A new Guild Direction for the guild

Fellow leaders, team leaders and guildies,

We had been doing great so far but there's some of the things that I would wish to include to bring our guild to the next level.

Recently, the actives players apart from the minorities who are not representing the guild average statistic is at:
Peak: 50-60members (previous high was 90, even when we have 500 members now)
Non Peak: 20-40members (previous norm was at 40~50)

The reason could be because
1. Some of the fellow SD are taking a break from GW2 which effectively reduce our amount of actives in the guild.
2. Some of the fellow SD might have quitted GW2 but still representing in the guild.

The result could be detrimental if the amount of inactives soar over the amount of actives which could effectively reduce our strength in various guild events especially so in Guild WvW Events, Temple Runs.

With the reduced actives in the guild, we would not be able to enjoy the same amount of fun together that we used to have.

The Solution:

1. HR Managers and Recruitment Officers to actively recruit potential players into the guild with standard mails to be given to the invitees and newcomers.
2. HR Managers and Recruitment Officers to go through the 3 rounds of management exercise (please refer to: Guild Clean up)
https://shimmeringdarkness.forummotion.com/t77-guild-clean-up
3. HR Managers and Recruitment Officers to finally remove inactives who had not been seen in the guild for more than 3months.

Guild Weekly Schedule to bring cohesive within the guild level as a whole.
1. HR Managers and Recruitment Officers to create assist in creative various HR Team bonding events to bring SD closer with each other. (i.e. Temple Run, Map Exploration, Scavenger hunt, Best Screenshot, etc etc.) at least once on a weekly basis.
2. Dungeon Masters and Raiders are to create Scheduled specific Dungeon Runs on at certain timings. However, please avoid having event during WvW/Hr Events are held.
3. WvW Warlords and Conquerors to schedule daily WvW events for the guild. At least 4 times a week (2 on either friday, saturday or sunday)

Events should be prepared 1 week before and then all scheduled events to be placed together in a weekly guild events timetable.
This would enforce guild cohesiveness and players will feel the needs of logging into GW2 to have fun with the guild rather than lost sheeps seeking for things to do which in long run creates boredom to the players, especially so for those who had been left out.

i would suggest that we have a guild Leaders meeting in 1st week of february to discuss this.

points to mention.

- have each hr manager host a weekly or monthly event.
- new recruits should be required to register on the forums. this gives us a timeline as to when they joined. and if they are inactive for a month without a notice in leave of absence thread, that they be subject for removal. this will help us with guild cleanup efforts.

second that raven! good suggestion.

let me get the guild meeting ready, we will have one on most likely this weekend or next. let's see if I can get the slides ready in time.

I agree this issue definately needs to be addressed.
some of the biggest causes for the drop in activity or people leaving the guild is:

1. we do not have enough vice commanders / leaders to cover the gap in time zones for our active guildies. Quite often when i am logged on, i will only see 1 maybe 2 active-representing leaders for the WvW or Pve side.

with that being the case...guildies will often spend 30min-2hrs asking in gchat to get a group together for a specific task (whether it be a dungeon, storyline/zone quest, WvW seige...etc).
Unfortunately, as much as some of the other guildies would like to help with that request. they don't. for the simple fact that they may not feel experienced enough to fill a slot in the party effectively, unless they know there is going to be a ranking leader in that party to assist with said task.
i think a lot of guildies do not feel comfortable entering a party with other guildies, without 1st knowing they have some sort of guidance. if they did, they would all just pug it.

Scenario:
online Pve leader = 1
guildies looking to do a dungeon = 2 (both wanting a different dungeon & limited to 5 party members)
guildies asking for assistance with their storyline quest = 1

Outcome:
possibly 1 dungeon party gets put together. making that 1 guildie a happy camper.
the other 2 guildies who did not get the assistance they were asking for; will in turn get discouraged & in most cases won't even bother to ask again.
not to mention the 2 who did not get the assistance, may be inclined to feel as though favoritism was shown toward the 1 who did get assisted.
then on top of that..they will have a tendency to tell their buddies that we're not as much of a helpful guild as claimed to be.

