Hello everyone…
My guild of over five years has fallen on hard times. We have been operating at about half seasoned players, half younger recruit capacity for years now, with a casual vibe, low requirements, and getting everyone to pitch in so that we could always finish basic guild tasks every week. We’ve recently lost some key members due to personal issues including the GL, and another who was helping with admin duties who briefly became GL. As such, the role of GL has fallen to me.
It is abundantly clear that I don’t have the time (nor honestly, the drive anymore) to perform this job to the level is necessary to bring us back to the level where we can just stay casual and low reqs, with old timers and newbies mingling and still even reach basic task completion. I don’t know if it is even possible to foster such a thing in the current game climate. But I’d still like to try. Unfortunately, just allowing newbies in and out by having the guild open has not attracted lasting regulars in a long, long time. So we need a more managed approach.
If anybody wants to jump in and try to get us back afloat, we are a laid back group with almost no requirements, 1500 seals on mythic week, 300k gold (less for growing members, our core group puts in much more… or they did). I’m exploring upping those a bit - 'd like to keep our casual environment around (no event reqs, reasonable gold req, say, 500k - note that I’ve never put in under a million per week in years, even barely playing, and few others at least will go that far) but get us back to at least finishing basic tasks and even able to foster newer players even if they aren’t going to stay. I’ve seen both sides of motivation cycles in other guilds and pulling out of this spiral can happen with just a couple enthusiastic members - it is usually contagious. But the same goes for demotivation, and losing our leaders and our third top earner has been devastating.
I’m also willing to explore other options. At the moment, we have only a handful of long term members that also are willing to actively contribute. Barring an huge infusion of new blood (which doesn’t seem likely) the next thing would be to merge with another struggling guild. We’d prefer to stay where we are, but outside of getting us back on track and doing my best to keep the “causal, but still get enough resources to be worth playing” vibe, I have little interest in keeping the Guild Leader position, and neither do any of the remaining members.
We’d prefer not to join a large guild “family” where more productive members get swapped out to higher earning guilds, as it sort of destroys the environment we are trying to foster if your “casual” guild becomes a dumping ground for afk accounts and low earners and the prize for performance is to leave that guild. As long as people are active and stick around, high earners motivate everyone and the average goes up, even if there are drastically uneven playtimes it doesn’t feel so much like “carrying”. It has worked for years in the past, and it can work again.
If you are otherwise serious about joining, merging, or otherwise have advice, feel free to post here or DM me. I can’t promise I’ll respond right away, but I will check back.
We have 4 openings after reset, soon to be filled with walk-ins, but will likely have more spots again in a week.