Guild Wars 2

My guild have around 300 members, but only around 20 active players , this guild holds a lot of memories for me and my friends, so I can not watch it die like this. Please give me some suggestions on how to revive this dying guild.

If it’s already to the point where only 20 players are active, it’s really a bit too late.

You can’t force ppl to stay and play a game they dont’t enjoy anymore.

Make new friends and don’t randomly invite strangers to your guild.

when you mean active players you mean only 20 log on regularly, only 20 are representing or that 280 people stopped playing?

if its the later only option is boot out the players you think arent coming back and recruit new ones. That being said I would wait for the expansion to hit first Its likely some will come back from that.

Sometimes it happens naturally too, my first guild had stopped playing and then it got active again.

If you have a way to talk to them you could ask why they’re staying away and what can be done for them to come back! could be as simple as you werent doing enough stuff as a guild or it could be they got bored of the game. Either way you cannot know unless you ask

do you personally know all 300 members?
Or do you only know and play with your friends that are the “core members” of your guild?

if so start inviting new players into the guild,when out of space kick the ones that are the most inactive to make room for more new active players.

Another thing would be how to keep the players inside your guild.

Having regular guild missions is nice, but other self started events are even better.

Try making a schedule with various things such as full dungeon runs, Teaching dungeon runs, tequatl runs, guild parties, scavenger hunts, lottery , prizes ,rewards, pvp guild tournaments, wvw guild runs ect.

Create a cool guild rank system and make some sort of conditions for people to do in order to progress further up the ranks (even tho they only give a fancy name and no real power in the guild)

Tell the members they MUST represent the guild at all times, in return reward them with plenty of guild wide buffs. Players just love to mouse over the guild button and see a looooong list of benefits coming from the guild they are inside

Vukorep.3081:

do you personally know all 300 members?
Or do you only know and play with your friends that are the “core members” of your guild?

if so start inviting new players into the guild,when out of space kick the ones that are the most inactive to make room for more new active players.

Another thing would be how to keep the players inside your guild.

Having regular guild missions is nice, but other self started events are even better.

Try making a schedule with various things such as full dungeon runs, Teaching dungeon runs, tequatl runs, guild parties, scavenger hunts, lottery , prizes ,rewards, pvp guild tournaments, wvw guild runs ect.

Create a cool guild rank system and make some sort of conditions for people to do in order to progress further up the ranks (even tho they only give a fancy name and no real power in the guild)

Tell the members they MUST represent the guild at all times, in return reward them with plenty of guild wide buffs. Players just love to mouse over the guild button and see a looooong list of benefits coming from the guild they are inside

Thank , I will try to talk to my guild mates.

oh, forgot to mention

Guild halls will be added to the game in the next expansion. and it wont be just a pretty place to hang out. It will have some functionality as well.

You can even preform special ceremonies inside it when someone gets promoted :P

Do also know that there are a lot of people who play a mmo alone……and join guilds in the hope they will make some friends but end up just reading the guild chat while soloing everything.

For them its all about having a extra chat on their screen where they can ask questions about the game, ask if anyone is interested in helping helping them out on something, or just another “safer” LFG tool. Also guild commendation rewards and extra guild buffs.

Know that no matter how cool your guild is and how much effort you and your friends put in adding new “custom events” in your guild you cant force anyone in doing them

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Make new friends and don’t randomly invite strangers to your guild.

This basically.

It takes a lot of time and effort to (re-) build a guild to the point where you have a critical mass of active members that keeps the guild alive and kicking. You will need to find people who fit into the guild and have similar goals and interests to the active members you already (or still) have.

Try building a friendlist of likeminded players, and eventually one or the other of them will enjoy your company and playstyle enough to become part of your guild. Be active in forums and all over the community to find more like-minded players.

Don’t be discouraged if many of the people you find, that you think would do great in your guild, already have another guild or simply don’t want to join yours for some reason or another. There are a ton of people out there, playing the game, and only a very few of them actually will fit into your guild.

