Guild Level 25 - Finally!

1-23-12

Wraith Flight on Demon Soul finally hit level 25 yesterday, with a big sigh of relief from me. I don't have to pay people anymore!! It's not about the gold, but I felt obligated to log in to see if I owed people money, as I didn't want people to have to wait forever to get paid, like the copycat guild Guild Bonus made them do.

Exactly how much gold did I pay out? Given that I leveled it to level 2 myself, that's 16.58 million gxp subtracted from the grand total of 845.67 million gxp, leaving 829.09 million gxp needed to get from level 2 to level 25. Grand total of contributions from all my toons = 150,107,791 subtracted from 845,670,000 = 695,562,209 guild xp that my guildies were paid for. At 1 gold per 1k guild xp, and allowing for people who didn't hit a payment mark, I probably paid out 695 THOUSAND gold over the past year.

In retrospect, I probably should have just paid someone for their high level guild, like E at the Altchronicles did, who I discovered from a comment on a BigBearButt post.

The difference between owning the guild, as opposed to just being a regular member and contributing, is that I can never ever be /gkicked. I am free to set policies, and I have faith that the Cash Flow perk, as well as the gold rewards for guild challenges, will eventually pay me back for the gold I've spent. I'd definitely have to /kick everyone if I decided to go on a long break, as you can be dethroned by members petitioning GM's if you've been offline for more than a month.

I don't know what it is, I'm just highly self-reliant (loner), probably from the influence of Diablo II, where I would buy items I wanted from players using my carefully hoarded gems (P Rubies ftw!), instead of doing countless Baal runs hoping that the items I wanted would drop. In WoW, I pay people to help the guild, instead of just hoping that they would, or having to run dungeons/BG's ad nauseum to benefit them, even when I didn't want to, so they'd stay in the guild.

Being a GM of a guild has drawbacks, you always have to be offering something, be it gold, dungeon runs, PvP, or raiding. If you offer nothing, people will leave.

1 MILLION DOLLARS!!!! I mean, gold.

8/30/2011


It's been a while since my last post. I just haven't really felt like I had anything noteworthy to talk about. However, this happened.....








So, as to the title of the post, yup, I dinged 1 million gold on 8/18, despite paying out a crapload of gold to my guild members in Wraith Flight (lvl 12). As a matter of fact, I'm at about 1,075,000 gold right now, only a few days later.

In contrast, Warshrike on Daggerspine just dinged level 8, and I've gone from about 230k gold there, down to about 125 k. I'm not as vigilant about posting, usually only once every couple of days with glyphs and enchanting scrolls. Plus, my scribe Doomslinger is only level 60, so I haven't gotten to the Northrend Research recipes.

Psychrometrics on Darrowmere is level 3, at 160k gold. I'm usually burnt out after doing Horde stuff on Demon Soul, so unless the fishing or cooking daily is something I need for their respective achievements, I don't bother.

BTW, there are several members in all three guilds at between 6 to 12 million guild xp. At my ratio of 1 gold per 1k guild xp, that's between 6 to 12 thousand gold that I've paid to each of those members (excluding Mysscia, who has adamantly refused payment).

So, now what? What would YOU do with a million gold? My main Bloodshrike is a 525 alchemist and 525 Archaeologist, and after a mind-melting 40 hours of digging up fragments, he haz the Sandstone Drake recipe. I already made one for myself, and am saving it for my 100th mount, since I'm currently at 98.

Buying weapons/armor? Since my warrior Bullkathos is level 85 with 525 Blacksmithing, why would I pay for weapons when I can make them myself if I stop being a lazy altoholic and actually run dungeons for Chaos Orbs?

I already buy all my non-mage alts the Dalaran Teleport rings when they ding level 80, but since Burizadokyan just got to 80, I only have 3 more alts on Demon Soul to get it for. I don't buy the rings for the achievement, I get them for the ability of traveling back to Dalaran, then to Orgrimmar, while allowing me to set my hearth someplace else.

