Making Guilds Serious Business

I read on another wow related site (I forget which one I read so many... my guess it was WOW Insider) an article that briefly in one line mentioned the problem with guilds.

I don't recall how it was worded but the general gist was the fact that there is really no commitment to a guild, no reason to stay with one over another baring friendships etc. It then quickly mentioned that guild banks were a method by which guild members could feel invested in a guild and threw out the idea of guild housing etc...

After reading it I as a guild leader was pondering the same issue. It seemed to me that the decision to join a guild is often taken too lightly since there are no real benefits of consequences...

Now enter the realm of my own fantasy here and what I would like to see...
A cool down on leaving a guild, say 10 days or something where a character couldn't join another guild upon leaving the old one. In a sense this would inhibit guild hoppers and maybe encourage members to more actively work to building successful guilds!

Just wondered what everyones thoughts were on something like this...

I joined a guild at about lvl 30 or so, and never looked back. Now I have 2 lvl 70s and a lvl 60, along with some other low lvl alts. They're all in that first guild I joined, and I've only regretted that once. This was due to someone trying to take control of our guild and move it in a direction that he (but not many others) wanted to go. When the dust settled, he was booted from the guild. His mom was fairly new to the game at that point, and apparently they shared an account, because one day we discovered he was logging in to his mom's account and robbing our guild vault blind. We all liked his mom, but had to boot her as well (We knew it was him because she didn't even know what the guild bank was at the time).

Anyhow, my point is that it's not always the way you say. I've found it very rewarding to be in the guild I'm in, not just for the help I receive, but the ability to help out my guildies as well. I find that rewarding and if I had more time I'd go on but it's time to leave work now, so I have to stop slacking and pack up.

frumpyandy -
Agreed, my guild experiences have been very rewarding. The decision to start my own was not taken lightly and the guild has some fantastic members who basically form the "core" of the guild. Some of them I know on a real life bases others are players who like the guild environmental that has been created and the tools we have a guild to make WOW-time more fun and entertaining.

However there is an element of players that seem to almost join a guild to complete a quest and then vanish...

The original post that got me thinking was this one, about members being poached from the guild. I've seen this happen before and like the blogger try to avoid doing this myself at all costs, but always remaining open to questions about the guild and people who wish to join us even though they are in already guild'ed.

my guild has a ~1 month "Initiate" rank, where they get to know the guild and the guild (hopefully) gets to know them. about once a month the veterans and officers of the guild get together and decide which initiates made a good enough impression to become full members of the guild.

initiates are pretty restricted. we discourage them from asking for help or gold, and they don't have access to the guild vault. if they make it through this sort of "gauntlet" period of time, they earn the right to access certain parts of the guild vault and guildies are generally very receptive to requests for help (as long as they are reasonable and not excessive). this system has been in place for the past year or so I think, and it has worked out VERY well. the whiny players who just want to get walked through everything, or clean out our guild vault, or beg for money leave before they ever become full members, and the ones who stick out the initiate process basically prove that they want to be productive members of the guild, so it works out for everyone.

about the link you posted: i read that article as well, and i don't think we've had many players poached from us. we've had a few leave to join other guilds after being with us for a while, and that's based more on the fact that we're not doing end-game stuff yet. we're making a slow push to get keyed for kara currently (we're fairly casual and this push is totally voluntary, which results in it being a little slow), but have had some players ready to try it for a while, so they've moved on to raiding guilds. we still stay in contact, and some of them keep their lower lvl alts in the guild, so it's really not such a big deal.