Some people may look like a great fit, will join you, and sooner or later find that it’s not their ideal of a guild after all and leave again. Don’t be discouraged by that, either, it’s just the natural course of things. I have good friends in this game that I used to be in a guild with that eventually moved on to other guilds, because “our” guild just wasn’t exactly what they were looking for, despite finding a bunch of good friends there.

Other people will just play less, or stop playing at all, over time. This is, after all, a game, and all of us spend our free time in here, and it’s just natural that the interest will fluctuate. If you want to keep a guild alive, you’ll have to make new contacts all the time, meet new people, and constantly keep an eye out for who might fit in with you, to have a steady stream of new members that naturally are opposed by a steady stream of people turning less active.

If you are determined to “save” your guild, be prepared to put in a lot of time trying to promote a healthy, active community within your guild. It’s not easy, but it’s totally worth it when you one day find yourself surrounded by the people you most enjoy playing with. But you have to bring a lot of patience to find the people that mesh with each other. Just inviting every random stranger will bring big numbers short-term, but won’t keep the guild together long-term.

The question is what sets your guild apart from any other guild. What makes it your guild. Guilds that make it either target everyone constantly, or target specific people who fit their overarching guild “theme” for lack of a better word.

I see ads for guilds all the time, who do everything. My guild never sells itself like that. We have a specific type of player we’re looking for and seldom openly recruit. We target very specific types of players.

More doesn’t mean better and having 300 members doesn’t make a guild better than ours.

We have about a hundred people log in every week. We seldom have more than 20 people online on mumble at the same time.

But we feel we’re a strong active guild.

It’s not the size of the wand, it’s the magic that’s in it.

Rasimir.6239:

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Make new friends and don’t randomly invite strangers to your guild.

This basically.

It takes a lot of time and effort to (re-) build a guild to the point where you have a critical mass of active members that keeps the guild alive and kicking. You will need to find people who fit into the guild and have similar goals and interests to the active members you already (or still) have.

Try building a friendlist of likeminded players, and eventually one or the other of them will enjoy your company and playstyle enough to become part of your guild. Be active in forums and all over the community to find more like-minded players.

Don’t be discouraged if many of the people you find, that you think would do great in your guild, already have another guild or simply don’t want to join yours for some reason or another. There are a ton of people out there, playing the game, and only a very few of them actually will fit into your guild.

Some people may look like a great fit, will join you, and sooner or later find that it’s not their ideal of a guild after all and leave again. Don’t be discouraged by that, either, it’s just the natural course of things. I have good friends in this game that I used to be in a guild with that eventually moved on to other guilds, because “our” guild just wasn’t exactly what they were looking for, despite finding a bunch of good friends there.

Other people will just play less, or stop playing at all, over time. This is, after all, a game, and all of us spend our free time in here, and it’s just natural that the interest will fluctuate. If you want to keep a guild alive, you’ll have to make new contacts all the time, meet new people, and constantly keep an eye out for who might fit in with you, to have a steady stream of new members that naturally are opposed by a steady stream of people turning less active.

If you are determined to “save” your guild, be prepared to put in a lot of time trying to promote a healthy, active community within your guild. It’s not easy, but it’s totally worth it when you one day find yourself surrounded by the people you most enjoy playing with. But you have to bring a lot of patience to find the people that mesh with each other. Just inviting every random stranger will bring big numbers short-term, but won’t keep the guild together long-term.

Thanks for the advise, I know the feeling of being of be surrounded by bunch of friends, and I want it back. That is way I’m doing this.

Vayne.8563:

It’s not the size of the wand, it’s the magic that’s in it.

This has to be the best analogy ive ever heard.

I would like to reiterate Vayne’s sentiments. I’ve never been in a guild ive liked that much, currently im in one but i dont really fit with the other people. This is due to the fact that I usually end up joining guilds when they already have like 200 people and because most guilds are built around a core member of players who know each other and to enter that can sometimes be hard especially if they are not open to it. Im probably going to leave my guild soon and try and find one that fits me more specifically.

