The Big Book of Punishments (& How to Use It)

Guilds have rules. We’ve talked about that a lot. What we haven’t discussed heretofore is what happens when those rules are broken. “The person who broke the rule needs to be punished” is pretty obvious, but the little things like “how” need to be covered. Unless your guild consists solely of members of your household, punishments like “do the dishes for the next week” aren’t really going to work.

Your options in most games are pretty limited; there is a decided dearth of games in which you can place your disobedient guild members in an oubliette until you feel like letting them out. (That would have logistical problems, for starters.) But you do have options for punishment, and today, I’m going to run down the five biggest ones whilst discussing when to use them and when they just plain don’t work.

Warning

You have gotten a warning at your job. It’s fine. We all have. At one point, I even got the dreaded Formal Written Warning at a job about a week before I got promoted. That fragment of an anecdote pretty well sums up the usual attitude to take toward warnings, which is that they’re not to be taken terribly seriously.

Warnings are an easy punishment to use, since they don’t require a whole lot of effort from officers. Unfortunately, they’re also a very easy punishment to completely ignore, because usually a “warning” just means that the officer said “don’t do that,” which means you have to not do that while that officer is watching until it fades from memory. It is ineffectual.

As a punishment, a warning is never going to have much in the way of teeth, but it works well as a buffer assuming that the officers are actually keeping track of this. “I’m giving you a warning for this” means absolutely nothing. “I’m giving you a warning; next time, you’re going to be unable to chat in the guild channel for two weeks” means something.

Carefully tailoring the “next time” punishment and the duration of that warning is also useful, as no one wants to forever be one black mark away from a major penalty; all warnings should be in place for a maximum of three months, after which time you can be reasonably confident something warnable won’t crop up again if it was a momentary blip.

Overall, warnings are useful just so you don’t come down with full wrath on every petty offense. But make sure to give them some teeth.

Fines

In MMOs, there are really two sorts of fines you can levy. The first is a proactive fine, such as making someone toss 100,000 gold in your guild chest in World of Warcraft. The second is a reactive fine; the next time a token drops that you could use in Star Wars: The Old Republic, you have to pass on it and let someone else have it.

Fines are, by themselves, an effective punishment. Someone takes an item that they should have passed on, they have to pass on the next thing they want. Someone yoinks an item from the guild chest, they have to pay back the value of the item plus some extra. Unfortunately, fines also have the problem of being entirely voluntary; you can’t force another player to pay the fines, and if they didn’t care about the rules enough to incur the fine, they might well not care about them enough to pay the fine.

Some people also have a nasty habit of using fines as buying the otherwise unpurchaseable; I knew someone in WoW who regularly stole items from raids and then paid the fine, reasoning (correctly) that the gold cost was something he could earn while the items themselves were otherwise impossible to buy. Not a great guy, but he had a strategy that worked.

As such, fines are something best put into place as part of another punishment, or as a slap on the wrist for something that doesn’t matter too much. Keep them small and use them more to punish inattentiveness than outright malice, so people are likely to grumble for a moment but then acquiesce on the grounds of fairness.

Demotion

Most guilds need more than three ranks, or even four ranks. When handled correctly, ranks are a measure of trust. If you’ve been with the guild for three years, you get more privileges; I trust you to access the guild bank freely and even change the daily message if need be, because you’re probably not going to screw with people.

Demotion, however, is useful. Consider, for a moment, a guild with eight ranks; the top two are the founder and officer, the bottom rank is a specialized punishment rank, and the others have slowly ascending privileges. If you get demoted in that environment, that indicates that your punishment isn’t just a loss of privilege, although it’s that as well. It’s an indication that the guild trusts you less. Even if the change in rank just means there’s one batch of items you can’t take from the guild chest any more, you feelthat shift.

Obviously, a lot of the utility of demotion comes down to the tools you have at your disposal. In some games, you can offer fine control; a guild in Final Fantasy XIV has many tools about different options for players at different ranks, so it’s easy to declare that someone no longer has the right to tend the garden and potentially reap those benefits. Some games offer less fine control. But a demotion is always something to consider, and even if you can’t reflect it in the game, you can still mark it in other ways, such as making sure the “demoted” player no longer has an automatic team placement or pick on your Heroes of the Storm team.

You can also have a demotion be temporary or permanent. The former is usually appropriate for smaller things. Someone got a warning about being a jerk to non-guild members, then they did it again, so now they get a notch down for a month. The latter, however, is pretty serious; it means that the member in question did something really bad, and they need to really rebuild trust before they’re allowed full access again, if ever.

Removal

The semi-nuclear option, and one that should never be at the top of a list except for the most serious offenses. If you’re in a competitive League of Legends team, for example, removal is an immediate and deserved go-to if a member leaks your strategies to an opposing team. Usually, though, removal is the option when someone just will not stop screwing up.

