Blog Azeroth

I've been thinking of writing on some of the mistakes or even "don't do's" of new guildies..

Like trying to withdraw from the guild bank within 10 minutes of joining (they better not have rights!)
expecting that level 70's will run them through any instance they need or want.

What have you seen or heard of?

Immediately begging for mats while admitting their character has two professions like Alchemy and Engineering, and they have no alts with a gathering skill.

Bugging people over and over "When's my rank going to go up?"

Not listening when the officers or guild leader make a polite request/having to be told things twice.

That one is the most annoying, especially when people are told to check the website for that information the moment they join...

That reminds me of one:

Not checking the guild forums/website, even when asked to, and then asking when the raids are.

Expecting to be hand-held through higher level instances.

Expecting to be brought to raids in quest greens.

Had one happen last night. A new recruit, some level 25, kept spamming guild chat begging for 3 gold to repair his armor. Seriously, at level 25, your repairs aren't costing you 3 gold. After being ignored a few times and ultimately being told to quit begging, we got the obligatory /gquit.

* do not go afk on me as I am about to invite you to the guild
* not knowing the rules, every guild has them, find out where you can read about them or let somebody explain
* we have a forum, we use it heavily, you want to be a member, you use the forum, too
* do not ask questions twice when they were answered the first time
* do not expect to be the center of everybody's attention immediately, it takes time to become a valued member of a guild
* do not try to reform the guild, we told you what kind of guild we are, you wanted to join ...

The last guild I ran was a social / levelling support guild, with a pretty flat hierarchy: new members would start with a novice rank and then become full members. After that, recruiters, full officers and the GM.

Just hanging around and showing you were there was enough to eventually get full membership, but I had required registering on the web site and reading the guild charter as the condition sine qua non before considering making someone a recruiter.

After promoting a new member to full membership, he started bugging me about the next ranks. I explained about the flat structure and the website, and the guy went apeshit at me. He didn't want to visit a forum, his contributions alone should warrant a promotion. No, he didn't want to register because he didn't understand this web stuff. I was being an unfair bastard, discriminating and whatnot.

/gkick, looks like we have nothing in common, good luck with your next guild, /ignore

Another time, same guild.
Future guildie: Hey, I see you're recruiting, but you didn't mention having a tabard? Do you have a tabard?
Me: Of course we have a tabard, and it's a damn fine tabard, mister.
Him: Why don't you mention it in your recruitment call?
Me: Well, you know, for some reason getting each of our members to sponsor 20s towards a tabard didn't strike me as so extraordinary that I would need to recruit with that.
Him: Oh. OK
Me: Want in?
Him: Sure
/g (me) Hello, welcome him!
/g (the others) Welcome, Him!
/g (him) thanks
(20 seconds later)
/g (him) anyone has 1g for the guild tabard?

/w to Him: Mate
/w to Him: For your next guild, you may want to consider that begging for gold within 20 seconds of joining is often considered poor form
/w from Him: what do you mean your next guild?
/w to Him: Isn't that obvious?
/gkick, /ignore

Priceless...

The new folks that bug me most are...

1) The ones that essentially want their guild to play the game for them. If they need to skill up their crafting professions, they ask for mats. If they need to farm something for a quest, they'll ask if anyone already has some to give them. Any time they come to a mob that looks scary, they ask for someone to come kill it for them. Gah!

2) The overly affectionate couples that bring their bedroom right into the guild chat. (Really, we don't need to see that. Please /w, not /g.)

3) The folks that don't take into account the tone of the guild chat before they start bantering. I think the best thing a new person can do is keep quiet and listen for the first couple days after joining. Sure, asking questions is fine, but interrupting chats about druid builds or raid strategies with whatever meme is popular in the Trade Chat that day isn't going to endear a person to the new group if that's not what the group is about.

Knowing what guild chat is used for can be a really important step to making a good impression on guildmates. Until a newbie has gotten a feel for what the guild is like, their chat messages probably shouldn't include:

-leetspeak
-foul language
-derogatory terms

Generally, I think those sorts of things are almost never appropriate, but not all guilds roll with proper English speaking adults.

Be sure to turn off all chat altering mods before you join a new guild.

Guildie: Welcome!
Newb: [bangin' b**ches] thanks for having me!
Newb is demoted to Potty Mouth rank

I also recommend that anyone new to the guild spend some time just reading guild chat channels for a while to get a feel for how everyone interacts. We've had some recruits get really upset at what were on-going jokes between other members (and didn't affect them at all).

One that has sadly started to happen to us lately is some people afk'ing in BG's... at the first report we get of this they get the gkick... funny thing is someone had the bright idea of doing it on a pre-made with a bunch of officers...

Mistakes new guildies make? Hmm...