As to advice consider what i’ve just said i would say make sure your guild is getting members not just to keep the guild alive but to have actualy people who you enjoy playing with. Its that old thing of not considering people as numbers but as actual people. Don’t just advertise in order to boost your active ranks, but try and get people you will enjoy hanging out with and they will enjoy hanging out with you. Be more inclusive and open and make it a fun atmosphere with all the aforementioned ideas people have mentioned. Good guilds, like the ones i was in in gw1, are not just places for lfgs or for guild benefits, but also for friends.

Make it feel alive by kicking everyone inactive for longer than two weeks (who did not warn they would be absent for longer for a holiday or illness or whatever).

Recruit only those you feel would actively bring something to the guild, not randoms.

You will have to devote A LOT of time in recruiting and organizing the guild into doing stuff.
If you don’t have the time…you won’t be the one saving it…
Talk to all your guildies about which events they would like to see (dungeon/fractal runs, hide&seek, guildmissions, pvp, wvw, …) and set dates (not too many events at first…before you know, others will organize additional events) set those dates in the guildmessage for all to see.

hitting 20 actively logging in members is not that bad actually. It’s what a lot of the guilds want. Not to mention in a game as popular as this, it’s not that hard to find new recruits.

I’m in what has been transformed into a multiguild community. I used to lead a guild on Luminai, on Wildstar. Since around November the server was battling death. What I mean by that is there was only 30 people online on the whole server. Now life there was a struggle. I just didn’t have the heart to continue after the Christmas halidays and gave my officers a green light to move. Elfarran took over while I started a guild on Guild Wars 2. And because of that we recovered a lot of players that we once knew but that moved on to other MMOs.

Some tips:

- don’t be afraid to take leaps of faith. I have awarded officer to people that I knew for merely days and invited another dude we only used to play boardgames with to lead our WoW part. Sometimes how nice are the people that you meet will surprise you. While we know about all the sad things that happen, remember that nothing happens until you bring yourself to trust some people.

- your guild will require your full undivided attention. That means spending hours simply recruiting, reaching out to multiples of your members trough the internet, logging in daily to help your new guildies.

- be optimistic. It’s hard to reach anything if you will focus on the negatives. Be positive, chat a lot, invite other guildies of yours to do stuff and be positive with you and they will want to continue to log on.

Also, the key to good recruits is to have actual standards, as well as seeking people out who legitimately enjoy the game. In our guild we have a fairly involved interview process to become an Initiate. Most of it centered on what kind of character you have and playstyle. If you get through that interview you become an Initiate and then after 1-2 weeks of playing, you will be interviewed once more to become a full member.

The idea of the second interview is really to get feedback from the new members to see if there are any areas that they would like to see more focus. Be it WvW/PvP/dungeons, etc. We also try to get a feel of whether or not they see themselves playing GW2 in the long term.

There have been times during the second interview where you can tell the person isn’t really that into GW2, or maybe they are also playing WoW/SWTOR/other MMO at the same time. Getting a lot of players like that is how you end up with 300 members and only 20 logging on.

You really need to hunt out the people that legitimately enjoy this game and want a strong community for the long haul. Easier said than done typically.

I wouldn’t suggest doing anything until after the expansion, which should pull a lot of people back in.

If it was my guild, I would not make it 100% rep because there are a lot of guilds around that specialize in specific things, e.g. Teq Terror Squad, Dry Top Master Race, etc. A lot of people, myself included, have our main guild and are also members of guilds like this that do a specific thing for a relatively short time. There are also personal guilds for extra bank room.

100% rep would wipe out people in guilds like the above despite them not taking much time.

And… what Vayne said.

