Confusion over the Guild hierarchy

[Twisto]

First off, can I thank all of the guild members who have been hard at work recruiting new people into the Guild. We now appear to have around 35 Guildies playing regularly. Great stuff indeed.

But there is some confusion over the hierarchy system we have in place.

The current system of Initiate, Member, Veteran, Officer, and Guild master sounds great in princible, but who is actually running the show at the moment?

It makes it very difficult to recruit new members into the guild if there is nobody about to invite them. A lot of the new guys are leaving other guilds to join with our group, because they see the comradeship, fun, variety, and unity that exist within 'The Haven'. Lets not lose future Guildies + Haven net members by bad organisation. I am not saying we are badly organised, but that we could be better organised.

All of this may come down to the questions 'How big do we want to be?' and 'How big is the effort going to be?' and finally 'What are direction are we going in'.

Damn... This is now turning into 'The future of our Guild' instead of my original question. Maybe thats another topic for another time, but please post up any thoughts/ideas you may have anyway.

Your flames are welcome as always

 

[Haven]

At the moment our major limitation is that Vekma (roninstorm) is the only one who can create new guild officers i.e. people who can then recruit more members. Since he's not on as much as many of the other members it may be worth looking at either a change of guild leadership or a forum thread listing members who need officer status so that RoninStorm can work through them and ensure that privelages are given appropriately.

Other than this I'm happy with the way things are going but throw suggestions forward twisto and we'll obvioulsy try and make things better.

 

[Ronin Storm]

The permissions system appears to allow anyone with promotion powers to promote to the rank directly below them. Theoretically, this would allow us to create two "tiers" of Officers, ones who could make new Veterans and sort of Uber-Officers who could also make new Officers. However, the Uber-Officer is something only the Guild Leader can make (given his permissions trump all).

The Guild Leader, aside from that, gets three other "special" (i.e. non-distributable) powers:

1. He can make new Guild crests, given 10g to spare.
2. He can add or remove new ranks, promoting anyone to any rank below his.
3. He can dissolve the Guild.

Nothing else requires Guild Leader powers. This is pretty much why I've not been fretting because I figured that the Officers had recruitment under control and the people who had Officer-bits are the Guild Founders minus one (Padding, who is just that).

If there aren't enough Officers available for the recruiting that you want to do then that needs review.

I'm on hiatus while I enjoy the novelty of my Xbox 360.

Personally, I never held any aspirations for growing the Guild so there's something of a divergence there. No criticsm implied there, mind you! Just that I'm happy duoing with Rojaws and can see the majority of content that way so never felt any need for me. I'd planned to do more play as a group but I find dying frustrating and to play with the wider group I would have had to worked at keeping up in levels or be prepared to die a lot, which I wasn't prepared to do in quite that way.

Hmm... maybe implies that I'm done, for the moment? Not sure. I'm Xboxing... when I get over that novelty then I'll review.

Meanwhile, keep discussing.

 

[Haven]

Ok well we do need new officers - lets get a thread started with a nice big list and then I'll badger you mercilessly until you promote them

Personally, I never held any aspirations for growing the Guild so there's something of a divergence there. No criticsm implied there, mind you! Just that I'm happy duoing with Rojaws and can see the majority of content that way so never felt any need for me. I'd planned to do more play as a group but I find dying frustrating and to play with the wider group I would have had to worked at keeping up in levels or be prepared to die a lot, which I wasn't prepared to do in quite that way.

I think the rest of us want bigger mate. We're looking at some serious lvl 60 raiding and we've almost got the manpower to do it. Once we start doing that sort of thing then we're going to attract a lot of attention. Obviously you can get what you want out of the game but we'll need your help (you being guild leader) to promote up the ranks (or set it up so we can make officer ranks ourselves) needed to maintain the growth (and to be able to kick undesirables). Once more we have spawned a beast and it demmands feeding!

 

[Birdy]

i thought us original members where officers and therfore could invite? if i am wrong slap me back into place!

 

[Haven]

we are and we can - we need more officers as there are other people in the guild now who have earnt the right to be able to recruit. So our officers need to be able to spawn new officers to keep the ball rolling.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Sounds like you need the power to create new Officers at whim.

There's only two routes to that, given the permissions system:

1. Someone else who is frequently available is Guild Leader.
2. We make a Senior Officer post who can promote others to Officer and I promote 3-5 active Officers/Veterans to that role.

Too many cooks/Officers can be a bad thing in Guilds, from my experience, as a difference in direction or opinion can lead to fragmentation at the top, which inevitably ripples down. That's why I'd keep it fairly tight at the top of the permissions hierarchy.

Which option would you guys prefer?

 

[Haven]

For the second option, twisto, secord and myself are the three that I'd want to be able to create officers. All of us are safe bets on the maturity scale (most of the time).

For the guild leader option I'd go for twisto if he's up for it.

I'm completely neutral on which path we take - but we need to take one, of that I am sure.

Those are my thoughts - what does everyone else think ?

 

[Loki]

I concur with all above. I want the guild to grow, so that we can tackle the higher end instances, and have larger raiding groups for quests and world PVP.

I think the uber-officer is a reasonable idea. That way no one has toes stepped upon, and we can function as a guild without out pres (in many ways it could be the Reagan administration, not that i am implying that ronin is suffering from severe form of age onset dementia).

How about two/three guild captains who can promote up to the rank of officer. Oh and in the mean time Zeutan and Daieseo should be promoted, as they are doing well on the recruitment front.

 

[Ronin Storm]

I prefer the Captain / Senior Officer approach. I'll logon this afternoon and make the rank, promote Secord, Soulhaven and Zeutan, and then ask you guys to check you can make Officers. If you can, then that succeeds. If not, we'll look again at option 1.

 

[Loki]

Cheers ronin,

you da man...

 

[Ronin Storm]

I've changed things around. The system isn't quite as nifty as I'd like in that I can only create new ranks on the bottom of the hierarchy, not in the middle. What I did was to create a new Initiate rank, demote all current Initiates, rename the old Initiate to Member and rinse-and-repeat. Then the old Officer rank is now called Captain and Secord, Soulhaven and Zeutan are all Captains. Everyone else has remained in the same relative ranking so I'll leave further promotions/demotions to you guys.

By the by, Officer Chat is available to everyone Veteran and above, just to be warned, as is MotD changing.

 

[Loki]

By the by, Officer Chat is available to everyone Veteran and above, just to be warned, as is MotD changing.

Is there anyway we can have officer chat and MotD only available to ranks officer and up... or is that a load of hassle?

 

[Ronin Storm]

Nah, that's easy. I'll set that up now.

[edit]And done.[/edit]

 

[Loki]

Nah, that's easy. I'll set that up now.

[edit]And done.[/edit]

Once again... you da man...

 

[Ronin Storm]

For the record, Veterans can still see the Officer Notes (though they can't change them), though a quick poll of the Officers online when I was playing with the permissions agreed that Veterans should be able to keep that permission.