Rather than being a single cascading effect, removal should be considered when lesser punishments are having no effect. You’ve demoted someone down as low as you can, even to the new recruit tier, but they just keep breaking the rules. At this point, it’s almost done with sadness. You don’t want to kick them out, but nothing else works at this point. It’s sad, but necessary.

Wait, did I just say this was the semi-nuclear option? Yes. Because there’s a worse punishment.

Blacklisting

This is when someone is just so dedicated to being disruptive that you have to turn your back on them completely. The player isn’t just removed from your guild; you contact other guilds and tell them not to recruit this player. You refuse to party or interact with this player. You full-on shun them, bar them from any interaction with the guild. They’re gone to you so far as you’re concerned.

Needless to say, this is extreme. Sometimes, however, it’s justified; you just have to have a situation in which the player his someone you actively want gone from all mentions. I’ve been in guilds wherein two players separated from a real-life relationship because one of them was abusive, and the guild, in turn, shut the abuser out completely. I don’t know how his story ended, but I know that he was not welcome in any space which could conceivably involve our guild.

Most of the time, you don’t need to go this far. Heck, most of the time you don’t even need to go half this far. The majority of the players you’ll meet just need a little nudge, some warnings, and perhaps the occasional demotion. But it’s important to understand your full spread of options, just in case they ever come up.

How to Handle People Who Aren’t in Your Guild

No matter what game you’re playing, you do not get to play it exclusively with your guild. Ever. There are going to be other people playing the game, some of whom you want to have a positive relationship with — and your guild needs to handle how you interface with others.

Of course, that also comes with the caveat that people who aren’t your guild are, well, not in your guild. Which means that you have to handle a different sort of interplay. You simultaneously have to make sure that you’re treating people who aren’t in your guild as important and relevant while at the same time not letting your actual guild feel less relevant. It’s a juggling act, in other words.

So let’s break this down into three major categories… after we determine the sorts of people you’ll be dealing with.

Who is this person to you?

Total strangers are people whom your guild interacts with based on more or less nothing. They’re random people tossed into your guild by queued content or other unplanned excursions. They’re people members meet out in the field of open-world games. They’re not people you have recruited or ever interacted closely with.

Associates are people your guild deals with infrequently, but steadily enough that you know who they are. They may be part of a sister guild or just someone who’s close friends with some officers through other means. Your guild as a whole sort of knows them, but not really.

Partners, in this case, are non-members who wind up in your guild space a lot. They’re the sort of people who make you ask why they aren’t actually with your guild — and while there’s often a very good reason, they’re a familiar presence. Though they have no actual ranks in your guild, they’re treated as almost a member.

Last but not least, former members are people who were part of your guild but aren’t any more. It’s important to consider why they’re former members rather than present members, and that’s going to inform the way you interact with them. If they left on positive terms, they can easily be akin to associates or partners; if they left on bad terms, there are other cans of worms to deal with.

Handling complaints and feedback

More often than not, you’re going to be getting this sort of feedback from total strangers. “Your guild member did X at our event,” or something similar. Someone you don’t know is going to accuse your guild member of being rude or otherwise violating a rule.

The first thing to do is to explain, calmly, whether or not what was done actually violates a rule of your guild. Guild members make an agreement to follow the rules of your guild, which is why I’ve mentioned in the past that you should have rules about behavior to outside members. However, if the guild member did something that was entirely valid but ruffled someone’s feathers, your only real recourse is to explain that to the (no doubt unhappy) victim.

Assuming that this is a violation of rules, thank the person and tell them that you’ll look into it. Follow up by talking with the player in question and explaining the complaint. You aren’t, hopefully, going to automatically side with your guild member just because they claim innocence; however, you’re also going to still take their version of events into account.

If you feel like there’s room enough to consider this an actual violation, you may as well treat it as one. Furthermore, if the person bringing the complaint is an associate or partner, you’ll probably be able to skip ahead a bit; you don’t need to know if the person leveling the complaint is trustworthy. More often than not, this is the sort of thing that merits a warning and a filing away until a later date. But if the member in question has several warnings for dealing with non-guild members the same way, it’s a sign that more serious steps should be taken.

Handling attendance at events

Events are a bit trickier simply because, at least in theory, events have limited space. Every non-guild member who attends is one more guild member who can’t, and that’s important to consider. But that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wrong to have non-guild members about; it just means that you have to have a care for how you invite people.

When setting up events, designate if they are open to non-guild members and also emphasize whether signups are based on a first-come first-served basis or on a priority system. If it’s the former, whomever offers to show up first gets to come, and if that means guild members get pushed out, that’s on them. The latter case, however, lets you tailor the list based on who you want there first and foremost; just don’t claim a priority system if you’re going to be inviting non-guild members and not inviting members.

Obviously, you can’t punish people who fail to attend if they’re not part of your guild. As a result, it’s best to limit events like this to ones where you can go with a flexible number or cancel if you can’t get enough guild members; if you’re doing a World of Warcraft raid on Normal and you don’t have ten members sign up, don’t try to fill out the base with non-members. It’s also completely fair to prioritize former members (on good terms) and partners over associates.