If you have something to differentiate between yours and other guilds, don’t slack off on it. If, for instance, you do an organized Silverwastes Chest run, organized Dry Top, Dungeon Day, etc., at a specific time, don’t skip those runs because you don’t feel like it that day. Pug it if you don’t have enough people on at the moment, but run whatever it is. I have seen that kill guild after guild over a few games.

Gregori.5807:

If it was my guild, I would not make it 100% rep because there are a lot of guilds around that specialize in specific things, e.g. Teq Terror Squad, Dry Top Master Race, etc. A lot of people, myself included, have our main guild and are also members of guilds like this that do a specific thing for a relatively short time. There are also personal guilds for extra bank room.

100% rep would wipe out people in guilds like the above despite them not taking much time.

same, I actually have members that are also in their friends guilds that have like 5 people in total. Their friend wants to be in their own guild, but they feel lonely when their friends are not around. This allows them to rep their friends guild and play that 1 or 2 hours that they’re online with them, but also join you when their friends are offline

if you want to make a rep rule, 60% or 80% is perfectly fine, but 100% is a bit much.

warbignime-

I have a question for you. I’m going to lightly suggest that you really think about this for a bit (as in “more than 5 minutes”) before answering because this is important. (Side note: I’m really surprised you’re getting all this advice but nobody asked this question yet.)

Why is your guild dying?

You can’t fix the problem if you don’t know why it’s broken. Are people leaving the game? Why? Are people still playing the game but leaving your guild? Why?

I have a lot of advice I could give, but without knowing why your guild is struggling, I can’t offer you good advice on how to help it.

The best way to help a small population guild thrive and grow is Tomane the experience of current guild members memorable and to keep your guild as something worth saving. Run events, get to know members well, and keep up conversations in guild chat. It takes a lot of work, but can be very worthwhile.

The only way to fix this at this point is for ArenaNet to add new content. Players have left because they got bored with the content and ArenaNet’s silence over the last year (or more) hasn’t really given them much reason to stick around.

HoT is now announced and on the way, all you can do is sit back, wait, and hope it’s not too little too late. I worry about my dungeon guild…they mentioned nothing about new dungeons at PAX :/

I’m in the same boat with my guild, though we’ve seen a bit of revived activity since the announcement over the weekend. My fingers are crossed that the returning players will still be around after a week. Unfortunately, experience says they won’t

Best of luck to you. Community is everything in this game, and it’s been tough trying to keep people around lately.

Vayne.8563:

Guilds that make it either target everyone constantly, or target specific people who fit their overarching guild “theme” for lack of a better word.

Aye. My guild’s theme is “drunk or sober: we like a good time… but mostly drunk”. Our drunken guild nights are partly what keeps me in the guild because they’re just so dang entertaining. And, of course, the people are the other part of it. A jam up good group of people.

Large numbers of guild mates is meaningless if they don’t interact with each other and show a genuine feeling of comraderie. I’m having more fun now with a guild of 40 than I did with one constantly at the limit.

It starts with the leader, followed by the officers, if applicable, and most importantly the members.

Inviting every Tom, kitten and Larry to your guild to fulfill some egotistical fantasy of leading 400 players is dillusional. Instead, focus on a core number. Cultivate those members, and you’ll find a much more rewarding experience.

1. I think the point of no return comes when your guild is down to only 2-3 active members with the occasional log-on of another 3-5.

2. Gaming habits are a personal thing and are very hard to sway from the outside. Some people are stubborn while others are flaky. However, it’s more than likely that they are going to make the same decisions no matter what you say or do for them.

“Don’t delete that character, you have 4 other open slots.”

“Don’t uninstall that game, $700 says you’re downloading all 30gb again in a month.”

Then they do it and regret it.

Or more relevant to the point:

Them: I quit because they were ignoring Ranger.
You: Actually they buffed Ranger a lot recently.
Them: Really? That’s awesome!
You: So are you going to come check it out?
Them: I might just do that!

Then they don’t come back anyway.

