5.1. A Guild Website
If you wish your guild to have some basic level of credibility on the internet, then have a
website. A guild without a website loses the ability to market itself effectively to people
outside of the game itself. Most people spend more time at work surfing the internet than
they do in the game itself. So you need to have a web presence to market yourself to that
group.
Having a website is a double-edged sword, however. If you have an ugly site where
clearly no effort was put into it then the site can actually backfire on you and tell the world
that you are a cheesy guild that isn’t very well run and probably not going to be around in
a few months. A similar message is sent when you use some free webhosting service
that is both slow and has annoying advertisements that pop up.
So you should have a guild website but when you go to set it up you should consider the
following things:
●Register your own domain name www.yourguildname.com. It is very inexpensive
to do
●Get a decent host for the site that doesn’t have popup adds and has good
response time
●Put some effort into designing your page. Poorly designed pages send the
message that your guild is poorly organised.
●Pick a good color scheme. If you pick ugly colors then your page will not be
enjoyable to read and people will not waste their time. Black text on a white
background is the easiest on the eyes to read. White text no a black background
is fairly easy to read. Red text on a bright purple background gives people a
headache and screams ‘newbie’ when people see the site.
●Don’t use copyrighted or trademarked material. People too often feel that since
something is seen on the internet that it must be public domain and they can freely
use it. That is false. A simple email to your ISP can get your account terminated
and your site lost. So avoid stealing other people’s intellectual property.
●Consider having a guild forum. This links back to the section on having good guild
communications. A forum is important. You should at least have a private one

that only members can read and you may wish to have a public one that friends,
recruits and perhaps even enemies can come post to.
You certainly do not need to rush out and spend hundreds of dollars on a website.
However, you should have a web presence and it should be professional looking. You
can make one for fairly low cost and it can look professional with fairly low effort. You can
go with a pre-packaged look and use a tool like Postnuke (which is both free and
professional looking) or you can design your own site.
The basic components that your site needs to include are:
●Your guild name
●What server you are located on
●What faction (alliance or horde) you support
●Are you recruiting? If so, how does someone join?
●What is your basic guild philosophy?
●What are your core guild rules members must follow?
●Any current news you wish to share
Here are some basic resources to help you get started, if you don’t know where to look for
hosting or registering your domain name.
Domain Name Registration: www.godaddy.com you can register your domain with them
for $8.95/year and they even offer hosting at good rates. www.netsol.com is another
registration company if for some reason you don’t like godaddy
Hosting: Hosting companies are a dime a dozen. There are so many out there I won’t do
them justice by trying to give you a comprehensive listing. Some that you may wish to
look at include: www.dreamhost.com and www.1and1.com (which does have European
servers as well like 1und1.com)
5.2. Should You Support PvP In Your Guild?
World of Warcraft offers pvp in two flavors. First you can play on a pvp server where you
can kill or be killed anywhere at any time. Clearly if you chose that server then the answer

to supporting pvp is YES by default. However if you chose a “normal” server then you can
chose not to support pvp with your guild.
I would like to make the case that you SHOULD participate in pvp to some extent with
your guild even on a normal server. I make the following case as to why pvp will make
your guild stronger and add value to the guild.
●Raiding monsters day in and day out, even if the monsters and zones change, will
eventually lead to boredom. No matter how creative the designers are, once you
know the tactics, you will beat the encounter most every time. When the challenge
is lost then things get boring. And eventually you will get so good at figuring out the
tactics that you will rapidly master new content. PvP in WoW pits humans against
humans. It is much more difficult to figure out another human and they are far
from predictable especially when taken as a whole. That constant challenge, for
some of your members, will keep the game fresh and fun.
●You get to chose when to pvp on the ‘normal’ servers. So you can chose to have
a “battleground” (battlegrounds are instanced areas with specific goals and
missions where alliance forces face off against horde forces) raid day where you
gather your guild, pick a battleground and go work as a team, along with others of
your faction, to achieve that mission or goal. You are, in essence, “raiding” other
players instead of raiding monsters.
●There are rewards for honorable pvp that you cannot achieve any other way in
WoW. By killing players that are near, at or above your level you will gain honor
points. Those points in turn will grant you access to special NPCs selling special
items that you cannot obtain through any other part of the game. And areas within
the battleground instances have monsters that drop high end items that are only
found in the battlegrounds.
●There is no penalty to pvping meaning you do not lose items and you lose very
little time running from the graveyard back to your corpse. One of the biggest
heartburns a lot of players had in UO was the loss of items and the loss of time.
There was a penalty for losing in pvp instead of simply rewarding winning. In
WoW there really is no penalty for losing. Instead the focus is all on the reward for
doing well.
●First Person Shooter (FPS) games are very popular. Odds are many of your
members enjoy FPS games. PvP in WoW is very much like playing a FPS game
with swords and spells instead of rocket launchers and machineguns.
Battlegrounds have goals to achieve and you earn “honor” for killing honorably (a

lot like in playing Americas Army, a free FPS that more than 2million online
gamers play regularly). PvP is more like an FPS than in previous games and as
such it finally puts the “fun” factor back into pvp that is missing in some games.
I would argue that you lose nothing by pvping but you stand to gain a lot. You have yet
one more tool in your guilds toolbox to keep your members happy, motivated and not
bored with the game. You have another outlet for their energy and an outlet to let stress
out. Who doesn’t like to see gnomes running around on fire screaming? Well, except the
gnomes of course. You open yourself up to another type of online gamer that may now
find a home in your guild. And you even have the ability to earn rewards that you cannot
earn any other way.
5.3. Should You Use Chat Channels For Your Guild?
Everyone guild gets a GUILDSAY and an OFFICER chat to use. However, even with 40
or 50 members, guildsay can get quite active and lose some of its usefulness in
communicating information to members. With the guild Message of the Day being limited
to 60 characters, should you consider using chat channels to supplement your
communications?
If you are having communications and spam issues, to the point guildsay is becoming less
useful, then I would say YES you should consider using chat channels. However, before
you dive right into them, you need to understand the limitations of WoW chat rooms at the
time of writing this article.
Here are the good points of using chat rooms:
●Anyone can make one
●You can let nonguild members into them if you chose
●You can password protect them
●You can create multiple ‘tabs’ in your user interface and assign chat windows to
those tabs
●You can create rooms by subject area and use them to divide up chatter (for
example having one room to get quest help and one room to offer up items in etc..)
●When you join a room and then logoff, WoW remembers what you were in the
room and tries to autojoin the room when you next login

Here are some of the limitations of chat rooms as of the writing of this article:
●If everyone leaves the room, the room is closed. Unlike IRC or the chatroom
systems in some other games (like Everquest) there is no memory of the room
once the last person leaves. This makes it very difficult to have a persistent room
with a persistent password since you likely wont have someone online 24hours a
day, every single day, for all time to come. And if you don’t, someone can steal
your room very easily.
●If you password protect the room, when you next login, WoW will try to autojoin
and fail to join the room and return a message since it does not remember the
password used to login.
●If you leave your own room, even if the room stays open and active, it forgets you
are the owner of the room. The room effectively becomes ownerless and no
functions that require a room owner to perform, can't be performed.
●If you make someone a moderator and they leave the room, the room forgets that
they were a moderator.
So chat rooms are useful tools for some things. But they fall well short of an IRC level of
robustness at the time of writing this article. They don’t have persistent access lists,
moderator lists or even a persistent lifespan. So you could make rooms without a
password to avoid those issues but then you lose the protection of keeping unwanted
people out of the room.
Chatrooms can offer value. But understand the limitations of them and use them where
they offer you value but not where they cause you more problems than they solve.