While I admit that I'm no longer practically playing the Guild, here's a few thoughts as regards how I've seen this happen before.
How do you feel about making this a mandatory part of the guild membership i.e. if you do not sign up within 2 weeks of joining then you will be removed from the guild ?
Two weeks is a long time online. Everything moves faster online, if there's actually a will for it to move at all. In two weeks, a new player can join a Guild, get bored, rant and rave, then storm out. Suggest this is actually a much shorter time. Three days? No more than a week.
I appreciate not everyone is into forums but they are an essential part of our communication structure.
I don't feel it's a matter of whether people are into forums or not. I feel the requirement is having a group that can:
- Find a common way to communicate.
- Find a compatible way to play.
For THN, the forums are our best mechanism for arranging things and longer discussions, where TeamSpeak tends to be used for tactical stuff (raids, etc).
On a common way to play, there's aspects of play time/hours compatibility (no good if most of you play 19:00-22:00 UK, but some try to play the same times EST or something), and play styles (raiding or questing or PvPing or whatever).
Smaller guilds try to cover all these areas and then have trouble scaling up because the same two or three organisers can't manage all the various streams for the larger volume of people when the demands are higher. In a sense, going from the small family/friend oriented Guild of 10 to 15 up to a raiding Guild of 30 to 50 breaks a bunch of stuff you did before.
I've seen this happen twice, maybe three times now, in various games (EQ, EQ2, SWG). In each case, the wish to remain a family-style Guild has won and the Guild collapsed back down to its original 10-15 people -- they'd recruited 20/30 more then lost them when they realised the Guild wasn't what they wanted any more and weren't willing/able to provide support for the new members.
To date, I've not seen an implementation of a raiding Guild combined with a family/friends Guild where both parts were happy. The former wants more raids, better organised, and now. The latter wants casual play, social events, and more breathing room to do some of their own stuff. It's hard to accomodate both, possibly even impractical.
I suggest that the following might be pragmatic if your aim is to raid:
- Make the forums a requirement of being in the Guild. Players must stay informed and keep others informed or they're not part of the team.
- Keep the events coming, twice a week if you can manage.
- Maintain your partnerships with other friendly raiding Guilds (e.g. Ashen Order) and offer them slots on your raids. If you're both in the 30-50 region then you should always be able to fill a raid and sometimes you'll each get the benefit of not having had to organise it.
- Lock the family-style activities to one night in a week. This assumes you want to keep that aspect, but it'll be important to make sure the clear focus is on raiding.
In doing any of these, you'll lose 10-25% of the Guild as stands (estimate based on previous policy changes in other Guilds in other games). Some you'll lose because they want the family/friends Guild. Others you'll lose because the one-night social event is on the wrong night for them. Yet others you'll lose because they refuse to participate in THN's mandated comms channels.
I suggest you can approach this problem of player loss in two ways:
- Recruit while it's happening so your actual numbers don't dip. Downside is that you may lose some recruits as they watch more "established" members leaving and not take the time to figure out why.
- Recruit after the initial losses. Downside is that you may lose 5-10% more than you'd otherwise have lost due to low morale (rats leaving the sinking ship mentality).
Neither is great. I'd probably use the first, though.
In a sense, I believe it's tough beans if a few people don't like forums. That's how THN communicates and comms are a
requirement for event organisation. Better to have people who can play with you not just on the roster.
Finally, I'm looking at two overhauls on the event attendance system here:
- Splitting WoW events into their own calendar so you can write what you want and have some WoW-specific custom fields against each calendar entry.
- Extending the current attendance system so that it can support teams (read "classes" or "raid groups" for WoW), player notes and predefined configurations.
The first is easy. The second... will take me a few hours. Probably will take me a week or ten days to get that together.
Alternatively, you can try out one of the Guild roster systems (of course).