My pet peeves are:
1. not bothering to go to our forums and read what's going on
2. refusing to actually look for anything on their own before asking the guild
3. proceeding to ask the guild every 10 minutes for something even after getting a "sorry, kinda busy getting the snot kicked outta me by 14 ogres" message
4. refusing to use the guild website to actually set up instance runs (we're a guild of 90% working adults, we -have- to schedule our play times)
5. people demanding, not asking but DEMANDING hand-holding and "oh do this quest for me, it's too hard"
6. arguing with the class leader/raid leaders/guild leader in the middle of raids (it happened once. painful for all involved)
7. those that bug, pester, annoy for a higher position in the guild when they've been in the guild for all of .5 seconds.
8. And then there's the person that at first looks absolutely perfect, checked out in the pre-guilding process, was a good asset to groups/raids, great personality, etc. Then after a little while of being in guild, they start belittling all the other guild members, sucking up to leadership, and if the sucking up doesn't work, they start making digs at them, their gear, their leadership, etc. Oh yes, loathe those energy-sucks...

Those are all the ones that are behaviors that most likely can't/won't be changed, no matter how hard you try. Then there are the ones that just don't know better. It might be their first MMO. And every guild is different as far as their "culture" goes. Most of our guild leadership can usually spot them fast, send them quiet tells and suggestions about how -this- guild does it. 9 times out of 10, the behavior goes away and we never deal with it again.

Agreed! I swear I want to tell the next person that asks "when do i get promoted?"....

When you don't ASK to be promoted!

This sounds like a great idea for a piece. I can't wait to read it when it's completed =).

All of the ideas on these list threads...you take all of my answers, force me to not contribute. =(

Oh! Here's a big mistake one of the members of my guild did.

After a few days, a level 45 rogue said "Hey, I'm gonna go ahead and steal everything from the guild bank now."

Ha...then after we /gkicked him he said "I was just kidding..."

We had this happen last week. I think it was last week.

Another thing with raids that ticks me off is when you have 30 minutes left on your respawn timer and you are trying to learn a new boss when your get

/raid (person) afk to go do ...
/raid (everyone else) dude, no afk's we are running out of times.
/readycheck
/raidleader I guess he stepped away already

/bangheadonkeyboard (me)

Join the guild and then disappear for 3 weeks.

So, afterwards we instituted a new guild policy that new guild members must be active in-game as well as register on the forums or be uninvited.

Not bothering to go to our dkpsystem website after joining
Going there, but not bothering to actually make an account
Making an account, but not requesting proper rank (as they are instructed on how to do it in a special ***Instructions for New Members*** link on the aforementioned site

And the kicker:

Upon doing one of the above, whining in game because they dont get invited to raids because "I cant sign up anywhere"

Stupidity really is universal, isn't it?

I've got one to add to the pile:
Bugging the GL (me, also heal lead) or deputy GL (who is usually raid-leading) about trivial, petty, whiny issues when the GL and deputy GL are smack bang in the middle of a progression raid and have already told you they're too busy to talk to you right now. Twice.

Although it's been touched on, the most annoying thing I find from new guildie's is the request for handouts; whether gold, gear, items, enchantments, quest help, etc.

We had a new guildie join and two days later he was asking if anyone was an enchanter. I piped up that I was and he wanted a fiery enchant. As everyone knows this isn't exactly a cheap enchant, but not terribly expensive for a level 70 either. Under normal circumstances, I am more than willing to provide the mats and/or purchase them from the AH at no cost. For me to be prepared to do this, that guild member must contribute to the guild in some way. His response was: "OK : (". He quit the guild five minutes later at which point everyone online started laughing!

Why is it that these "guild jumpers" do not have the common sense to contribute first and ask later? What comes around goes around, Jumpers!!!

Also, FYI for all non-70 players, those of us who are 70 are not done with the game. For many of us the game just feels like it started with different goals now in front of us. We're more than happy to help, but I will not do that quest with you that requires us to go Ironforge to Darnassus to Stormwind and back to Ironforge!!! (I actually did something similar to this on a class quest and he didn't have flight points. We walked the whole way and encountered nothing!!!)

Not listening in raids. At. All.

We had a warrior in our guild once, in the dark days of MC (<3 MC).
We always skipped the imps on the route to Lucifron and as we engaged Luci, we got wiped by alot of imps, that came out of nowhere.

He pulled the imps. For Rep. Hydraxian Waterlords have no (useful) rewards.
As we ressed, he did so again, even after we told him not to do so.

Later, when his armor was red, we put up a repair bot. Unfortunatly, he HS'ed to Org to repair already.

Begging, in any form, mats, runs, help with quests, money, locations as soon as they join.

Just last week we were in the middle of Shade when a new idiot (sorry member) started whining why we weren't paying attention to him, and refused to leave it be when we told him we were busy. When has asked again for a run and no one answered him, he said,
"Are you guys only at Kara?"
I said, "No, we raid BT every other night. But we are all rogues so you can't see us."
LOLs abound.

Leecher gquit.

I make that joke daily, but I add the server transfer and name change to it too.

Since I'm an officer, nobody's ever taken me seriously... They will rue the day.

I recently borrowed the last 1000g for my epic mount after promising to pay it back to my guild leader. I remember telling him:

Me: Don't worry, I'll pay you back ASAP.

Him: I trust you.

Me: Yeah, I'm cultivating a reputation for honestly until a much bigger score than 1000g comes along.


But yeah, begging gets on my nerves. I refuse to walk people through low level instances. More recently I went to help a lower level guildy with a quest. And found there were already 4 other hordies at the same location trying to do the same quest. We grouped up and finished it in a flash. Last time I'm helping that person with quests for quite some time.