What Defines A Guild?

WoW is a very competitive sport. Why is it that there are always labels for everything? Including guilds? They must have a label, you as a player must label yourself. Well what makes us feel like we have to label our guilds, and explain to others how our guild works or plays. What types of guild exist and how do we decide what type of guild to be a part of? I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because it seems as though my guildies view our guild as a casual raiding guild. When we are actually supposed to be a casual guild...period. I have been putting guild raids on the calendar since Naxx. So I can definitely see how my guild started expecting me to lead a raid every week. But the problem is that they expect to see a raid, and to be a part of that raid, like they have some sort of inherent right.

The Guild of Friends- This guild exists simply because these people were friends, either in rl or in game. They only want to play together to have fun and enjoy themselves. If they are big enough they might try out some raids. But nothing too serious, this type of guild is relaxed, and fun to be with.

The Leveling Guild- This guild was created to help people get to 80. What an awesome notion. It is so much fun to have a guild full of people low level so you can actually run dungeons at level. I wonder what happens to all of the toons when they reach 80? Sometimes the guild converts into a raiding group, many times the 80s leave the guild, and allow the 70s to help the lowbies level.

The Hard Core Raiding Guild- This guild is clear in purpose, and can be very picky about members. They attempt to be the first at kills. They require exalted with Sons of Hodir, and extensive knowledge about your class. You have to meet certain attendance requirements to be accepted, and to continue raiding each week.

The Raiding Guild- This guild's purpose is to raid. But has no desire of being server first. They raid each week with the goal to progress, and they have organized raid leaders and regular raiders who get the spots in raids. This probably makes up the majority of guilds. They plan on raiding every week, but don't have the strict requirements as the hard core raiding guild. Although the seriousness of this guild definitely varies, as well as progress, they raid and have fun.

The Casual Guild- This guild is so generic, it could really fall into so many categories. Some guilds who call themselves casual, actually raid every single week.( like my guild) Sometimes these guilds just log on and do whatever. There are some in my guild who log on, and do dungeons, and achievements, and rarely join us for raids. This guild's categories are where problems from. It isn't well defined. The name casual is why my guild started to have issues.


Where did things begin to go wrong?

• By defining ourselves as a casual guild, we did not determine if we would raid, how often we would raid, and any rules we would go by for raiding.
• It is easy to set up raiding rules, such as looting, but as far as how often to raid, we didn't set this up.
• So apparently my guild got use to me setting up raids every week for them. But what if I want a break!? 
• We don't have any other raid leaders for end game content, only for older content. But the players want the latest thing!

So the biggest thing that happened was that people joined after we had a close knit group, of doing things together for over a year. When they joined they saw us running raids. Seems like people get upset if they are not incorporated into the raids. After everything I have gone through in my guild the last few weeks, I learned to say: Hey we are not a raiding guild!


I was getting so caught up in trying to please everyone and get people into raids. I forgot to remember that we set the guild up to be casual. Which means if you want to raid take some initiative, don't always rely on your raid leader if they give you permission to set up your own raids. If you want to regularly raid then join a raiding guild.


So when creating a guild it might be a good idea to make a clear purpose (which we did) and clearly tell everyone joining what your purpose is (which we did), and do not create habits that conflict with your clear purpose (oops).