If the non-members showing up are part of another guild, you may want to communicate with that guild’s officers first, just to coordinate matters. It might not be necessary (your guild might be a casual raiding group while they’re a PvP group), but it can be good to know that if you do need to hand out some punishment, the other guild has your back to some extent.

Handling progression content

This is where things can get very tricky. Progression content is something that, in theory, not everyone has done yet. It’s something that drops some really high-end rewards. And traditionally, it’s often been one of the bastions of guild content. A guild offers a group that can clear this content. But sometimes that winds up being just plain limiting, forcing people to choose between guilds and environments that they want to either follow friends or progress, not both.

The first step, then, is to make sure that any progression groups are operating on a priority system that is understood ahead of time and is entirely transparent. Once that’s established, the question has to be answered: for every non-guild member present, why should that person be there instead of another guild member?

At this point, you’re pretty much only discussing partners and former members on good terms. If you’re filling out with totally random members, it’s probably not really progression.

The other major thing to consider here is rewards, and there’s really one hard-and-fast rule you need to have in place here: If there’s something that’s being fought over by a member and a non-member, the member wins that fight. No matter what it is, the member gets the item. That ensures that members don’t feel as if they’re fighting against people who aren’t even in the guild to get rewards they need; they still might not get what they want, but at least it’s not because of someone who isn’t even part of the guild.

You’re always going to be dealing with non-guild members, but with careful management, this can actually be an asset. Just make sure that your priorities center around the people who are in your guild. Otherwise, those members are going to wonder why they’re supporting a guild without an interest in supporting them.

How to Properly Promote Your Guild

The old adage of “no publicity is bad publicity” is a bald-faced lie. You know it in your heart to be so. Sure, it sounds nice to think that any forms of publicity are equally helpful, but you know that odds are low you’re going to join the guild whose members are constantly shouting obscenities in general chat, or the ones who advertise themselves with a regularity usually reserved for atomic clocks.

Of course, you also know you need to promote your guild, even if you’re not doing so by swinging a yowling cat over your head and shouting about it on the regular. Sure, you may or may not to be recruiting right at this moment, but you still need people to know you exist or you’ll be out of luck when you are recruiting again. This means you have a complex problem on your hand, a need to advertise along with a need to avoid being seen as annoying.

Yes, some of this comes down to managing how your group interacts with others who aren’t among your members. But how do you advertise effectively? It probably comes as no surprise that there are tricks to it, and mastering them is well worth the time it takes.

Focus on tangible distinctions

When I play Final Fantasy XIV, I regularly see advertisements for guilds that have a laundry list of features – buffs always on, a stocked guild bank, plenty of players, voice chat servers, and so forth. And I always roll my eyes seeing them, because those things are not features. That’s like advertising a car based on the fact that it has a windshield, headlights, and tires. You can argue (convincingly) that all of that is necessary, but you can’t argue that it’s unique.

When you’re advertising your guild, you don’t need to advertise things that everyone naturally assumes are present. Those offerings will take care of themselves. Instead, what you need to convince people is that you can offer something above and beyond the normal. Instead of making a four-line advertisement stuffed with the stuff every guild has, a one-line advertisement with one unique feature is more likely to stick with people.

Similarly, advertising a “great community” or “helpful players” isn’t really an advertisement in and of itself; what you call a great community might not be what another player sees as great or even acceptable. Those are just words. Saying that you have a community focused on small-group content and scheduled runs for new players? That’s an actual thing. That’s something that you can check on and provide, something tangible. Just by focusing on actual things instead of buzzwords, you can make some extra impact.

Run open events

If I see a guild telling me “join up with us, we want more members,” my eyes frequently glaze over. I can’t help it, I see a lot of those. But if I see a guild in World of Warcraftoffering sign-ups to people who want to run old Mythic raids for transmogs as an open event? Now my interest is piqued, even if I don’t want to join that guild.

Open events are a great form of advertising, in part because you don’t actually have to do any advertising. All you have to do is organize and run an event that happens to include strangers. You don’t need to tell people about what your guild does, because you’re showing them what you can do, welcoming people to take part in something fun while at the same time demonstrating your ability to handle it.

It’s important to recognize the distinction here between advertising and recruiting; open events are worthwhile even if your group isn’t recruiting at the moment. Indeed, outright ending open events with “now join our guild” is a good way to make the goodwill you earn evaporate quickly; players will feel like they’ve been held hostage for an advertisement. Instead, just run the event, thank people for coming, do the best you can, and then know that you left a positive impression on people when they arelooking for a guild.

Of course, running these events also requires a certain critical mass of people, so it’s not always easy to do in the earliest stages of a guild’s development. But it is worth the effort put forth.

Be active and visible

Passive advertisement can often be as effective as outright advertisement, if not more so. This is the same principle as the open events mentioned above; if your guild is running something that people attend and like, they’re more likely to remember your guild positively. Just being active and helpful in the community of your game can often build up significant word of mouth alone.

