadak

Pretend to be super friendly, even if you're not, and organize things so that people can just so up, deadhead and feel like they participated.

You have to understand a couple things about the vast majorities of people.

Firstly, most people are lazy; really, unbelievably lazy. Thing is, they don't want to feel lazy.

Most everyone wants to do things their own way, but about four out of five will implode as soon as figuring out their own way that doesn't suck proves challenging.

Most everyone wants to feel like they're accomplishing something, but at least half of anyone you'll ever meet has no real clue what exactly it is they want to do at any given time, on any given day.

Most people want to be entertained. Most people want to be led around by the hand, but god help you if you ever make them FEEL like they're being herded and directed.

Some few will rise above the motley masses and prove eager to do the entertaining rather than be the entertained. Some of them are egotists that crave the spotlight, others are control freaks that hate everything unless they're in charge of it (these can be the same people) and some have no clue what they're doing but are willing to try to fill a hole that they perceive as needing filled (these are the keepers and the people that will prove to be long-term assets).

Big guilds need a lot of organization, right up to a point where it turns into micromanagement and alienates people. You have to find that point and stay on the not-alienatingly-micromanagey side of it. Its a moving goalpost with some people.

Rule 1: You will never please everyone. Don't even try. Set goals, be clear about what those goals are and remain consistent in pursuing them. You will never please everyone all of the time, but you can consistently please some of the people most of the time, and that's good enough.

Rule 2: Learn what to accept as 'good enough' and what to never accept as being good enough, particularly with behaviors and attitudes you will and won't tolerate in your guild. REMAIN CONSISTENT.

Rule 3: Be the leader. Don't try to be everyone's friend. You can be friendly without sacrificing your authority or your consistency. If you don't like to be or can't be, be honest with yourself about that and move on.

Checkmath

I have some tips for you mate:

First off many guilds serve a purpose like trading, trials, dungeons, pvp, duelling, roleplay or crafting. There you need to decide, what you want to present/provide for your guildmates. Trading guilds mostly are huge, but its a competitive thing, so you always neef to be up to date for getting a good place and merchant.

There are many pve guilds out there, mostly doing trials and dungeons. They can be really big or a small guild of some dedicated players. Here a good raid planning is important, you need to organize trial leaders and date of the trial to run. Dungeons mostly are done with the same guildmates, this doesnt have to be organized.

For a pvp guild, you have to choose an alliance for which your guild will play. Advertisement should be done in the alliance zones and in cyrodiil. Also here you need to have several people able to lead groups of 5 to 24 people. Everyday should be covered with a leader, so people can join whenever they want.
If you rather go for a duelling/bg guild, alliance doesnt matter. Recruiting should be done at famous duel spots.

For every kind of guild, you need to invest time to manage guild stuff. Organizing raids, merchant and more. Also you need good officers to help you out. You need to plan events and give tasks to your officers too. Write a catchy advertisement text, also saying what your guild is aiming for. Either do the recruitement yourself or let somebody with patience do it. You need to hop from relevant zone to the next one and spam your advertisement text. If you want your new recruites to stay, dont only invite them to the guild, talk with them, invite them in voice chat and try to find out, why they joined and what they expect from the guild. Also you can help them getting gear or stuff to bind them to the guild. Try to maintain a good ambiance in your guild and dont try to set to hight goals or change them

Kel

Whatever you do, be true to what you say your guild does. I've joined guilds that say they run dungeons/trials, but getting players aside from one or two to actually participate was like pulling teeth. I've joined guilds that say they run PvP, and again, when it came down to it just didn't have members join up.
It's annoying as a player thinking you are going to get to participate in a activity you were sold on, but don't get to do because the person who recruited you misrepresented the activities the guild participates in.
Just be sure to do what you say you're going to do, whatever that may be. Even if it's just "This is a place to chill and do nothing"....just don't misrepresent what the guild is about just to get numbers.

Aisle9

A guild with 500 members where everyone does their own thing won't do, you need to be active.

The activities need to be something your members want, so in case of an endgame raiding guild, you need to organize raids, ideally one or two every week.

The activities need to be successful, so in case of a raiding guild, your raids need to be completed, which means you need 6 to 12 very experienced people in your roster, depending on the content you want to do. For PvE trials, as long as you only care about completion, you can do with 6 people that really know their stuff, to cover the important roles: Main Tank, Healers, 4 DDs with solid rotations/experience/equipment. In case of PvP raids, I'd go with the same number, but may vary. I said 12 because you want to be able to have more than 1 raid, therefore you may need multiple rosters, for a large guild.

People want to be engaged, but people don't want to feel mocked. Most people feel very high end players will mock them if they can't reach certain goals, but the truth is, the very high end players want to be challenged too, so stale gameplay (staying forever in a learning environment where you have to teach people with less experience) won't keep them long in the guild, because they will feel frustrated, which then may translate in backlashes against less experienced members when the raid fails (i.e. constant wipes for stupid reasons).

What I'm trying to say is that you don't have to worry only about recruitment (get new members), you have to worry most about retention of your existing members (keep them engaged). You achieve that with activities that satisfy most of your members. For that reason, as others have stated, it's easier to specialize (e.g. "PvE Endgame Trial Guild", "PvP RAiding Guild", "Trading Guild", etc).

Also, if you can complete challenges your guild will increase in notoriety and people will then contact you to join it (e.g. Achievement runs of newly released content, Leaderboards positions). Having one or more members that also provide content creation (streaming/videos/written guides/etc) will help a lot.

Back to the activities, if you provide what a player can't have without joining your guild, or even just make it easier, people will join. That includes veteran trials (because a lot of players believe the addition of trial gear will magically make them pros), veteran DSA (which is apparently very difficult to pug if you have no experience), cross-faction PvP raids (so they don't have to spam the zone chat with "lfg"), veteran dungeons for farming, etc.

