Hello, and may I be the first to welcome you to this weeks The Guild Emblem. This week on The Guild Emblem I will be answering a user submitted question and discussing this issue, and also be profiling my interview with Blur, the head of the Mandalorian guild Beskar.  I received an e-mail from another source asking me the following question:

Q: Just curious, as you were asking for questions, to how you would handle another guild that was becoming an issue before the game even started. Our guild (who will remain nameless), has had trouble with another one trying to send a mole into our forums, generally being rude to us on the ToR boards, etc. It isn't really a problem anymore, but I was curious to how you would've dealt with it.

A:  Well this is very common with rival guilds.  Many times if a guild is competing to recruit a similar crowd one will try to sabotage the other.  There are a few rules.  First, do not turn around and do the same thing to them.  This just means that you are willing to stoop to their level and could cause you to lose the respect of your guild members and other guilds.  Two, remember there isn’t much useful information that they could take on your forums.  Unless you have plans to take over the world using a technique to brainwash all new recruits over the internet you do not have to worry about them stealing anything.  Third, ignore the abuse on ToR boards.  Most people realize it is senseless flaming and should be disregarded.  I myself have seen this on community forums and always ignore the senseless flaming. 

If it gets really extreme report them for abuse or something and that is a good way to stop things once and for all.  I have many times in my experience seen people acquiring ventrilo or teamspeak passwords and going on and spamming and yelling.  This is quickly resolved with a swift ban.  The same thing can be done with your forums.  Server info should be password blocked if it becomes and issue and the password should only be given to officers and ONLY officers can give out server information.  Non-officers with the server info cannot give out the information.  Also a monthly password change is a great way to mix it up a bit.  This could help solve some of the abuse problems.  When you do this make sure the officer only rule is enforced.  This prevents recruits from giving away the information to people they think are in the guild and aren’t.  The way I would have dealt with it is to ban them from my forums and ignored them on the ToR forums.  If you weren’t sure who it was then I would have had an investigation to at least determine who it might be.  One thing I suggest is don’t go ban crazy.  I saw one of my small guilds do this to try to find a mole and we lost one third of our guild to hunches.  Just remember that as long as server information is well protected than it should not be a problem and unless it is directly effecting your recruiting then it should be ignored.

Now here is my interview of Beskar guild leader, Blur:

JGard: In your guild profile you tell people to visit this thread on your forum. It tells about your guild and how it is run. Right of the bat you say that this guild is not run like 99% of other guilds. Please explain.

Blur: Simply, there would be very few guilds out there which are run by one person. I don't actually know of any, of the top of my head, but I wouldn't be arrogant enough to say that we were unique in that way; I'm sure there are some out there. Most guilds are run by a "leadership team" of sorts; sharing out the chores, debating what needs to be done with the group, and so on. The problem I have with groups like that, however, is the red tape the average member has to cut through to get anything done. In a lot of guilds the average member has officers above them, and often a leadership team above the officers. So even if a member gets an idea through the officers and up into the real leadership, it's probably going to get debated to death and changed, or there'll be a stalemate because the leadership team can't agree, or some other problem. It just gets very bureaucratic and, to be honest, silly. I've been in guilds long enough -- since Ultima Online in 1997 -- to say that I think the best way is to have a pool of members who are all equal, with one guy tasked with the admin chores. In summary, if someone wants something done in Beskar, they come to me and ask. I'll decide whether we do it or not -- usually on the spot because I don't have to debate it with a leadership team. This makes decision making faster and a lot more personal, too. People can come to me and we can get things done without any waiting around. If someone sends me a Private Message asking for, say, a new forum for a certain topic, if I think that's a good idea, I'll just go and make it. Fast, simple. And way different to "the average" guild.

JGard: You do not have rankings except for leader because you propose that the entire guild has a say in every decision except you, the leader, has the final say.  How will you balance this system between seasoned guild members and new recruits?  Also, how will you prevent this from becoming a dictatorship with one person making the final decision?

Blur: Well, to answer the second question first, we openly operate under a model of "enlightened despotism", which is all covered in our FAQ, so people could call it a dictatorship if they wanted to portray the concept in a negative light. But here's the hidden ingredient: unlike a real life despot, or dictator, when it comes to a gaming guild, this kind of role is a little different. Let's use our choice of server as an example. I could, for example, decide that we will be on 'x' server and if any members didn't like that decision they would be free to leave. However, that would be a pretty dumb way to go about things. In reality, I'm going to canvas opinion from our members. So if 55% of members want 'x' server and 15% want 'y' server and 30% want 'z' server, clearly, I would have to have a pretty good reason not to take us to 'x' server. So I do have ultimate control, yes, but to not listen to the members in arriving at my decisions would just be dumb. Of course, there may be times where I will excercise that control to go against the grain on a certain topic because Beskar is, ultimately, my guild. As I remind the guys sometimes: I pay the bills! So if I thought, for example, that the guild would be better off on the server that 30% wanted, instead of the 55%, I could theoretically still take us to that server. But I would do so in the knowledge that I may lose members in doing that, so "going against the grain" isn't something any despot should make a habit of, even if they do have the control. It's a balancing act, basically, between what the members want and what my overall vision for the guild is.

