Player Associations Archive

Here's what works for my PA... each candidate is sponsored by a full member of the guild. The sponsor ensures that the candidate registers on our website, where our history and rules are located. If you don't want to create a website, you can write an ingame mail to yourself and put that information in it. Send it to yourself. When you have a sponsor recommend a candidate to you, forward the email to him or her.

Once the candidate responds that he or she has have read and accepted our philosophy and rules, for a period of a week the sponsor takes the candidate out to "meet and greet" (or "group and hunt"). I personally interview each candidate but that's just the way my guild operates. Usually around the fifth or sixth day I send a formal invitation to the candidate to join us. I do all initiations on one night a week and guildmembers do their best to show up that night to welcome their new brother or sister.

The "meet and greet" periodgives the membership at large a chance to endorse the candidate, the sponsor knows he is responsible for recommending a quality candidate, and I only have to be available one night a week for accepting new members. It leaves control of acceptance in my hands (and my AGM's) but gives all members buy-in on the process. And all worthy candidates are in guild within a very short period of time.

Now, we purposely try to keep our numbers a bit small so that we can remain close and supportive of each other, so keeping that in mind, you can adapt this plan to be administered by the GM, AGM,Recruitment Officer,Council Elders, whomeveras needed for recruiting volumes of candidates.

Just my two credits'. Good luck in your endeavors.

One thing that we do that works well is to only allow 2 new members a week. Members can sponsor anyone they wish and as many as they wish, but only 2 make it every Sunday. This does a few things:

• You are forced to grow slow, allowing new members time to become familiar with veteran members


• Causes less strain on the guild leader or guild leaders working with new members


• It creates a "demand" to be in the guild so once people are in, they appreciate it more


• You have plenty of time to screen new members and new players. We allow new players but cautious to those on their one month free pass. I find they often don't know enough about guilds to make the best decision for themselves.

We have other rules of conduct that players must agree to before joining the guild:

• No lewd or sexual comments made to female avitars


• No racial slurs


• No excessive swearing in guild chat


• No exploiting


• Adhere to our rules of engagement for PvP


• Adhere to conduct guildlines when grouping with oother non-guild members

And of course, you only get out of the guild what you put into the guild.

These all seem too harsh to me.

I'm a member of a guild that started small but has grown. We have 40 members, allmost all of them are active and seem like members of the guild. When we recruit generally either some one in the guild knows them or we have a talk to them before they can join. The talk is casual, just detailed enough to get to know them, see what they want from the guild, make sure they're not greedy etc. Once the talk is finnished we either accept them into the guild or don't let them in, generally every one makes it into the guild.

Actually for my Pa we have tried several methods of controlling the level of players that get recruited. With that said i can tell you that upabove are some fantasic ideas, but you need to find what works best for you. Personally i have 4 Officers that i trust totally, they are the only ones that have acceptance stanse. With that said, we too have moved up and down the ladder of members. There will be times when you have more 'hunters' than 'crafters' and so forth. We work hard to keep a balance of professions. And we are now moving into the entertainer arena looking for them to finish out our balancing act. As a leader you need to set up rules governing the sponsership of members and keep those rules.

One thing to remember and i saw this above also, and i feel it is sound advice. Grow slow, i have seen many pa's started that went on crazy recruitment drives and had well over 100 members within a few weeks. But again i have seen these same pa's crumble in a short amount of time as well. Pick a theme for yourself (who you want to be), pvp, factional, crafter, hunter, and etc and recrut those that will fit this for you. As you grow in size and strength pick another theme and look towards those that can fill this role as well.

Aegis is on a tier for recruitment: We have Founders, officers and general members. In order of recruitment, any founder can accept a new member but this is only done with my approval as Guild leader. Officers are the ones that sponsor the new people and I generally accept after a small interview with the new applicant. For 2 weeks following, it will be up to the sponsor to train the new recruit in our ways and acclimate him/her to guild life. If a general member has a friend that wants in, a simple letter to myself or any other officer gets emailed and they are sponsored in under the trust of that member, should this fall apart during probation period, the member loses recruitment rights for a time and I boot the problem. If a brand new person that doesn't know anyone in our ranks wants in, they first have to move into our city for a week to get access to members and once they have developed a sense of what our guild does then someone is asked to take the risk of sponsoring them.