3. You can try to respectfully “flirt” with your current and new members. I don’t mean “flirt” in the dating sense. Basically you want to give people a reason to stay and a reason to hesitate when thinking about leaving. You just have to make it seem like you’re presenting the opportunity to build a meaningful relationship. Give compliments often, go out of your way to do content with your guildies and don’t be afraid to suggest the randomest stuff.

“Who has the most intimidating main character guild contest in LA!”

Definitely make sure you are always commenting on people’s characters. If they think people are noticing their gear and features, they have more reason to make their looks a goal. Comment on people’s builds and skill so they have motivation to improve those things too.

Timmyf makes a great point. You can’t fix it if you don’t know whats broken.

As far as some general advice, some have already mentioned some great ideas. Don’t go 100% rep. Everyone I know who was is a 100% rep guild has regreted it. They felt punished if they wanted to play with friends outside of their guild.

I would also suggest maybe getting a few smaller guilds together. People you play with on a regular basis. For example, I have 2 guilds I play with almost exclusively. On I consider my main guild, and it’s a fairly large guild, and another smaller guild. We will rep each other depending on what we are doing, and what we feel like at the time. :P

But the main thing in any size guild, as mentioned before, is getting to know your players. One of my good in-game friends is the guild leader of the large guild. And we run together when we are online together. But he took the time to get to know his guildies. He knows the game modes the more active players prefer, understands their play styles, and preferred builds. He is also the first one to volunteer when a guildie is looking for a group for X.

Such things are part of why I stayed with them. My first guild wanted to switch servers (before mega server) and wanted each member to pay their way. I am not too well off, and didn’t want to put up the cash to transfer. So on the leaders suggestion I started farming gold, and was asking for my guildies if any were welling to help. I was on TS with them, and they started talking mad trash about me. (not realizing I was in TS) Saying things like: “What a lazy F*!@, can’t farm his own gold.” “Oh, look the begger is online again, why haven’t we kicked him yet?” etc. So I revealed my self, and that shut them up, and then I promptly left. My point? Don’t be like that, I can take a joke and friendly trash talk, but that most certainly wasn’t “just kidding around”. Get to know your people, help them out, and make friends with other guilds.

Mutual admiration here, pdavis. You bring up some really good points.

On the other hand, it’s comments like this that lead many guild leaders astray:

The only way to fix this at this point is for ArenaNet to add new content.

As a guild leader, I take on certain responsibilities for my guild. These may vary slightly based on the type of guild, but it should be something like this:

• I will put together a like-minded group of people who can happily co-exist, even when I’m not around to keep an eye on them

• I will find players of varying experience levels, and sufficient players of each, so that beginners have other beginners (or vets who don’t mind doing newer-player stuff) to play with and pros have other pros for higher-end content. (This is, personally, where my guild could currently be better and is the focus of our current recruiting drive.)

• I will constrain my guild’s size and growth based on my ability to personally get to know each and every member of my guild. As such, we will always be a smaller guild.

• I will enforce a set of rules and standards of behavior such that all members of my guild are comfortable being themselves. While I am personally a pretty standard straight white male, I recognize that gaming can be hostile for women, LGBT players, etc., and I will do everything possible to make my guild a safe place for all.

Basically, all of the above serves one purpose: happy members have fun. Members who have fun keep logging in.

Contrary to what I’m hearing from most guilds, my guild is growing. In fact, we were growing so fast late last year I put a roster freeze in place. I would only invite new members if an existing member knew them for at least a few months, either in GW2 or another game. We’ve since started recruiting again, though “recruiting” for us is a post here on the forums, one on /r/guildrecruitment, and saying “we’re recruiting” if anybody asks. I don’t /map recruit as a matter of principle.

So no, you don’t need new content above and beyond what we’re getting to have a successful guild. What you need are members who care about the game and perhaps more importantly each other. We even have some members who don’t play much but log into Teamspeak every day to hang out. We built a community, not just a list of dungeon run partners, so it’s strong enough to survive the dry times.

Anyway, more advice when I know what advice to give.