Playing to your base

Having a durable, long-lasting guild is a difficult chore in the world of Warcraft. Attachments are often virtual, play schedules vary, not to mention the extremely broad codeword "drama". If you want this goal though, the only way to achieve it is to anchor the guild around your core membership. What is your core? It's the people you can depend on, those who play often, get involved in operations, maintain a positive attitude, demonstrate some skill, and keep plugging on during good times and bad. If you're in charge of or can shape the guild, those are the people to keep in mind when implementing policy and making arrangements. New members might become core, or they might leave. Long-term but unreliable members won't be there for you. Certain things, especially loot and formation rules, should be fair towards everyone, guilds that operate as pyramid schemes don't last. But if you match your core's interests to what the guild is doing and how it operates, then it has the greatest chance of longevity.

Luckily I've almost entirely been in the same guild for the bulk of my WoW career, roughly 3 years. While its direction sometimes changes, in general it holds to those principles, whether directly or indirectly. I was an officer for a large chunk of that time, and in that position I've learned over time that when the chips are down, you have to keep things in line with your chief membership, it's the only way to keep the ship sailing.

Money Management

Raiding requires three things: (Game) Money, Time and Commitment. In WoW, monitoring these three factors just as important as your mana bar. To raid successfully you need to be willing to schedule 3-5 hour blocks multiple times a week, and you need the commitment and desire to stick it out through wipes, bad luck, and other members disappointing you.

Money however can be overlooked as being a significant raiding factor. Casual players spend the majority of their time on low risk/high reward activities (like soloing or short instances), where it's a lot easier to earn money and where you don't usually have to spend much. A hardcore player doesn't worry about it either since they invest so much time in WoW; while they may have high costs from raiding they also have the most revenue streams available to them (especially once content is on "farm"). However, money management is difficult for the "semi-serious" raider; since we spend most of our available time in groups (high costs), while not having much extra solo-time to replenish our reserves (low profits).

So how should a semi-serious player make money? In WoW, you can earn gold either actively (ex: daily quests) or passively (ex: buying and reselling something on the AH), or some sort of mixture (farming mats then selling the crafted item). In Burning Crusade I was quite adept at making money, but most of it involved working in Outlands, like completing quests at the level cap, grinding rather than buying faction rep, or daily quest circuits. Very "active" sources of money-making. But I also raided a lot more casually back then, so I had extra time which I won't have in Wrath. Since I want to spend most of my time seeing new stuff, I need to step up my passive money generation.

It's my theory that the best way to "passively" make money in WoW is to have access to multiple professions, which requires access to multiple high-level characters. My next post will explain how I'm going to manage this.