As long as the GM doesn't kick me, I'm happy. Everything else is a bonus to me.

With ESO now 6+ years old, I have been through multiple different guilds and experienced a wide range of personalities and leadership/organisational styles.

The number one quality an ESO guild leader (this applies to the whole core leadership team in any guild), is visibility and engagement/activity.

The guild literally dies if the leadership are not actively engaged in the guild.

- Regular chat in guild chat, & discord - but mainly in guild chat, more people than you probably realise have no interest in discord. Even saying hello and asking if anyone needs help with anything, that can be all it takes to generate chat and a sense of community.
- Running regular, scheduled or impromptu content runs - random dungeons, pledges, trials, wb/dolmen/delv runs etc.
- Running regular extra curricular guild activity - tournaments (pvp), raffles, competitions - best guild house, best character outfit etc, in game games - hide & seek, race from A to B, etc etc... Crucially, all with desirable prizes.
- Well equipped guild house, transmute station, crafting stations, target dummies, etc.


These may seem obvious, but very very few guilds maintain that level of leadership/activity, in my experience. Many do for short spells, but not over the long haul. If you genuinely know of a guild that has and continues to provide these features, with a vibrant active community, please let me know. I have been in some incredible guilds with wonderful leaders. Some guilds I have been in for years. But every single one has or is in the process of dying due to the gradual reduction in the basic features of a guild and engagement by the leadership.

There are a huge range of reasons why leadership enthusiasm/engagement/play time wax and wane, were all human and have lives/gaming away from ESO. I am part of the core leadership team in a couple of guilds and I am every bit as guilty of the issues I describe here, why? The usual, I now have kids, Ive been at ESO for 5 years, naturally my play time has reduced as I play other games and complete more and more ESO content, I work full time, and other personal issues - Life happens. And that guild is now a ghost ship most days compared to its hay day back when the whole leadership team were active every day and chat was a buzz of activity and community and content and events were being arranged every day/week.

Mini rant over I guess. I just feel so sad that some guilds that were so vibrant and effective, die or are dying the slow death.

Be active

Be involved

Offer some fun or useful activities

Make an effort to communicate even if it's just to say hello and ask how everyone's doing. A mute guild is a dead guild.

Dont spend all your time just focusing on yourself and ignore your guild members. A guild doesnt run itself. You need to at least get involved in the early stages until you get officers helping you.

Encourage your members to run activities too

Reward your members that help build the guild by praising them, thanking them ...its nice to be appreciated and noticed.

If you dont have a guild hall for guildies to use maybe one of your members might share their house, they might have crsfting stations etc that other guildies might find useful.

If you are busy doing crafting writs then put yourself as busy status so guildies know you are there but cant chat...

It doesnt take a lot of effort to do a zone clear once a week or some dolmens or skyshard farming...also ask for help,and advertise for officers ...dont make the mistake of trying ty o do it all on your own, you will burnout and hate the game cos you wont get peace to play your game...so delegate jobs.

I'm more concerned about the guild as a whole than the leader.

I've been in guilds before where the leader is a wonderful, friendly charismatic person who is absolutely the life and soul of the guild and did a huge amount to keep things active and get to be friends with each member, but because they were doing it all the guild just didn't work when they weren't around. If they were just at work, sleeping etc. it just meant the guild was quiet (and since they'd recruited almost everyone themselves generally most players shared a similar schedule) but if anything happened to stop them logging in for a while the guild just died because no one else was in a position to cover for them.

More often than not they also ended up getting burned out because they felt this pressure to be online whenever they could and to spend time with everyone and always be friendly and social and never got any time for themselves.

I've been in equally good guilds where I'm not even sure who the leader was because the responsibilities were shared between several different people equally. Sometimes they'd have specialisations, like one person was in charge of organising trial groups and another did PvP, sometimes it was just whoever was online and willing and able to do it at the time.

The main things I look for in a guild are:

• Casual, PvE-focused and social, willing to help each other, even with easy or simple things.
• People who don't take themselves or the game too seriously.
• Mainly use in-game guild chat to communicate. Some have a discord channel too but it's not the main way of talking to guild members. I use Discord when I need to, but I don't want to have to keep switching to it to see what's being said and I usually can't use voice chat so guilds who mainly use voice are useless to me.
• Organise events sometimes but they're not mandatory even if you're online when they start.
• Members willing to help out if someone asks and they're free to do so.

More specific to the leadership I think it helps a lot if they either decide the guild's priorities in advance and then recruit based on that or ask the members what they want before deciding to focus on something.

I once had a guild nearly shut down because the leader spent about 2 weeks desperately trying to farm enough gold to afford a good trader before complaining that everyone else was barely contributing and weren't even putting much stuff on the guild store. Most of the responses were pointing out that none of us had joined a trade guild, and we didn't want to be in a trade guild so we didn't see any need to spend lots of time and gold on trading. I think it surprised him to be reminded of that but it fixed the problem - he stopped trying to afford 'good' trader spots and went back to only getting one if we got lucky with a low bid and seemed much happier focusing on other stuff.

A cool guild name...yes I am serious.

Kind, honest, non judgemental, takes a joke, not too serious, is fair, not prone to anger tantrums, doesn’t build a guild/inner circle within a guild.

I like guild leaders that take a more administrative role rather than a hierarchical role, allowing members to drive the guild and have a “piece of the guild pie”.

From the other perspective, as a guild leader I appreciate when members help set up and lead events.

Starlight_Whisper wrote: »

A cool guild name...yes I am serious.

Left a guild with a trader, no dues, activity extremely high...but name was so cringe

The guild leader of the one guild I belong to has all the qualities I expect and more.

• Does not allow toxicity in guild chat.
• Treats all members with respect.
• Has fun activities. One day we played hide and seek and there were nice monetary rewards for the first 3 to find her. (I was first )
• Other activities are auctions, random giveaways, housing tours and contests, a guild bazaar with items on display for sale (decent prices, proceeds go back to guild)
• Organized Dungeons, Trials, World Bosses, skyshard runs
• A public trader one week each month even though we aren't a trading guild.
• Helpful.
• Recruits to keep an active membership.
• Provides crafting stations at the guild house.

This sounds like utopia but it's not, because it takes more than a great guild leader to keep things going smoothly. The members need to pitch in, too. And this guild is somewhat cliquish and guild chat is dead most of the time.

Grianasteri wrote: »

Regular chat in guild chat, & discord - but mainly in guild chat, more people than you probably realise have no interest in discord.

I wanted to add this quote because this is HUGE. Our guild chat is dead most of the time. I've logged in and said hello, or made comments to try start a conversation just to be ignored.

And I hate discord. The one time I got in discord for a housing tour, one member kept interrupting and dominating the conversation. Plus sometime I just don't want a headset on, or to listen to others chatter all day. With guild chat I can choose which conversations I want to participate in... if there are any.