Obviously, not everyone can be a top-level theorycrafter or run dozens of events per month, but even just taking part in discussions and being friendly can make a significant impact. Being active on a community site is an excellent way to keep your guild’s name out and notable without having to rely on shouting about yourself.

Of course, it comes with a caveat – just like in-game, anyone with your guild tag is representing your guild as a whole. If the people passively advertising your guild are contentious, nasty, or cruel, that’s what everyone will assume your guild as a whole is like, even if that’s not true. A bit of caution is well-advised, as a result.

If maintaining an active presence is a bit much, many official sites for online games have forums specifically dedicated to advertisements; posting a detailed advertisement that gets edited and bumped for major changes can often be a good form of quiet notification for people who are looking. As with the first point, you should be focusing on things your guild has that are unique rather than universal, but the core remains the same.

When you have to shout, do it quietly

MMORPGs almost always have guilds shouting their advertisements in cities. As discussed above, you want to do so in a way that focuses on what you do rather than generic traits, but there’s another important aspect: not trying to shout over anyone.

Place your advertisement in the intended chat channel, and then leave. Don’t do that again for another fifteen minutes at least, preferably half an hour to an hour. Enough time so that people are likely to see it, but not so often that it’s constantly buried in waves of chat. If the chat is super active, consider waiting and coming back at another time to advertise.

Again, what you want here is for people to know you’re around, not to be annoyed with your constant begging for members. Spacing out your advertisements helps accomplish that. It keeps your presence in the minds of those watching, but it does so in a way that suggests you’re calm about it. You’re not begging, you’re just asking people to come over, without any real urgency to it.

There are, of course, no certainties. It can be difficult for advertisements to reach the people you want. But if you’re trying to do so the right way, you can at least be certain that you’re not alienating the people you’re trying to attract.

5 Ways to Ensure You’re the Best Guild Member You Can Be

Focusing on progression in an MMO is hard, but it’s not just hard because of the content. Sure, that’s part of it, but it’s safe to say that if you really want something down, you’ll get it down. Eventually.

It’s that “eventually” that starts to wear thin, though. Everyone knows you need to go in for another round of practice, this content won’t beat itself, but boy you’re not looking forward to another week of wiping, and the same problems keep happening, and you’re all struggling… and before you know it people just don’t want to be there anymore. The rewards are not worth the exhaustion, full stop.

Of course, officers do everything they can to help this. But you, as a member, can alsodo a lot to help make this happen. So let’s look at some of the ways to make sure that you’re being the best guild member you can be.
Do independent research

Part of an officer’s job is making sure that everyone involved in the progression team knows what they’re supposed to be doing, and hey, that’s great. But that does not mean that during the rest of the time you can slack off and ignore things. If anything, it means that there’s more onus on you to find out what you can be doing to improve your performance all around.

Take the time to do research on your own. Research your class mechanics and make sure you’re using the best build possible. Practice your rotation. Look for alternative strategies on bosses that are giving you problems. See if other people are stuck in the same spot and what they did to overcome that problem. Do yourself the favor of looking around and seeing if there are more resources out there to make your team better.

If you find a good alternate strategy, send it along to your officers. If you have more practice with your rotation, share it – not in a passive-aggressive way, just share on the forums that you overcame a problem and that others can use the same approach. Don’t try to take control of the guild away from the officers and the people who are actually in charge, but make a point of doing some of the lifting on your own rather than waiting for the officers to say that you have a problem.

Volunteer for what you can do

There are always things that need to be done in between progression attempts. Resources need to be restocked, guides need to be written and consolidated, people need to be reminded of the times, events need to be scheduled… it can be exhausting. And most of the time, the majority of that responsibility is on the officers, since… well, it’s their guild. So that makes sense.

Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t offer to take some of the burden off of them. If you can gather some of those resources or handle the necessary calendar functions, that’s a burden off of the officers and more effort for them to focus on actually leading the guild. This is doubly true for things like calendar maintenance, necessary tasks that no one really wants to do but everyone wants done just the same.

Understand that this means you will probably be volunteering for some boring scut work and it won’t be particularly glamorous. It’s probably going to be tedious as all heck. But it also makes the guild as a whole run more smoothly over time, so that’s a good thing.

Understand and respond to guild needs

The hardest part of being a good guild member is when your guild has just cleared a difficult fight in Final Fantasy XIV, the loot is there, and you want to lay claim to exactly what you need… but you pass on it, because it’s a bigger upgrade for another part of the guild. There’s no shame in making a few choked noises over voice chat as it happens. But you also know it’s the right thing to do, because the small upgrade for you will be a huge upgrade for someone else and will lead to more success overall.

Responding to guild needs need not be that extreme; sometimes it’s just a matter of choosing crafting specializations or professions in Star Wars: The Old Republic to match what your guild needs rather than what you like to do. But the core philosophy is the same: you are part of a group, and your decisions are primarily based around what is good for the group, even if it doesn’t necessarily sync up with the stuff that’s best for you.