I could buy them all the Mammoth vendor mount, for the ease of selling and repair when running dungeons back to back. However, the Guild Page is a pretty cheap pet AND vendor at 300 gold, AND you can summon them inside dungeons if needed.

Seriously, I am looking for opinions on what you would do with the gold. Give huge chunks of it away to low levels? Make up contests in your guild with cash prizes? Offer a prize in Trade Chat to the person with the highest total engineering recipes learned for their level range? (I've already done something similar to that when cleaning out AH alts on other servers).

Hide yo wife, hide yo kids, they robbin' everybody out here!

Blaaargh.......that's how I feel. I don't check the log on my guild tabs that often, because only the officers (me) and GM (me again) have access to the guild bank. Or so I thought. Apparently, over the past week, 2 members of the guild took advantage of a glitch that must have happened. I know I double and triple-checked access for each rank on the guild tabs before I first started inviting people into the guild, but I just found out that Veteran rank had access to all tabs, and were able to withdraw 2 stacks a day. Dasoidon and Demolisher exploited that to the fullest, taking out whatever they pleased. The gold cost of it all doesn't worry me that much, it's the availability of the quest items that is fucking annoying.

I scanned the AH for a long period of time for deals on some of those items, especially the Arcane Tomes, and for someone to just blatantly take them ALL? There's no excuse for it. You'd only need about 60 of them to go from neutral to exalted, I believe, so they just took them to sell.

I can't explain what happened. I know I AM a forgetful person, so I cope by checking and re-checking things that are important to me. I can't believe I would do something so stupid as to leave one rank with open access. Besides, as I recall, I think you'd have to actively enable that, and I know I didn't do that. All I can think is that they either found out a hack to get in, or there was a glitch in one of the patches that enabled that rank to have guild access.

Demolisher had earned over 1.75 million guild xp, and had been paid 1,750 gold for doing that. Dasoidon had earned 250 k guild xp, and had been paid 250 gold for that. Not only that, but since Dasoidon had invited Demolisher into the guild, another little bonus I offer is that if you recruit someone, and they get 1 million gxp, you get a 500 gold bonus. Dasoidon had been paid that.

I just feel betrayed, and angry. It's like inviting neighborhood kids to your house to do work for you, paying them triple what they would normally get, and then you find out that they stole your coin collection to go buy some Mountain Dew. They have no idea what you went through to get it, what it's even worth, they only know that it will get them a little bit of satisfaction.

UPDATE: I talked to Demolisher in-game about it, and he said he was planning on surprising us by putting epic items back into the guild bank, since he had used the items he got out to level his Blacksmithing. I've never asked for ANYTHING from guild members though. You keep your items, and I keep mine, and everyones's happy.
In retrospect, I see he took out stuff that he could use for his profession, but like Mysscia said, he should have known to ask before taking out the truesilver bars and tons of volatiles. I wish him luck in his next guild, and am sorry that this episode happened.

I GOT MY STUFF BACK!!!















As for Dasoidon, in my mind, there's no excuse for what he did.

Social, gold, and drama

3-8-11

I recently found the magic word to recruiting people was "social." I know I'm not as anti-social or introverted as Gevlon seems to be, but I had thought that just talking about how much gold they could make by leveling alts through my guild would be enough to get people to join. Boy, was I wrong.

People in trade chat talk about how broke they are, but will do nothing to change that. You can tell them to take up dual-gathering, do more quests, or even to loot everything and sell it to the vendor, and they will just continue on as they have been, ignoring everything that you've told them.

You can tell them that they'd make 10,000 gold from leveling from 60 to 85 in your guild, based on the 40 million plus xp that they'd need to get them to 85, and they would only be interested in your guild level.

