More Guild Talk

by Kaorichan

Which guild is the best guild? Does it exist? Are you active?

What makes a good guild? Simply put, it's the L.A.P.D. - Los Angeles Police Department??? No it's the Leader, Activeness, Participation and Design.

L - Leader. Why is the Leader so important? Simply put it's because s/he rules the guild, and it's her/him who makes all the important decisions, choose the council, and attract the members. If you have a charismatic leader, you already have a good Guild. (Think American President, most if not all of them are charismatic). A Good Leader is also a good person in general, one who scams, lies, break promises is not going to earn respect and cohesiveness from the group members, hence s/he must have solid foundation. There goes the saying, "If you are a good leader, I shalt follow."

A - Activeness. It doesn't matter if you have a guild with 1000 members and only 20 of them are active (i.e. only 0.2%). If you have a small guild with 20 members and all of them are active, that is already more than the 1000 members guild. Why? Because an active guild provides a community (think Amazon.com and NeoPets). These communities help each other, provides tips and look over each other's shoulder. If you have an inactive guild, make it active, a good leader will do that.

P - Participation. Without participation an active guild means nothing. You could have 1000 members all mark "active" but they don't chat in the board, they don't do the guild any good, they don't let people know about the guild. And make sure you keep the promises of the guild, if it's a HTML guild, actively help members design page, if it's a "Be rich quick" guild, actively help members to be rich and so forth.

D - Design. The first thing people says when they come into a guild is the design. Sure they read the headers, but if the design of the guild is loud and too many graphics to load, no one will want to stay for it. I once went to a guild with pink background and yellow text. It's immediately a fail for my eyes. Make your guild powerful and professional looking. A good design also shows people you do put effort into your guild and to some extent, your personality. Remember an average person's attention span of a Web page is only 5 seconds, so if you make your guild too graphically intensive, people will not stay for it. And imagine you are designing for a 56k modem, and not cable.