And yes, sometimes it means making choked noises over voice chat. Stop shy of singing “I Will Always Love You” in the midst of it, though.

Encourage your fellow members

Your officers are your authority in your guild. Whether or not they deserve that authority is another discussion but also doesn’t matter a whole heck of a lot; that’s the position they have, regardless. Praise coming from them is naturally going to feel more like your boss giving you a pat on the back. You, on the other hand, are not an officer; praise from you feels more like a co-worker acknowledging work done well.

This is one of those times when the source of a compliment matters almost as much as the complement itself. Encouraging your teammates doesn’t need to be a big thing – it can be as simple as telling someone that you can tell they’re doing good work, or reassuring someone that they got screwed by mechanics when they drop. It’s a matter of making the environment and atmosphere one of commiseration and camaraderie, that you’re all on the same team and you recognize their accomplishments.

What’s especially nice about this is that it tends to form a self-perpetuating loop – if one person is more free with compliments and praise, everyone else tends to follow suit, until everyone is praising one another and being supportive. It’s like a master plan to manipulate everyone into being helpful, it’s great.

Liven up the atmosphere

When I was working on Naxxramas with my guild many moons ago, we would often all burst into song before the Heigan fight. He was the dance boss, after all, and so we all wanted to be in the mood to dance. And sure, we still would occasionally wipe on him, but the fact that we were all going in and laughing about someone’s terrible rendition of “Video Killed the Radio Star” made things far less tense than they would have been otherwise.

Maybe you don’t sing; maybe you tell awful jokes or share puns or just rib one another. The important thing is that you work to make the atmosphere light and fun. Yes, you all need to be paying attention and put your game face on, but you don’t need to do that instead of having fun. You should be doing that while having fun.

Please note that intentionally failing an encounter is not “livening up the atmosphere,” it’s just being a jerk. Find ways of making people smile that are focused around humor rather than just forcing a wipe.

None of this, of course, will ensure that you’re successful as you work through progression. It just ensures that you’re doing your part to be the best guild member you can possibly be, offering your fellow players the best atmosphere you can bring to the table. At least if you still wipe, you know you’re doing all you can to avoid it… or take the sting off of the frustration.

Surviving the Holidays as a Guild

Back when MMOs were first becoming a whole thing, I remember that there were two times of year thought of as guild killers — the end of the school year and the holidays. The end of the school year could often spell doom for a guild simply because people were going from campus internet access to their homes, which often had lesser or nonexistent online access. However, at this point access is so ubiquitous that the odds of Kevin suddenly being unable to raid for three months due to the end of the semester is practically nil.

But Kevin still might go home for the holidays, take a few days off… and then just not come back. Ever. Or if he does show up again, it’ll be after several months have passed and half of the guild has already moved on to other things.

Holidays, in short, can be guild killers. People have a lot of other things to do through the season, which is understandable, but between getting new games, having other obligations, and just general exhaustion, it’s all too easy to find someone going from a regular member to being not there at all. The good news is that it is entirely possible to survive the holiday season; you just have to start by accepting that the holiday season will not simply be business as usual.

Plan around your members

Depending on your guild size, it is either impossible or at least unlikely that you can plan around everyone in your guild. But you can pick out key members. If you have five members who always show up for progression in World of Warcraft and a dozen members who rotate in and out, you can certainly make plans based around those five members.

Find out what those members are doing over the holidays, what their plans are, when they expect to be away from the game for a prolonged period (if at all), and what they hope to be doing over the holiday season. If you’re one of those members, don’t just wait around; make your plans clear. Coordinate with the rest of your guild. Make sure everyone is in the same place so that once people start going on holiday vacations or getting on planes to visit distant relatives, no one is suddenly baffled and wondering why the guild roster is so empty.

This also means that you’ll have a pretty good idea of what members aren’t going to be around for progression or other usual guild activities. Which is something that’s good to expect, because the reality is that people will not be around for these things. Thus…

Expect a hiatus from certain activities

Pushing heavy progression over the holidays is dumb. It’s not going to happen. You can have the best intentions in the world, but if your normal raid night is Sunday this year, odds are most of your members are going to be in something of a food-and-eggnog coma and thus will not be able to bring their A-game. They also will not be bringing their B-game. Expect the game they bring to start around the middle of the alphabet, in other words.

Weekly schedules sort of demand suspension during the holiday season. Even in the event that people are doing everything possible to still be present and playing, they are just plain going to have less rest. Your best tank might be bringing his laptop halfway across the country so he can still be there for raid night, but the reality is that he’s halfway across the country and will probably not be really in the right place for serious stuff.

The bright side is that this is the perfect time to do things that are not, necessarily, progression. I’m not suggesting for a minute that your guild should somehow close down during the holiday season; instead, what I’m saying is that smart planning revolves around knowing that some of your members will not be available. Thus, instead of planning intensive activities that require a whole lot of people to be on point, you can plan smaller fun activities that just bring people together.