You will find very few people in the game who are actually, truly interested in making gold. In most cases, not because they need it, but because it's almost a mini-game within WoW itself. Mysscia in my baby Horde guild on Darrowmere is one of the exceptions. I've had fun talking to her since the moment she joined, and she will try out any of the ideas I suggest to her. I told her about the pools of fire in Mt. Hyjal that you could fish for Volatile Fire, and she went and fished there for quite a long stretch of time. I recently told her about the Darkmoon Fair selling herbs from old world, Outlands, and Northrend, and she camped that vendor for the next couple of hours.

I have always stressed that my guild Wraith Flight on Demon Soul was a leveling guild. I made no promises that it was a PvP or raiding guild, but apparently the guild no longer fit 2 members today. One of them left after he had made a very off-color remark, and I had said that this wasn't trade chat. He said "Oh, I didn't know this was one of 'those' guilds," and /gquit.

Another one, Indorath, had been with the guild for a while. He was almost to a million gxp, but apparently he wasn't having fun questing anymore, and wanted to do dungeons. He had also /gquit the guild a few days before based on some drama with another guild member, but because of another member stepping in and mediating, he re-joined.

I had/have no problems with members doing whatever they want, but I'm also going to do what I want, which is to do dailies, post stuff on the AH, and whatever else I feel like doing. I don't want to be pressured into doing dungeons with other guild members, just because they're bored of questing. I've also stayed away from the Cataclysm dungeons because I have heard they take wayyyyy longer than Wrath dungeons, and I can't have another time sink that my OCD mind will be compulsively drawn to do.

I want this guild to be a fun, friendly, mature place to be, with members stepping out to join other guilds after they've gotten to 85 and outgrown questing. I also want it to be an amiable split, no harm, no foul, with them wanting to recommend us to anyone still leveling to 85.

The state of the Guild(s)....or, apparently I'm autistic

3-2-11

Wraith Flight on Demon Soul recently dinged level 3, helped by my relentless recruiting in trade chat.

/2 Want to earn some extra gold while leveling? I would appreciate the guild xp for my personal guild. I pay 250 gold per 250k gxp. I also pay for all repairs from the guild bank.

I've gotten about 29 members who AREN'T me now, with several high levels who I have paid about 2k gold each during their leveling through Cataclysm zones. I've had quite a few lower level members quit suddenly, when they realized they couldn't just level in dungeons AND get guild xp at the same time, not to mention the low amounts of xp/gxp you get from lower level quests.

I've been greeted with a lot of skepticism, some puzzling questions (see pics), and a general dawning of comprehension about how people level nowadays. Even though Blizzard re-designed all of Azeroth, most low levels seem to level primarily through dungeons, foregoing questing entirely. How do I know this?

Guild xp. Hit your guild icon, select the Roster Tab, and View All Guild Activity. Most low levels that briefly visit my guilds will get a few thousand xp, then stop. They'll still level up, but get no more xp. That means they are either leveling in battlegrounds, or in dungeons, neither of which grants gxp unless they were grouped with 2 other guild members from my guild (as far as I know).

Warshrike on Daggerspine and Psychrometrics on Darrowmere are proving to be a bit harder. On Daggerspine, I think we just have a small Alliance population, so they've already settled into the mega-guilds, and don't want to leave. It could also be that I usually don't log into Daggerspine until late at night, and post my recruitment macro while I'm doing the cooking and fishing dailies.

Psychrometrics on Darrowmere.....despite the fantastic efforts of my one high-level member Mysscia, it's slow-going. I haven't been able to attract any other people willing to grind xp for my guild. Again, I should probably try recruiting earlier in the day.

I've come up with a new macro that I'll be trying out.
/2 Want to earn some extra gold while leveling? I would appreciate the guild xp for my personal guild. I pay 250 gold per 250k gxp. Guild repairs. BTW, you could earn over 10k gold from me while questing from 60-85.

How do I know that? Google "how much experience from 80 to 85," 2nd site, scroll down to the table.

