Introducing the Guild Spotlight

Greetings and salutations, Guild Wars 2 fans. I’m Leander, and I will be running the new Guild Spotlight column here at GuildMag. In brief, I started playing Guild Wars shortly after launch, and I’ve enjoyed the game thoroughly. I was an officer, or a guild leader in every guild I joined, and have aided and recruited more people than I could possibly remember at this point.

In writing the Guild Spotlight, I am looking forward to working with imaginative, encouraging guild leaders and officers, who go the extra mile for their guild or guild mates, and who thoroughly enjoy working with people in the game. In this introductory post, I’m going to explore a little of where my interviews and commentary will come from, and why I believe that what I have to say is important; as well as letting potential guild interviewees the scoop on who I am and what I stand for.

As I mentioned at the start, I’ve been in leading positions of several guilds over the years, and still am. I have my sights set on leading a guild in Guild Wars 2 with several friends, but in doing this job, I’m going to address some of the issues with guilds that I’ve seen in Guild Wars recently.

To those who play regularly, how often do you see something along the lines of the following:

Ixl Scoot Master Ixl: Generic Fantasy Name [DeRp] Recruiting everyone possible! We do everything offered in this game! omg|wtf|bbq|PvE|PvP|Rofl|LmAo! PM for info!

This kind of recruiting tag has been used since the dawn of Tyria to attract new members to a guild. It is functional in that it shows what they do, and displays their name. Someone interested in this fictional guild would likely wander around to look at the cape, or just PM the recruiter themselves. All is fine, until a challenger appears:

Ominous Bladwind: Generic Phantasy Name [HeRp] guild recruiting everyone who can play! We do everything offered in this game! omg|wtf|bbq|PvE|PvP|Rofl|LmAo! PM for info!

What some with a good eye can see is what is currently happening in Guild Wars. There is no real distinction between guilds: they do everything, they want everyone, too many of them are completely generic. As near as I can tell, the guilds who spam recruit like that are only looking to recruit as many warm bodies as possible, so they can add 95+ people in guild to their tag, regardless of activity or guild personality. This is at best, mediocre; you are no better or worse than the competition, as far as your opponents are concerned. As long as you have a decently attractive name, then you stand a good chance to get members. Of course, these members may leave in an hour, or may pick a fight with one of the lead officers, several things could pop up, because your advertisement is not appealing to anyone in particular.

I’m going to try my best to recommend guilds to certain types of people. I won’t simply be re-using the info that the guild leader may write about their guild. I want to talk to a few members to get a feel for the character of the guild is as a whole, because that’s what should be important in a guild, not that “you have 95 people, so obviously you’re better for anyone than a guild that has 10.” I want to help players to find the kind of guilds that work best for them. I won’t recommend an entirely strict PvP military guild for people who like a little friendly playing, for example. In regards to who I will or will not interview, I strongly urge that someone 18 or up is the representative of your guild, and that it is an established guild already. I may make a monthly post about smaller, just formed guilds, so that’s something to keep an eye out for.

Once the game has been released, I’d like to have an interview with the representative of your guild over Skype or some other chat service. I’m not too concerned about it being voice, but I don’t want to spend all my gaming time interviewing people, or having requests out for the column to be about your guild. Contact me via the email address for the column guildspotlight@guildmag.com, and I’ll try and get back to as many of you as possible. I would prefer to be invited to your guild for a short in-house observation period. I’ll help out and pitch in and try to work with your guilds as much as possible in the time I have dedicated to this. This could range from doing a dungeon with you, to just chilling and chatting with you and your guild in-game.

I see the long-term function of this column as matching up guilds with players who will fit in well in those guilds (and vice-versa, obviously). Other GW2 fan sites have nice guild profiles, but we’re trying to provide a useful service to the community: bringing together compatible players and the guilds in which they’ll thrive.

Signing off,

Leander