If you’re normally all about progression, dedicate the holiday times to running old stuff as a group or doing silly theme runs. For more social guilds, focus less around structured activities and more around loose events. And above all else…

Theme your activities around the holidays

I’m a part of a guild right now that’s running a Secret Santa event in-game. It’s a fairly low-key thing with a low cost to enter, so it’s not meant to be a major activity… but it is meant to give the people who have time to pop in and play briefly a sense of community and fondness. It’s another layer of holiday integration, and it makes sure that players feel like the guild is still running events without relying on all of us being able to give our best in difficult content.

There are a number of ways you can have holiday-themed events in the game beyond that; most MMOs have some sort of holiday event running during the season, and many of those are easier to tackle as a group. You can also schedule snowball fights, low-level holiday runs, or something similar (I once ran a guild that did a “Clears for the Seasons” event where we’d carry less geared and skilled players through content that they would otherwise be unable to get through). The point is that if you’re already breaking from your “normal” schedule, and you are, you might as well break a little further out of the cycle, yes?

Sometimes, you’ll have lighter fare in mind that doesn’t really fit in with the time of year, and that’s fine too. But when you can tie it in, it helps people who can only log in briefly or around the fringes still feel like they’re part of the festivities. And it also keeps the people who can’t log in feeling like they want to be there and participate. Sure, Sarah really won’t be able to play during the holiday season, but she’ll come back with a sense of missing players rather than being happy for the break.

This also helps for the players who don’t really have a normal holiday environment. Odds are good that at least one of your members doesn’t get to just pal around with family members over the holidays; let them at least feel like they’re able to be with friends.

Ease back into normalcy

When New Year’s Day rolls around, there’s often a sense that it’s time to just get right back into everything running normally and act like the holidays are over. But it’s not enough to just expect a hiatus going into the holidays; you also need to plan for one extending slightly after the holidays end. People are going to be moving a bit more slowly as January takes center stage, and you should probably keep your schedule a bit lighter than normal until the middle of the month.

There are, to be fair, some players who will bristle against this. But the thing that’s more likely to kill a guild isn’t being too passive, it’s making players come back and feel like they came back to chores instead of fun. Pushing the progression group to get right back into the thick of it makes the whole thing feel really stressed. By contrast, letting your players have a bit more time to breathe first means that people can reflect, think about having missed the guild, and slowly take center stage once again as the game’s population comes back around.

Or, to make things shorter, the best way to make sure that your guild survives the holidays is by acting like the holidays are happening and they’re important rather than trying to pretend that everything is still business as usual. It’s so obvious that you’d think it went without saying, but it really doesn’t.

A New Player’s Handbook to Joining a Guild

There are always going to be new players coming into online games more or less as long as they exist. And let’s assume, for just a moment, that you’re one of them. It could even be a totally accurate assumption, in which case: Hi, new player! Welcome to a new way to play games, it’s pretty fun.

If you’ve been playing an MMORPG, or quite possibly one of the many other online games out there, you’ve probably heard about guilds or seen some talk about guilds. Most games contain a brief tutorial about the mechanics involved, but they’re not really good at giving you a picture of what guilds are meant to do. So here’s a handbook for new players looking for and joining a guild for the very first time.

What is a guild?

In simple terms, a guild is a group of players who have decided to all work together for a common goal. Most often, this takes one of two forms: the guild either focuses on the content experience or the social experience. Which sort of guild you want to be a part of is going to be very important, even though most guilds at least have an element of both.

Guilds that focus on the content experience are primarily about banding together to take on difficult dungeons, raids or other content that might otherwise be hard to assemble a group for. This is the sort of group to join if your primary focus is in seeing the really difficult stuff that the game has to offer and climbing in power. The exact nature of groups will, of course, depend highly upon your personal game of choice; in games like World of Warcraft you frequently find groups devoted to raiding and PvP progress, and these days, you may well have groups dedicated to Mythic challenge runs.

A guild focused on the social experience is concerned, first and foremost, with gathering people into a social circle so that everyone feels comfortable and happy. This can involve guilds facilitating interactions that might otherwise be challenging, such as roleplaying or shared social gatherings; it can also include making it easier to find new friends and work together. Social experiences vary widely, and there are many guilds that are “loose” social guilds with little real structure to them.

Of course, most guilds of reasonable size will have more going on than just one activity; even social guilds, for example, will often have people who run dungeons together. The difference is simply focus. If you want to primarily meet new people, the social guild is a good fit for you; if you want to primarily run dungeons, the social guild is a poor fit for you, because those dungeon runs aren’t assured by any stretch of the imagination.

How do I find a good guild?

There are several ways! The best way, of course, is knowing a member. If you’ve met someone who’s a part of The Happy Hour Harvestmen, for example, you can know right away if that’s a guild you want to join. Presumably, if your friend is a part of the guild, the guild shares at least enough values that they’re worth a look.