Having a crafter with 9 traits and most of the motifs that provides services without compensation (always ask to provide mats, tho, that's a slippery slope, people will eventually believe they have a right to stuff) helps a lot, and having someone with intimate experience with certain classes, maybe the aforementioned content creator, with advices on builds and sets and rotations also helps. A guild hall with crafting stations (e.g. transmute station) helps, make sure you include it in your recruitment ad.

Other than that, we're social animals, people want to be engaged and want to be part of a community. Try to engage as much as possible your members, because most people will lurk in a corner until you go there and take their hands. May be laziness, may be social anxiety, don't know, don't care, the point is, you might have to actively engage your members until they are confident enough to engage others on their own. Social status helps in that regard, so make sure you update the guild ranks (e.g. from recruit to member, from member to premium member, premium member to officer, etc), but that's not enough, you have to go there and invite them to do stuff. If they underperform you have to be the one telling them it's ok, not to worry, but if they need help "go there, there and there, or ask him, her and the other one" (basically, that it doesn't matter, but there's room for improvement). I personally don't like to use only positive reinforcement, I think it creates an environment that doesn't promote improvement and challenge, but it's the safest choice if you want to keep people.

One thing, as a guild master, you will eventually forget (because it's tiresome) is that unless you're famous, and don't really care about retention, you can't always stick to your inner circle, your entourage, you need to include everyone in activities, but always make sure the new person you're including is not vital to the activity completion. Basically, make sure you can /carry. You may get the pro, you may get the bow LA spammer, both of them want to be successful, so make sure you can complete the activity, which means always make sure you have at least 60-70% of your group made of people capable of doing what you're going to do. Also make sure you excel at your role of choice: if you're the main tank, be the best tank in the guild, if you're a DD be the highest dps, or close to it, in the guild, if you're a healer... heal a lot, I guess ? As a guild master you want to project an image of power. You can't be the one wiping the group, that will be detrimental to your guild in the long run. If you're not, make sure nobody notices. Don't brag about a parse, unless you're sure it's a good parse, so stay informed about where the game is going.

On that note, make sure you're not the one creating drama, be the one moderating it. If you have an issue, make sure it's not public, solve it behind closed doors.

If one day you do your progression raids, the next day you have to do a training raid, or a casual raid, that everyone can join, even the scrub that stays in the corner light attacking with the bow. Listen to your guildies and, where possible, try to gently push towards improvement. If you go for "show me your parse, you need at least [x] dps on a target dummy" and then the activities you do can't engage your members, they will leave. They will take what they can and leave. If you decide for that kind of recruitment, make sure you keep the activities engaging. You need to grow in content you do, challenges you tackle, and performances of your guild mates.

Other than that, make sure everyone feels relevant. Social features help (facebook, discord, forum, whatsapp/telegram group, w/e), you want your members to be social to a certain degree, so they will feel part of a community and that will help you retain them through hard times (like when you want to take a break because the game is stale and a new hot game just came out).

On that note: get help. A lot of help. Learn to delegate. Get a large group of officers that can micro-manage stuff in the guild. To do that make sure to keep an eye out for exceptional players, give them positions of power, then allow them to do their thing (e.g. PvP raid lead, Trial raid lead, etc). If they take the initiative, you don't have to. The larger the guild gets, the more people you will need to keep everyone engaged.

Engagement is kind of a big thing, so you need people to be active. Not bashing on casuals, but people that log in once every month, stay a bit, then log out for another month are not good for a guild's health. Get rid of them, unless it's a temporary phase (e.g. "exams, have to study, can't log in for a couple months"). In that case make sure they tell you. Make sure you know which player you want to keep and try to keep the ones still engaged in the game. I'm not saying daily logins, but if they stay offline for more than 30 days there's a good chance they lost interest in the game. Clear that slot, get someone else.

Hope this helps.
Stay safe.

Olen_Mikko

As a former guildmaster, getting people is easy. Just spam interesting ads on zone chat and randomly invite new players.

Harder part is to make people stay and finding active and dedicated players.

You have to offer them something. Scheduled stuff around your guild's mission.

Like example: Adventuring guilds should offer constant world boss hunts, dungeon runs etc.

kargen27

We recruit a lot of good members after running random dungeons. The key is good members. I am in one guild that has over 400 members but you can go days and not see anything in chat. Better to have 40-50 active members than 400 that just barely participate if at all.

Back to the random dungeon thing. When you join group say howdy and see who responds. Ask if anyone needs the quest and see if you get a response. If you get a reply back from someone saying they have already done the quest ask at the end of the dungeon if they have an open guild slot and would like to join your guild. People who take the time to let you know they don't need something often take the time to contribute in a guild. People who respond favorably to sharing dropped items can be good for an invite. Just taking the time to acknowledge other players are in the group may be enough of a tell to send an invite. Doesn't have to be just dungeons. Look for a PuG to do world bosses or dolmen and if someone in group is helpful or whatever give them an invite. Always ask first though, don't just send the blind invite. Ask if they ahve a slot open and if they would be interested in joining a guild that...

Grab members from other guilds you are in. Our casual guild got some good members from a PvP guild a few of us are in. They were looking for groups to farm armor sets and were not getting a lot of response from the PvP guild so perfect opportunity to grab them.

You really need to build your guild around five to ten players (more if you can) that will be on often and will be active in chat. If someone asks a question in chat try and have people who will respond. Even if the response is sorry I can't help that at least beats nothing. When you get a few members that are active you can then begin to define your guild and start finding players that will fit with what you are planning.