I'm sure most of us know the general grapevine analogy.
1 bad experience will spread to 100 people;
1 good experience spreads to 10 people (if your lucky)

this is quite possibly the same on the PvP side (as i was online last night & saw 2 WvW Warlords & 2-3 WvW conquerers). yet, the day before i was logged in at a different time slot for appx 2.5hrs & during that time only saw 1 WvW conquerer.
Which brings me back to the point of having a need for more Vice Commanders & Team leaders from multiple time zones available (to cover the gap) & ensure our guildies always have higher ranking officers to conduct tasks with them.

Proposed solution: (promote, promote, promote)
eg.

TimeZone 1	TimeZone 2	TimeZone 3	TimeZone 4
2-HR Managers	2-HR Managers	2-HR Managers	2-HR Managers
2-Warlords	2-Warlords	2-Warlords	2-Warlords
2-Dungeon Masters	2-Dungeon Masters	2-Dungeon Masters	2-Dungeon Masters
2-Recruit Officers	2-Recruit Officers	2-Recruit Officers	2-Recruit Officers
3-Conquerers	3-Conquerers	3-Conquerers	3-Conquerers
3-Dungeon Raiders	3-Dungeon Raiders	3-Dungeon Raiders	3-Dungeon Raiders

this table of promotion allocation should help to alleviate any future issues regarding guild Dungeon runs, WvW Seiges & social events (even if they are during overlapping time frames.

2. imo.. if you are of any rank higher then "Senior Guild Member" you should be representing guild a minimum of 80% of your online time.
eg. during the 4days you are ingame you should be "SD representing" atleast 3days. i understand everyone has their own reason for not representing at some point or another. however, far too often i see other leaders not representing our guild for prolonged durations.
all you have accomplished by prolonged periods of non-representaion was: creating a sense of insecurity & disloyalty toward our guild. basically if you are not proud enough to wear the "Shimmering Darkness" tag; neither will our new members or other leaders be.

Proposed solution:
1st offense = written ingame mail warning
(backed by a forum posting with the time of the offense in the appropriate forum)
2nd offense = a demotion in rank of 1 level with a different guildie to replace your spot
(backed by a forum posting with the time of the offense in the appropriate forum)
3rd offense = well..as the baseball term goes "3-strikes, you're out!"

3. as far as the holding of weekly & mothly events go. I'm with yall on that. i think it's a great way to keep guildies involved & happ about being in an active guild. but, again if we dont have enough management bodies to produce those events regularly; they will inevitably fail

Tyall,
NiteRage .aka Fiora Cruth

p.s. I apologize for the long post & if i sounded harsh at all. as i'm sure you have noticed i am as helpful & honest as i can be (even when people don't like to hear something)

OK all great ideas thrown out there by all so far. First let me give people alittle back ground on my GW2 Life.
!. Huge GW1 player for 6 years so GW2 was a no brainer. I had a great Family of friends in GW1 and we came as a group to GW2. We had a dedicated 15 members that were on all the time and played together both in GW1 and GW2.

2. In Nov. I got a random Ingame Mail about a Guild Invite to SD. At first glance I didnt even read it because I was in a great Guild with Friends already. Well about a week later I found myself online bymyself and decided to read the Invitation to SD mail. After reading I went onto " The Shimmering Site" which i thought was at first a joke. Who in there right mind would make a GW2 Logo of there guild witha shirtless picture of themselves. So right there i closed it and went on idle in LA untill a guildie popped on to do some stuff. Well that didnt happen for 2 hours...

3. the next morning I logged on and once again no Guildies at this time, so i accepted the SD Guild Invite. AND WOW THINGS WERE OFF AND RUNNING FAST.
Keigo happened to be on and set me up with Raidcall, got me set up in guild, introduced me. And it felt good to see at that time 112 people were online. Once in Raidcall and met all the people with BAD Broken English i was impressed. People were freindly, offering help with anything that was needed.

4. That impression will never fade of what SD was for me when i first joined. I love my Family of Friends from my other Guild and that is why im glad they followed. I truelly believe we can make that happen with every new recruit. The problem is HOW DO WE KEEP THEM FEELING LIKE THIS IS " THE ONLY GUILD THEY WILL NEED ".