But what if you and your friends are all devoid of a guild? A good places to look for guilds to join are on the game’s official forums. Games with official discussion areas like World of Warcraft frequently have people advertising their guilds, often with the space and opportunity to provide more useful information than you’ll see in an in-game advertisement.

As a rule of thumb, avoid guilds that randomly invite you. These are guilds that want members so much that they’re shortcutting the process of determining whether or not they want you in the guild

Of course, in-game advertisements and tools are good ways to find out about guilds you might otherwise not be aware of. It’s often a good idea to combine the previous method and this one; you can sometimes miss guilds that might be of interest t you by only using one method, as some guilds might not want to advertise in-game but will happily put out a call on the forums (and vice versa).

The last option is to ask the larger community; asking in general chat channels in your game of choice can often give you an idea, and I’ve seen several times when guild officers or members will happily tell someone about their guilds even though they weren’t specifically advertising.

Of course, some of the “general community” answers won’t be terribly useful; a lot of players will offer recommendations either by reputation or by personal preference (“you want a social guild with an emphasis on creating a safe space? Try this hardcore progression guild with a racist name!”) rather than offering useful advice.

As a rule of thumb, avoid guilds that randomly invite you. These are guilds that want members so much that they’re shortcutting the process of determining whether or not they want you in the guild; you’re wanted as a live body and little else. That’s not ideal.

How do I apply and join a guild?

Every guild has a different process, but generally speaking, it will always involve some degree of getting to know you. Usually, the guild will have an application of some sort that you’ll need to fill out; there will also usually be an interview, although depending on the guild it might be involved or perfunctory. Your goal will be to portray yourself as a desirable member while figuring out whether or not this guild will be a good fit for you.

Once you’ve joined the guild, you’ll want to make a point of being the best member you can possibly be. This is often easier said than done; sometimes guilds will have:

Your officers should give you a good idea about how to contribute to the guild, however, as well as what you can be doing to be a better guild member.

Assuming that you do like the guild, you can help shape the character of the group and either take a big part in its ongoing victories or even eventually become an officer. If this is your first guild, you should think very carefully about whether or not you want to be an officer, as it’s a big responsibility that can require a lot of experience.

Don’t be afraid to turn down the position if you don’t feel that you’re ready; a good guild gives you space to expand and improve without requiring you to take up burdens you aren’t ready for.

Of course, after you’ve joined a few guilds, it’ll all seem like old hat. But you have to get that experience before it can be old hat, so get out there and join your first guild. Or your first several guilds. Heck, eventually maybe it’ll be time for you to just start your own altogether; stranger things have happened.

The Seven Big Benefits to Guild Membership

Why do you want a guild?

That seems like the sort of question that should have been answered a while back with this feature, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s possibly not one you need answered; you aren’t reading “Guild Guide” because you think it’s going to talk about how dumb guilds are. But you may very well be unsure of what actual benefit having a guild provides. And the answer to that can be extremely multifaceted.

But let’s be straightforward. Here are seven big benefits to having a guild.

People to talk with

An online game is a game you play with other people, but a lot of the time you don’t actually need to directly interact with them on the regular. That is, in and of itself, all right. You don’t always need to be buddied up with everyone on your server. But sometimes it can get kind of lonely when you log in and haven’t got a single person to actually interact with.

Guilds change that. Sure, there’s still going to be times where no one is online, or the people who you really want to talk with isn’t around. But you actually have better-than-zero odds of having a friend online who you can talk with, and you’re more likely to make friends you can connect with in the future. That’s an obvious benefit.

Shared resources

This isn’t always about actual items. If you have a dedicated League of Legends team, for example, your guild is not trading items to one another to enhance your play experience, more likely than not. But — and this is crucial — you are still benefiting from shared resources. You may have friends who can fill roles that you can’t, people who can offer you strategies and point you toward useful tips that you wouldn’t see otherwise.

And in MMORPGs, this is compounded. Other players have items you don’t, levels in various skills and classes that you don’t. They can do things you cannot do for yourself. Instead of having to beg for random people to give you what you need, you can tap into a shared resource of your guild and help others in the same fashion.

Necessary guidance

You will be lost sometimes. You will not know how to do a quest. You will not be sure how to play your class/job/build. You will need guidance. And having a guild means that odds are good you either have access to that guidance or have people there who can point you in the right direction. Or — and this is also good — it will give you motivation to be that guidance for other people in the future.

Seriously, sometimes the benefit of a guild is learning enough that you can be right when other people are wrong. It might seem spiteful, but it works.

Content pushing

We all tend to fall into certain ruts of content. There are things we all do on a regular basis almost instinctively, and left to our own devices it would be easy to assume that this is what everyone does. It’s easy to queue up for the same content and join the same sort of premade groups while looking at outside content as “well, no one does that.”