Now going back to the first question, there is no difference -- in theory at least -- between a veteran and a new recruit. I dislike guilds where the veterans act like gods towards the recruits. I mean, at the end of the day, this is just a videogame. If someone is deemed "good enough" to be in Beskar, their opinion counts, whether they have been in the guild one week, one month or one year. Just because someone is a "recruit" in a guild, doesn't mean they don't have good ideas, or skills. They might have joined from another guild, for example. Or they might have bene playing the game for a year prior, and thus have a character, and skill in the game, that is just as "uber" (and maybe even moreso), than the guild's existing "veterans". So you can't judge a book by it's cover and I think keeping everyone on this even playing field goes a long way to building a fair and balanced community. No one is made to feel better than, or worse than, anyone else. Period. Of course, in practice, there may be times when a "veteran" can give a better perspective on a Beskar issue simply because they've lived with the issue for the past six months and the new recruit, walking through the door, has no idea about the issue. I understand, and acknowledge, that too. There may be times where, for some reason, a veteran might have a better perspective on something but, having said that, sometimes recruits can have better perspective on things too, as people who have been with the guild for a year or two might have become "too close" to the topic, and can't see it with the same kind of fresh eyes that a recruit brings.

JGard: Many guilds use ranks as an incentive to be active and to recruit.  How do you plan on getting members to do this without this added incentive?

Blur: Many guilds do indeed use ranks as an incentive. I find, however, that the kind of person who only wants to be with a guild because they can be "Ubergruppenfuhrer" in a month's time isn't the kind of person that Beskar wants to attract. Hopefully, removing the incentive of ranks will also remove that kind of person. The rationale being that if a person cares more about an imaginary title than the overall guild... well, are they really a good member to have on the books in the first place? Is their heart and mind with the guild, or just on what they can call themselves?

JGard: You say that if the guild is not what recruits are looking for do not join. Some would say this makes your guild an exclusive club that makes it harder to recruit.  You have a wealth of players though.  How do you have success recruiting even though you are very specific in your expectations?

Blur: We are unashamedly harder to join than "the average" guild, yet we're very well off in the member stakes, I agree. We probably make ourselves even more niche with the Mandalorian part of the equation, thus ruling out all the Sith players, all the Jedi, etc. So you'd think the opposite would happen and we'd be lucky to be made up of four guys, someone's sister and a small beagle called Bernard or something, right? I think the simple answer is that Star Wars fandom is so big, and expectations for TOR are so huge, that we're dealing with a large pool of potential applicants. Thus, you can still be quite selective within the TOR community and still have respectable recruiting figures simply because there's so many people out there, looking for a guild.

JGard: With the release of SW:TOR seemingly so far away how do you expect to keep members with you until release?

Blur: By recruiting selectively and bringing together people with similar interests, such as Mandalorian culture, I find that Beskar is becoming its own family. When people feel part of a family, they keep coming back for more and finding their own little place in the group. Some of our members are into roleplay, so we created a roleplay forum which is actually one of our busiest forums, even though we aren't a roleplaying guild by design. Elsewhere, we have forums for film, music, sport, and so on, and people are finding their own little piece of Beskar to call home. As time goes by, you start to see which of the guys mostly drop by to talk about film or anime or something, and which guys drop by to tell us the latest wacky YouTube offering. And, in this way, people feel that they have their own little bit of this group that they can define and make their own... and that keeps them coming back. Undoubtedly, as time goes by, some people might get bored if waiting for TOR, or TOR might end up going in a direction they don't like, and they might drift away from the group. That's natural when you're running a guild so far out from launch. The solution, of course, is to keep recruiting and always have a pool of people who want to be there so that if we bleed, say, a dozen members over the next six months, it doesn't matter because we've recruited three or four times that number in the same length of time.

Thank you for reading this weeks The Guild Emblem, I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any guild related questions or are interested in an interview please e-mail me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Thank you and goodnight!

I wanted to add I know there was some misunderstanding on the swtor.com community forums and I wanted to point out that the question at the top of the page is separate from the interview and was not submitted by blur or Beskar.

JGard