Guild Tracks

It has been a couple months since I have last posted.  This delay has mostly been due to the start of the Fall semester where I am teaching a couple of classes, plus some research projects I have been putting some finishing touches on.

In any event, I managed to free up some more time and decided I should start posting again.  But I realized that I was having a difficult time getting started again, mostly because I felt that I didn’t have anything “grandiose” to write about.  That is, I really didn’t have a major topic all planned out to discuss.  I thought about a couple different things, but nothing really struck me as a “perfect” topic.  Even so, I really feel it’s time to get writing again, so I’ll just meander though some relatively minor issues just to get going again.

Guild Leading

One of the things I realized this weekend is that Team Love [kiSu] will be one year old in two weeks.  It seems just like yesterday that I quit Xen of Onslaught [XoO] after two years of leading it and was all set to take a break, when the Team Love mentoring project began.  So basically I went from leading one mega-guild, to starting a brand new guild, which eventually lead to the formation of a second mega-guild.  I honestly never planned to lead a guild, much less a mega-guild or two.  But it seems that in a MMO like Guild Wars that the experience is highly dependent upon the quality of the group that you play with.  So instead of constantly shopping around for that perfect group to play with, I tend to find a decent one and then try to grow it.  Basically I look for people who share the same time of vision and values that I have, and then work to build up a strong community.  When I was in XoO I was fortunate to have had a good infrastructure in place upon which to build.  But when we started it kiSu, basically everything had to be done from scratch.  The nice thing about starting over though was that we were not bound by any previous organization culture.  As such we could shape things as we wanted and hopefully avoid many of the pitfalls we ran into with XoO.

These past months since I have not been around as much in game have provided the leadership in the various kiSu guilds with an opportunity to try new things out and grow things on their own.  Much to my surprise, after some initial struggles, things have started to take off and work really well.  It has even gotten to the point where I feel that I no longer needed to lead things for the guild, and instead can just maintain a more advisory role.  Being free from worrying about the day-to-day activities is a huge luxury that I never really felt I had before, and in fact is the one thing that I have seen burn out more than a few guild leaders.  At this point I am still looking for the best way for me to fit in with the Team Love project.  But as a minimum I feel that the guild and project will continue on whether or not I am around to guide it.  While this is a bittersweet notion, it is one that I am glad is coming about.