5. One Solution to a problem is ALL Leaders take there JOBS more seriously.
a. If you are online and AFK please put your status to AFK so it doesnt look
like we are ignoring anyone. But please dont abuse that and be running
around in a zone.
b. And I believe the membership should be allowed to voice there opinions
about how a LEADER is doing there job. Cant have a good Leadership
Team if we are our own Judges.
c. Lets get more members involved with the direction of the guild. There
seems to be some weeks we focus only on WvW and Piss off PVE'rs
and other times it seems PVE has Attention. I understand it is hard to
find a happy medium for both but that should be our jobs as Leaders.

all good points so far. but also im only seeing 4 leaders posting on this topic, we have more than that lol. need to get more leaders active on the forums as well. even if that means just posting little 1 line comments on a subject. that shows you are at least reading the forums and understand what the we are trying to accomplish.

side note* good idea on the afk thing toons, forgot you could do that. i been known to afk in this game a lil bit lol.

Salutes Toon,
sounds like we're on the same page. I too started with GW1 in the beginning of 2004 (during closed beta testing (which as some of you may know, caused A-net to keep pushing back its retail releae date by almost 1yr). I continiued to play for nearly all of 2005 religiously.
Unfortanately at the same time i started with GW1 testing, I was also involved with the testing of WoW for blizzard..which ultimately ended up with me choosing to stay playing that game religiously for the last decade. although (at the time) blizzards graphics, sprite animation, etc weren't as good as GW1. they did offer a superior product with a lot of features A-net was missing. over this past decade i continued to play GW1 in short spurts every few months; to see if they could catch up to blizzard. They could not (until they finally got GW2 in motion) & if it had not been for the misfortune of blizzard placing their focus market toward teenie-boppers and the younger crowd over the last few years. A-net would have failed again.

let me get back on track. i have had my hands in the development & play side of dozens of large scale mmo's & with that have been in leadership ranking for some of the largest most active guilds there have been for those games along with the experience of running my own personal guilds successfully to help. I do have a lot of knowledge of what to look out for, how to keep people happy, why people come & go..etc.

When i started playing GW2 at release (i missed the chance for this beta, as i was caught up with RL work) i was very excited & quickly got into a large guild on a EU server along with afew of our other current guildies. this was an unpleasant guild for me as they were very focused on themsleves only & not really the progression of their guild. nor were they very helpful with other new guildies. When Styph & Keigo sent me the "shimmering Darkness" invite; the 1st thought in my head was "great another powerlevel hungry guild"... LoL, i couldn't have been more wrong in that thought.
I was soon very pleasantly suprised at how friendly & helpful all the existing members were & the guild had most of the base structure already laid out for smooth progression.
all in all, this guild has been great & i think it will continue to grow in the proper directions for all play styles as long as remain diverse in all sides of guild appreciation.
but, metaphorically speaking..bubbles that grow too fast without intervention will pop.. so lets please not let this happen to our guild.

Keigo,
1 thing mentioned in your post..to quote you "However, please avoid having event during WvW/Hr Events are held". i do not agree with. You are the guild leader & should be more inclined to promote happenings during all times of the day/week (overlapping or not). appx 50% or more of our guild is Pve driven & may not like the WvW. Therefore, placing a majority of other events/happenings on hold during that duration will only result in many unhappy guildies.

There are a few successful ways to work around the Pve/PvP barrier amongst players in games such as this.
one way that has been successful (although a large change) is:

1. The master guild forks into to smaller sister guilds with shared members & resources (via ingame transfer & website colaboration).
eg. Shimmering Darkness becomes:
a. Shimmering Darkness = WvW, Pve focused
b. Shimmering Light = Pve, Lore focused

members can stay in both sister guilds & with the click of a button switch to whichever guild is needed for their task or event. (A-net made that easy through use of guild representaion). similar games have used guild alliances to accomplish this very same feature.

this option comes with many great Pro's & Con's...
Pros:
1. it eliminates "too many hands in the pot at one time" as the phase goes.
2. it allows for potential doubling of the current guilds size. (exceeding the ingame 500 member cap)
3. it allows us to tailor both sister-guilds to match the playestyle their respective members. while still remaining supportive of the larger family guild in whole.
4. it gives guildies a drastically increased chance for putting together a guild group to do a Siege, Wvw event, Dungeon run, Story quest, Social event..etc.
5. Shimmering Darkness now has the potential to be come the most sought after or desired guild in game for both PvP & Pve. as well as the #1 overall guild on the GW2 charts.
6. you eliminate confusion & the feeling of being overwhelmed amongst guildies in gchat; due to mixed content continuously being scrolled.
eg. guildies will be more excited to join in the guild discussion while ingame (since, the content scrolling is based on which ever sister guild they're representing at the time).

