Council Chambers is all about the ins and outs of guild leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Each week, we’ll look at running and managing a guild through good times, bad times and everything in between.
To wrap up our Guild Formation series, I wanted to spend a little more time talking about officers – in particular, what to look for when hiring or promoting them. (You’ll notice this nicely dovetails into the next couple entries about guild advice! So stay tuned.) For the majority of TOR guilds, you’re just getting started in this new game – for some of you, your guild was established through the Guild HQ before the game launched, for others your guild was ported over from another game, and for some of you, your guild may be a brand new one formed since launch.
Regardless of how you got your start though – good officers really can make or break a guild. You want officers that are responsible, fair, active, and reliable. To make it even more tricky, being an officer isn’t even a paid position! Even so, having reliable officers that you can count on to manage the roster, deal with issues when you are offline or not around, and who can support you and the workload that goes with running a guild is a tremendously vital asset for any guild leader.
Let us begin by looking into the qualities that seem to make a good officer. This can be tough – some are easy to measure (time online, for instance), and others can be harder (how does one measure maturity?) Ultimately, it’s going to be a combination of observation, current officer consensus (for guilds that already exist and have officers), and a bit of sixth sense or gut hunch thrown into the mix. Below is an initial list of qualities I usually request from prospective officer candidates.
Primary requirements are:
1. Ability to be online around 15 hours a week. Being an officer is a time commitment, and while officers don’t need to be around that much *every* week, they should plan on that (or 3 nights a week) as an average. If your guild raids or is active more often, you may need to alter this to meet your own guild’s needs.
2. Willingness to chip in on a number of tasks. This may include things like new member recruitment, dispute resolution/mediation, raid organization, and social events and outings. Ideally, a guild will have one officer take point on each of these issue areas (see below) but other officers may be asked to help in outside their area from time to time.
3. Leadership and initiative. The other big part of being an officer is to get things done for the guild! So initiative and a willingness to go out there and do is a big plus – guilds are looking for people who have the time, energy, and commitment to make those visions a reality. No matter how nice a person, if they don’t have leadership skills, probably not a great choice for an officer.
4. Ability to manage conflict situations. This can be the toughest one to fill – nobody likes conflict or arguing with people, and the rare few who do probably aren’t good officer material in the first place. But, it’s a core part of the job – someone has to be willing to step in and resolve member disputes when they flare up out of nowhere and the guild leader isn’t around. Also – no matter how wonderful the guild leader, we all have bad days and periodic bad decisions (or, less than ideal decisions) – and if you have a guild full of officers who are just yes men and won’t speak up to raise the questions that should be asked in these occasions, who will?
Aside from this, you want people who are level-headed and not prone to being reactionary. (By reactionary, I mean they won’t rise to the bait if someone is trying to provoke them.) You want someone willing to lead and assert themselves, but not so much so that you’re battling them for control on a regular basis. So a lot of this is a balancing game – keeping a good eye on the members, seeing who might have some of these qualities, talking to them to see if officering interests them, and then trying to match them to the position that best suits their skill sets.
Some generalities on that, from my own observations:
- Social event and recruiting officers are often extroverted and outgoing members, since you need to be comfortable gathering groups and talking to strangers
- Raid leaders are often very good at details and organization – they benefit from knowing and prepping members about boss fights, gear lists, and good web sites for classes
- Technical officers are tech savvy (duh, right?) Not much more to be said there, really
My final comment is to realize that not everyone asked will want to be an officer. A lot of the people I’ve approached over the years as showing good competence in the above areas were already officers elsewhere and for other games/guilds for exactly those reasons – or perhaps, that’s where they learned those skills. Some of us are willing to serve more than once, others – once they retire, they retired and they like having a place to just play. Do not push someone if they decline! There’s a lot to be said for just being a player and only having to worry about your own playing experience, rather than everyone in the guild’s. It’s a high burnout position, so if you ask and the person declines – respect that, and don’t push. Plus, if you don’t force the issue – a lot of times, they’ll reconsider and offer.
So, that’s some of my experience on what to look for in an officer. Next post, we’ll talk about how to handle it when officers don’t manage to keep up their responsibilities and some diplomatic ways of managing that.
Let me start by explaining how we go about determining when to fix an issue in the live game, whether it is a bug or an exploit. Let’s begin with exploits – those cases when we determine that a bug in the code can give an unfair advantage to a player. (Remember, not all bugs are exploits!)
