Fending off the Monkeys from Your Banana Supply

Let me start this with the simple fact that people do not understand: You have to have an abundance of time to run a guild. Period, the end, game over. And yes I am dead serious! If there were a Guilds for Dummies book, step one would be to make sure you have enough time to run the guild. In case you missed it, leading a guild takes a lot of time. Some of this can be controlled by you and some of it cannot.

Think of it this way, everyone has a monkey on their back that will eat up a good portion of their time banana supply. Now, you want to play the game you love, that is a monkey. Seriously, starting a guild will take away from that monkey’s banana supply so you better consider it! Now add on that you are creating a guild, each thing you add on to make your guild successful will add to the monkeys on you back that are eating up your time and bananas.

Think of your basic guild. Most are offering the same basic things besides in game features: website, forums, TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or other voice chat servers, and so forth. Now let’s look at these as we try to figure out how much time this takes.

The Guild Website. Who is going to make it and design it? That is a large monkey at the start of your guilds life and many experienced players will not give the time of day to a guild without a website....I know I will not.

Let’s just say for argument sake that either you or your buddy creates the site….now you are done with the site right? Nope! Not if you want to make it actually useful. And if you do make a static site, it will eat up less time, but not allow you to do many of the fun guild stuff. We like fun stuff, so let’s add some features and watch the monkeys come out of the trees!

• Forums – This is a guild standard everyone loves to talk on the forums when they are not in game. I personally hang out on my guild forums for 8 hours a day while I am at work, checking them for new posts every few minutes. Even if you do not do that, you are going to have to look at them on a regular basis to make sure things are running smoothly, people’s questions are being answered, and to just simply police them for trolls or God forbid unhappy members who just want to go off and vent. That takes time and you now have two monkeys on your back, one for playing the game and on for maintaining the forums.
  
• Now you know we have to have a guild news page! People love news right? So who is going to write those news articles? Ah ha! Another monkey takes its place on your back happily eating away on your time banana supply. So you try to counter with “I will let an officer do the news”, sure that will help, but you will still need to track it and make sure they are doing their job. That still takes some time.
  
• If you are a MMO guild you will need to track the guild bank and get it to the website some way or another and that takes time. There are MODs out there to assist, but it will still take some time away from playing and other duties.
  
• Roster management takes time. Like the guild bank, you may be able to find an add-on or something to make life easier, but it still takes the time to run it and upload it to your site’s database.
  
• Voice chat servers will take time to set up, configure, and then maintain. Again, be ready for it.

So now we are done with the basic web site.So at the end of just the website, we now have a total of 6 monkeys eating our banana supply. Now let’s look at the in-game time.

• Practice can take a lot of time for a FPS guild that is trying to compete in the tournament ladders. The same can be said for arena teams in Warcraft. Practice makes perfect, and to be successful, you will need to invest some of your banana supply.
  
• Officer meetings will eat up some of your yellow skinned friends. These are vital and need to be fed so just partition off some of your supply because these are coming.
  
• Arguments and rules lawyering will eat up a huge amount of time. Hopefully you will not have to deal with this much, but you better bet one day you will log on and find a heated debate over loot or team killing or whatever and you will need to resolve it.
  
• And finally after all your daily guild chores, you actually get to sit down and play the game.

Now of course this does not represent everything you may need to do every day and then again you may run into more stuff than this list. But this will give you a good basis to look at when you are judging your time.

Consider your time and what you want to do in your game. Let’s say you enjoy running an instance in Warcraft every night with your friends. Well most instances take about 2 hours for the most part. Then consider how much time you think everything you want to implement in your guild will take and simply add them together.

• 2 hours to run an instance
• 20 minutes of forum maintenance
• 30 minutes looking up news from the web if needed and being creative to write your site news.
• 10 minutes to add the 6 rookies to the roster and remove the guy that dropped last night
• 5 minutes to upload the file to the guild bank database
• 20 minutes stopping an argument over a blue dagger that dropped that the hunter and rogue are fighting over after you log into Ventrilo for what you thought was going to be a peaceful night.
• 20 minutes to talk with the officers and get guild business handled

So on this example night, you spent 1 hour and 45 minutes handling guild business and taking on other people's monkeys. Then you actually get to start your instance run. And you have been online for a total of 3 hours and 45 minutes.

Now use this type of logic to think about if you truly do want to spend that much time working on your guild instead of playing. If you do have the time, then wait for the next few installments of Guild Guide to see what to do next. However, if you are honest with yourself and you don’t think you want to give up that much time to maintaining a guild, then start looking for an established guild to join instead of creating your own and soon feeling overwhelmed and pulling the plug. It will be better for you and for the members you have recruited that now need to find a good home.

Guild Strong, Happy Gamers and until next time…