Cons:
1. requires trusted guild leaders & officers on both sides with the willingness to help out the sister guild when needed (stronger communication & utilization of website resources) as well as ingame communication between those leaders to accomplish the tasks at hand.
2. requires the use of 2 shared guild banks. (of which permission to transfer different items/funds between them..needs to be approved before hand by the appropriate officer in the sister guild who is donating the items). this is accomplished by setting up an altered command structure with permissions to match the new rank structure.
3. requires mutual understanding of each sister guilds priorities & respecting them.
eg. guildies, you do not jump in the sister guild & spam for guildies to help with something you are working on that opposes the sister guilds primary focus. you in turn; represent the sister guild & explain to one of the officers/leaders of that guild what it is that you need help with. they in turn make known the situation to other guildies (of that sister guild), evaluate if they even have the resources available at the moment & decide if it will interfere with their current guild happenings. guildies will still have the freedom to switch between sister guilds as they wish. considering the whole point of this solution is to allow the freedom to have an enjoyable gaming experience no matter what a guildies current mood for playstyle is
4. requires a mandatory website registration prior to becoming an "SD Guild Member" or higher... this does not include new recruit status. mainly useful for knowing what guildies preferred playstyle is & most likely which sister guild to find them in
5. when a guild member is kicked from their respective sister-guild for any reason. they are kicked from both sister guilds & lose support of the family in whole. which means that any infractions that occur need to be discussed more timely & professionally by both sister-guild leaders. before the ultimate decision of probation or guild dismissal is reached. NO one sister guild can kick a member without consent of the opposite sister guild leaders approval.

Overall, this solution generally works well & allows guildies the freedom to experiment with different playstyles while at the same time keeping our family together.
no more leaders worrying about guildies leaving our guild to join another guild that has focus of a different playstyle.
no more guildies worrying about getting back into our guild, if they wanted to try a differnt playstyle (as they no longer have a need to leave the guild..they now simply switch to the sister guild to test things...at this point we truly are a diverse guild).

anyhow, i'm still out of town for a few weeks; so seeing how my ingame time is all messed up.. i figure i'ld help out as much online as i could.

so, let me know what yall think & if we decide this is a route we would like to pursue.

I will be more then happy to head up this endeavor with the approval of the other leaders & guildies.
Btw, i have a big suprise in the workings for the benefit of the guild. atleast i can still do some constructive things with my time while out of town

Sincerely,
NiteRage .aka Fiora Cruth

well said so far, don't think we would adopt a sister guild anytime soon. I guess we should start looking into the guild direction and solving it in a holistic manner.

I'm really glad to hear all these from you guys ^^ thank you for being such a wonderful and helpful peeps all these while.

Let's have our guild meeting on next Saturday night EST & Sunday Morning EST.

Further details will be updated soon.

I would hope that the guild meeting would includes a guild discussion, with someone to take down the minutes for both meeting and then we could probably work from there rather than just solely from me.

I guess that would help bring the guild up to a new level.

Thanks ^^

Keigo

guild leader of SD

Tried to read the posting as requested but was denied access.

did you get it straightened out Foxey? since you are posting in here im assuming yes, but incase you cant i will mention it to Toons.

Ya I was wondering why the average online steadily declined as the weeks go by. Bad thing about gw2 not having a monthly subscription I guess (with subsription fee u feel u HAVE to log in cuz u paying for it) so maybe thats how the population dropping off.

But I rather not have to be forced to pay haha thats for damn sure

For recruiting new memebers in pve we been having success with doing dungeon runs with 1 random pug and eventually that pug joins guild or will tell his friends and they want in

Same for pvp where in wvw ppl r tagging along guild SD and want to be a part of such great organization

Pugs r just Potentials U Guild Soon (P.u.g.s.) haha

true villenio hahaha! but then again, not all pugs are good remember?
our guild had a couple of bad & rotten apples previously, luckily we had the HR and recruitment officers to get rid of them fast.

https://shimmeringdarkness.forummotion.com/t186-upcoming-monthly-guild-meeting-on-feb-2013

Please refer to link for more info and recorded guild meetings + slideshows

Thanks.

keigo
guild leader of sd