Guild Wars 2

Alrighty, so I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 since… early September, and MMO’s in general for about 12 years now. As you could imagine, I’ve been in several dozen guilds, and I’ve had some good experiences in them, and some bad. Now I’ve taken to making my own guild in GW2, but I’m having a bit of trouble.

In GW2, I’ve noticed that a lot of the guilds are just enormous, and very impersonal. You feel more like a number than a person, and no one really knows your name. I’ve also joined smaller guilds, but they ignore you just the same. So I was hoping to create a guild that stands for all the things I think a guild should stand for, and to treat the game like a game, not a job. Although, I’m having a bit of an issue.

Alrighty, so I created a guild last week, and it had a grand total of three members, up until today, when everyone quit. So I was wondering, how in the world do guilds start up? I’ve been making posts in map chat every now and then like I see a lot of guilds doing, and I even posted an ad on the Guilds section of this website! Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

It’s going to be really hard, really, really hard to start a guild where the game is now. Your best bet is to just spam your ad in every zone every hour. Without the buffs & upgrades not many are going to want to join or help build it up. Perseverance lots of it…

As wooboost says it will indeed be hard to start new now. A lot of people want guilds with bonuses rather than being in a new one with nothing at all.

I started my old guild originally with friends from a previous game which gave us 15 or so people as a foundation at release but unless you can do similar (or want to just spam all day for recruits) its going to be tricky.

Oh and as a blatant recruitment attempt, if you are after a nice EU guild drop me a PM we are a nice bunch

- Era

There was a good thread on recruitment in the guilds subforum recently: Recruiting…how can I get it to work?

Hard to start a new guild now? That’s an understatement. It’s near impossible to keep a guild together since all the recent updates and most mega-guilds requiring you to rep all the characters on your account for the price to join. Seems the GW2 developers just hate small to medium guilds, set out to wipe them from the game.

Creating a guild is really hard, and it doesn’t stop, you need to work hard to maintain a good guild as well. I think a lot of the successful guilds started off as an existing group of friends, either in real life or from other games, and built on that.

Personally I’d suggest starting out by thinking about what you want from the guild. What kind of people do you want to attract to it, and what kinds of things do you want to do together? Then use that to advertise the guild and find like-minded players.

Importantly you need something more unique than “Friendly, PvX guild does PvE, PvP, WvW, Dungeons, Guild Missions etc.” because there are hundreds that say that on every server and absolutely nothing to choose between them. People will join, but if the guild is small or not very active they’ll leave just as quickly because they know they can find exactly the same things at any of the other guilds and they’re likely to be busier.

I think a lot of people are afraid to limit themselves but IMO it’s actually an advantage because it’s a lot more believable (I’ve known a lot of “friendly, helpful” guilds that were actually 24/7 drama for example) and you’re more likely to find like-minded people.

When I joined my guild some of the things which appealed to me is that they only accepted adults and had a no drama policy (and a complaints process to prevent the drama), were PvE focused with occasional WvW and did regular, casual friendly guild events (this was before misssions existed).

If you come up with a short list of what you want from your guild and then use that to advertise you’ll have a better chance of finding and keeping like-minded people.

Also it might sound obvious but don’t lie. Don’t tell people you have all the unlocks and always have buffs up if you don’t. People aren’t that stupid, they’ll check as soon as they join and leave if they find it’s not true.

Starting a guild is rough if you don’t have a couple of friends (IRL and/or online) to help you kick start things. I was lucky to have gained a few like-minded friends before I started mine. We worked to build some upgrades before we recruited other people because we wanted to offer them something upon joining. If you don’t have a lot of people to help you gain influence, be prepared to spend some gold to speed things up. Even with some friends to help me, I poured quite a bit of in-game money into it – but I’m not very patient

As for recruitment, we do not recruit people in map chat. We typically find our members after we play with them in a pug group etc. If I ever do find someone via the guild forum, we have a conversation before they are invited. While this strategy has made our growth slow, we haven’t had anyone leave the guild.

Speaking of retention, that is the hard part especially in a small guild. You need to be very involved in forming relationships and making sure everyone gets to know each other and plays together. The majority of my past experiences, I joined guilds with an established core of regulars that were not very welcoming of new members. It’s not a good feeling and I had left countless guilds because of it (their loss!)…That’s why I make it a point to make sure that new members feel welcome and part of the community rather than outsiders.

So there is my strategy. It’s worked well for me so far! Good luck to you.