Join even a small guild, and there will be at least one person who enjoys content you do not. Join a big one, and you will find groups of dedicated players for that content. And that forces you to have a larger perspective, to realize that something you don’t care about might be something that a lot of other players are looking forward to. Perhaps even the majority.

That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily want to take part, but it does mean you know people who can help you get into it. It nudges you out of your comfort zone. That’s a good thing, really.

Anecdotes for the future

I have a lot of stories that start “I was in this guild where we…” and continue on from that point. And that makes sense; while there are all sorts of emergent situations that will come up in any game, especially an online one, dealing with a mass of other people is always going to produce more interesting stories. We remember those odd social dynamics and the way we work together better than we remember arbitrary mechanical weirdness.

Do you really want to collect anecdotes? Well, they can be useful for offering advice in the future, and you could argue that the whole reason to do things with other people is to acquire experiences you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It is left as an exercise to the reader whether or not this is a desirable outcome.

Understandable community

I cannot understand The MMO Community. I can’t even understand the community for one game. I have been playing Final Fantasy XIV since its original hot disaster of a launch, and I do not fully understand the community. I have been part of its roleplaying community equally since launch, and I don’t totally understand that, either.

But I can understand my guild. And really, guilds are a microcosm of the larger situation. You can’t comprehend the game’s entire community, but you can filter it through the small slice that you get to survey. It turns the community from something sprawling and incomprehensible into a smaller portion that you can interact with. And it lets you get a sense of the macro through the micro interactions that you do have.

Sure, you don’t know everyone or participate in everything. But your guild members are out there, and they’ll know and see things you don’t. And you can filter that with your own perceptions to at least approach accuracy.

A reason to log in

On one level, this might seem to be more of a benefit to the designers than the player. Having a group of people who know you, like you, and expect to see you on a regular basis keeps you playing and logging in. Designers obviously want that; that way you keep playing and (presumably) paying.

But if you take a step back, you realize that it’s your benefit too. Online interactions are, in many ways, just as real as the interactions we have in our day-to-day lives. The people you know and speak with are just as real, and sometimes they provide you a perspective you might not otherwise have. It’s like having your favorite bar, except you don’t have to be sloshed out of your mind and you can get there from anywhere that’s got an Internet connection.

I know from personal experience that there are times when the real world is unpleasant. Being able to slip into a world with people you like seeing, companions and friends? That’s a good thing, and that’s a benefit. And having a guild full of people who are happy to see you reminds you of just how many people out there are happy to see you.

So there are lots of reasons to be in a guild. And sure, that also means you’ll have to deal with some unnecessary drama and nonsense, but that’s not all you get out of the exchange. That’s important to remember over the long term.

World of Warcraft Legion: Artifact Weapon Appearances Guide

Artifact weapons are a huge part of the World of Warcraft: Legion expansion. Every specialization of every class gets one, which is a total of 36 weapons. Each weapon also has different variations or appearances you can unlock. These range from simple recolors, to complete changes in design.

The appearances also range, depending on activities you complete. For example, some are unlocked by participating in PvP, and others are unlocked by working on your Class Order Hall campaign.

I’m going to explain what these different appearances are, and how to unlock them. There will be a separate guide to show the hidden appearances.

This guide will go over unlocking alternate artifact weapon appearances in Legion including:

  • Types of Appearances – The different appearances you can unlock.
  • Unlock Requirements – How to unlock the different artifact appearances.

Continue reading World of Warcraft Legion: Artifact Weapon Appearances Guide

World of Warcraft Legion: Hidden Artifact Weapon Appearance Guide

There are more than just the standard Artifact Appearances in World of Warcraft: Legion, there are hidden ones. All 36 artifact weapons have a hidden appearance, and 4 total colors for that appearance. You can unlock these in many different ways, from just buying an item, to getting one from a random drop.

I’m going to go over all of the known ways to get hidden appearances so far. It is not known how to get some of the appearances, so I’ll update when I find out.

You can see what each color looks like by visiting wowhead.

This guide will go over how to unlock all the hidden artifact weapon appearances in Legion including:

  • Unlocking Alternate Hidden Artifact Weapon Colors – How to get each alternate color of the hidden artifact weapons.
  • Death Knight – The hidden appearances for each artifact weapon and how to get them.
  • Demon Hunter
  • Druid
  • Hunter
  • Mage
  • Monk
  • Paladin
  • Priest
  • Rogue
  • Shaman
  • Warlock
  • Warrior

Continue reading World of Warcraft Legion: Hidden Artifact Weapon Appearance Guide

Everything We Know About Demon Hunters

Demon Hunter is the newest class being added to World of Warcraft for the Legion expansion. They are a hero class, which means they have their own introduction/tutorial and start at a higher level. You start off at level 98 and reach level 100 after the intro, but you are required to have a level 70 character on that server before you can make a Demon Hunter.

When you make a Demon Hunter, you must wait 1 week before you can do Legacy raids. This is to prevent people from farming them by just creating a Demon Hunter, deleting it, then creating it again.

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