In the past we would accept people in just from an interview with myself, but quality of Membership dropped and I eventually got a swearing 11 year old to slip through the interview process easily. This being said we adapted this new recruitment policy and I have definitely seen a big change in the quality of members that are being sponsored.

Having a lax entry into your guild will breed you problems, I speak from experience when I tell you that it only takes one bad apple to annoy good members and make your already complicated Guild Leader-life a living hell. When you kick someone out, you are forced to answer everyone's questions of "why?" and when a rotten apple runs your guild's name into the dirt, there is almost no coming back from it.

Harsh entry breeds membership that cares and really want to belong, anyone can spam for 100 losers with the same guild name, that is not power, that is 100 losers with the same guild name.

My guild uses a system whereby applicants must get voted on by five members and also a High Councillor (we have 6). This is a fairly recent policy but seems to work well. However, the guild has been there pretty much since the server started (it's a euro server, so that's early November). In that time we've risen to over 100 members, gotten out of control, reformed, and have now capped at fifty players and closed recruitment.

It's taken us over 8 months to refine the guild to a group of people who get on well and exist in a harmonious atmosphere. One thing we've stuck with is having a council run the guild, and I think it's a good system. I guess our success is evident in that a few months ago, councillors barely got to play because they received mails and /tells almost constantly. Now we barely get any.

We have 5 council members (odd number for voting purposes) who make the big decisions for the guild. I make the day to day decisions & also I am the only person with the ability to kick members from the guild (only had to do it three time now) so that, the hardest of decisions to make IMO falls on me.

We have a 'Probation' period for new members of 2 weeks (everyone so far has passed). After 2 weeks the new member can Move into our town if he/she wants to & receive the guild benefits (free buffs, reduced cost armour/weapons etc). In these 2 weeks you can easily get to know them in guildchat & see if you want them in your guild.

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DavjoFahNu wrote:

out guild started very slow on purpose getting older 18 to 35 year old members and need full vote of council to bring some one on

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To the original poster: You said you want a guild of 18-35 year olds. Why are you discriminating against those under 18 or over 35? If it is a maturity issue, I think you should not worry about age, but about the behaviour of the person behind the keyboard. I am 24, so I would fit into your guild. My brother, who is sometimes more mature than me (& a great player) falls below your age bracket. I also have a member who is over 35. Would he be excluded from you guild too?

Now i'm probably being a bit harsh here, saying that, but you also get some proper idiots aged between 18-35.

Sorry for being facetious at the end

Message Edited by Jascentia on 06-04-2004 11:38 PM

Kaiburr has used several variations on a theme. We make unofficial use of the sponsor system, in that you have to get to know a current member first, and they have to sponsor you to the guild. Not usually a big thing, because if you haven't gotten to know someone in the guild, why are you usually wanting to join it?

The one constant that we've had since Kaiburr was founded was a Q&A session. Sometimes with just a few council members, sometimes with however much of the guild is online, and sometimes with whatever guild members are nearby. The Q&A is always attended by several council members, and usually involves some RL questions, including age group, general location, and (depending on age) what they do, RL. We've found that this information helps us to determine how well people will fit in with Kaiburr, as we're mostly a group of about 19-30 in age.

Of course, if I've had to miss a Q&A session, I usually end up having one with the prospect anyway! After a few people who didn't quite mesh right, we've gone to a more fully sponsored based system. We have the Q&A, and then the prospect is sponsored for about a week. During that week, the guild leader sends out an email to let everyone know who the sponsorees are for the week, so that we know who to be looking for. We had4 last week, and one showed up and was admitted in our meeting on Sunday, one was admitted before the meeting. We take the week to talk to them, get to know them, group with them, etc, to find out how well they're going to fit in.

We recently (okay, last night) created the position of Guild Recruiter, which is currently held by our most active recruiters, who happens to be a Dancer who spends good time in Cantinas around the galaxy. While anyone can recruit, it's been asked that all of the recruits get filtered through this official recruiter. We'll see how this works out.

But that, in a nutshell, is how we do it. It's an organic process. It grows and changes as it needs to. We're currently running around 25-35 active members, depending on who's deployed when, and I think we're one of the older guild still on Scylla.

Later all,

Kothmia

sorry for the double post...

I'd give my spat for an edit button, but I don't troll enough.