You need 4,722,000 xp to level from 60 to 69, another 17,651,500 xp to get from 70 to 80, and 20,494,000 xp to level 5 levels from 80 to 85. Total is 42,867,500 xp
If you divide by 4 to get guild xp = 10,716,875 gxp. 1000 gold per 1 million gxp, minus losses of xp earned by killing mobs/gathering......it would still be a hefty chunk of gold.

Hopefully that will spark some discussions in trade chat, which will lead to more members for me, once people realize what other guilds aren't doing for them.

Ding! I leveled my guild!

Yup, on January 29th, on Demon Soul, I leveled my stand-alone guild. The release date of Cataclysm was December 7th, so after a month and a half, I had accumulated the 16.6 million of guild xp needed to advance to level 2. That's not easy, btw. Here's a link to Wowwiki's guild advancement tracker.

Unless you're a level 85, it feels like any quest you do is a drop in the bucket. My 2 level 85's (Bloodshrike and Pallormortis) get 17,350 guild xp for each of the daily fishing and cooking quests in Orgrimmar and Dalaran, so logging on to them for about 15 minutes to do the quests is usually one of my first concerns.

Granted, I don't spend too long on each character, and since a few of them had recently gotten to 80 before Cataclysm, they were still working on their Crusader titles from the Argent Tournament, which, no matter how high of a level you are, only reward about 5k guild rep.

I am considering outsourcing, though. Basically, advertising in trade "Looking to hire leveling mercenaries, 500 gold per 1 million guild xp, repairs fully covered by the guild." That way, they get to do whatever they like, be it PvP, heroics, or just questing, and as long as it gets guild xp, I'm happy.

Guild....Alone

1-18-11

Back in Wrath, I wasn't just a one-man army on 3 servers, I was also about 4 guilds on each server. Whenever someone advertised they were giving a guild away, or selling it very cheaply, I'd snap it up with a low level toon, which was usually a shaman (LW), warrior (BS), or whatever toon had Jewelcrafting on that server.

I like planning ahead, so when I found recipes for the 350-450 range for my crafters, I stockpiled them. LW/BS/JC recipes are usually the most prolific in my opinion, and so a guild bank was a perfect place to store those recipes until I could level the toons up to be able to learn them.

Fast-forward to Cataclysm, and guild perks. I hate waste, and having my quests/looting/kills/crafting count for a guild that I don't care about is just wrong. Besides, it's much nicer to have any of my toons being able to access all of the mats in the main guild bank.

So, I'm trying to consolidate my toons back into my original guilds - Wraith Flight on Demon Soul, Warshrike on Daggerspine, and Psychrometrics on Darrowmere. I've cleaned out or learned recipes in those guild banks, and then sold them for a profit, or at least took a slight loss on what I paid for the tabs. My Ally guild on Daggerspine is 10/10 again, and the 2 Horde guilds on Demon Soul and Darrowmere are almost re-united, with only a couple of toons on each server with a TON of mats and recipes stuffed in their stand-alone banks.

I guess I was inspired to write this because of another solo Wow'er. In it, Skaut was talking about the impression she got that if you're not in a huge guild, you're not going to get anywhere. I respectfully disagree.

After about a month, I'm not level 2 on any of my guilds, but I'm not at 1% either. On Demon Soul, with all my 80+'s, I'm at about 80% to level 2, with an average of 300k experience added the total each day. It could be more, it should be more, but again, my dogged persistence in avoiding waste. I wanted several of my toons to finish out getting the "Crusader" title from the Argent Tournament, the tabard for teleportation, along with the most interesting of the Argent mounts (at least to me), the Dragonhawk.

On Daggerspine, JUST from doing the cooking/fishing dailies, with 10 level 45-60's, I believe I'm around 10% or more.

On Darrowmere, JUST from doing the dailies, with 8 level 30-50's, I believe I'm at 18%. Granted, this belies the title of the post, since I'm not alone in the guild. A very nice person joined the guild after we had a long conversation about how Cataclysm got rid of unnecessary quest items, and they have been graciously allowing me to gain the benefit of their questing XP. Thank you!