Guide to Forming Alliances & Mergers

Copied from the original posted by Ashling.

This is a guide to help guild administration with the thought processes behind forming alliances & mergers. It may not have all the answers you are looking for, but it’s intent is to have you think about what you are planning on doing with your friends and guilds. Every guild is different on what their goals are, and it is those goals that you want to keep in mind before starting this process, as it will influence what your individual answers are. It is also advisable to follow a courtship period via an alliance before jumping straight into a merge. =) After going through this guide, I hope you at least understand, why these process either do not work or haven’t been tried or supported more frequently Enjoy!

(STEP 1) Alliances

What is an Alliance
Types of Alliances
Purpose: Pro’s & Cons
Process: What Questions to ask yourself and/or your officers & membership
Process: The Alliance- Where to start?
Alliance Case Studies
When Alliances go Bad

(STEP 2) Mergers- Should we?

What is a Merger?
Types of Merges
Purpose: Pro’s & Con’s
What are these feelings ?
Process- Analysis: What to do first?
Process- The Merge- Where to start?
What to do with the old guilds?
Things to Remember
Mergers: Case Study
When Mergers go Bad.

STEP ONE – ALLIANCES

What is an Alliance
A merging of “efforts” or interests by persons, families, states, or organizations

Types of Alliances
1) Community & Casual Grouping- Coffee Talk? (loose knit, extended friends list)
2) Casual Family who want to tackle endgame? (loose knit, but structured on raiding side)
3) Raiding- We need more like-minded individuals. (Highly orchestrated, structured, tight rules, member requirements)

Purpose: Pro’s & Cons. Want to form an alliance with another guild? These are some of the possible reasons why or why not to form an alliance.

Pro’s

Increased numbers
Maintaining control of your environment and members
Keeping that “small guild feel”
“This is my guild, my tabard, my rules, and my friends.”
Test period before merging.
Possibility of continued friendship beyond the alliance
Additional integration with the server community, building a “rep”

Cons

Dealing with the other guild’s drama/ siding over friendships vs. leadership
Enforcing Responsibilities (if applicable)
In-House Guild Decisions now effecting the Alliance
Increased time needed during collaborative decision making.
In house vs Alliance Roster (Collaboratively, what does our membership #’s, classes look like)
Bureaucracy – forums permissions, event signup permissions, communication channels between leadership/decision makers, loot rules
Intra-guild expectations – managing different expectations w/r/t guild and raid process and procedures

Process: What Questions to ask yourself and/or your officers & membership

In General

Does my guild need an alliance?
Why an alliance? What makes this guild different than ours, so that we have to remain 2 separate entities? (Size, Age, Loot Rules? Game Focus? Management Style?)
Does this other guild match with our philosophy & rules. What if they don’t? (Rules including: Conduct/ Behavior, Looting, invites, etc.)
Who would be required to participate in alliance efforts & activities?
Expectations: What are we each hoping to get out of this partnership?

About Leadership

How will you work together? (Sharing Resources, taking turns, independently or “on call”, etc.)
How will you communicate both inside and outside the game? (officer meetings, forums, email, voip?)
How will you divide “alliance responsibilities” (Hosting # of runs, VOIP, shared chat channel moderation, etc.)
How will you decide on Policy? (Will you have the same rules? Loot, DKP, age, consideration, grouping, etc.)
How will you assign responsibility for decisions/issues arising from the alliance within your guild?
What additional policies, if any, will we need to implement in order to ensure everyone has clear expectations and knowledge of the rules? (for instance, invite policies)

Guild Membership

Should we get all members to approve?
Are members required to work with alliance members?
What if members don’t support this?

Alliance Membership

I play a lot with this other guild, can they join the alliance too? How? (Application? /join channel?/ Requirements/ sponsorship?)

Process: The Alliance- Where to start? Great! Everything has been gone over, now what do we do?

Announcements: Let your guild members know this happened, and is official. (by forums, GMotD, GuildMail, Meeting, etc.)
Post agreements on website: What did you guys decide to agree on for rules & policy?
Create a common/shared chat channel by typing /join alliancenamehere
WoW Blizzard Chat Information: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/chat.html
Updated GMotD, Guild Info, etc.
Play, Have fun, Enjoy!

Alliance Case Studies

1) Severina, Court of the Ruby Grail, Maelstrom
We have a very successful alliance with another guild on our realm. Both guilds use Guild Portal so we are able to share our events calendar and certain forums on each others websites. It helps us stay informed and work together. In game we have a chat channel that we created. All of our members join this channel and we can communicate with each other easily via that channel. One thing I would suggest is to make sure both guilds are like minded.
RIP & CRG (our guilds) are both casual, adult guilds… so it works our really nice. We are like one big happy family. http://crg.guildportal.com/

2) Ashling, Pay it Forward, Greymane
We’re currently in an alliance w/ 4 small guilds.. I’m fairly proud of the work we’ve done developing it. You can check out what we’ve set up here: http://pif.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?G … ID=1401400
We haven’t sponsored the site yet officially, as we each have our own gp site, but it’s a base location to hold information about each of us, etc, and all that good stuff Right now, our current project is setting up the “raiding” policies.

3) Anaea, My Other Mount is a Tauren, Aerie Peak
MOMiT has been a part of two alliances in our lifetime as a guild.

In one, MOMiT agreed that we could contribute approximately 8 people for another guild’s MC raid while we were getting ready for our own ZG runs. As our ZG runs began to grow, we were unable to maintain that figure (they were all in ZG) and formally dissolved the alliance.

Because we had a more formal contract, loot rules were decided on between guild leaderships; for instance, as we were contributing about 1/4 of the raid we were entitled to 1/4 of the rare drops like Core Leathers, etc. Similarly, we received between 1/3 to 1/4 of the epic drops from bosses. Leaders from both guilds joined a chat channel to discuss loot during the run – this meant that downtime after boss kills could drag on, and sometimes the other guild’s members were confused and would roll when they saw my guildies were rolling on a piece of loot that I had claimed for the guild.

Even though it was a bit cumbersome, it did the trick during the time it was necessary and we’re still very friendly with the guild with whom we were allied. Many members continued to raid occasionally with the other guild as individuals (in other words, without our loot considerations) after the end of the formal alliance.

In another, less formal alliance, we simply reached out to people we knew in a guild with whom we were familiar. We invited the members we knew on a few raids, we enjoyed our time with them and offered spots to others of their guild who were online at our raid times and wanted to fill in, and it worked out well for both of us. Honestly I can’t remember what our loot rules were, so I’ll dig through our forums to try and remember.

Invite rules were important in this case because we weren’t working very officially through the guild, and were dealing more with individuals. We gave members of the other guild who were interested access to our event planning forum and web signup. As we didn’t have too fierce a competition for raid slots, they were able to sign up in advance the same as full members (though none did that I recall). Raid slots were reserved for people who had signed up on our calendar, or who had messaged the RL/officers regarding their desire to attend. At the official raid start time, any unclaimed spots were reserved in their entirety for members of the other guild – they were coordinated through an officer of the other guild.

After a misunderstanding among the membership, we had to officially update our invite policies to make it clear that members of the allied guild would NOT be dropped from the raid for latecomers from our own guild. Our former invite policies had left this implied, when we should have spelled it out.

As this was a very informal arrangement, it just fell by the wayside as TBC was released and we began leveling again. We’re still on friendly terms with the other guild, and many members essentially use the other guild’s tag as a friend’s list when they’re looking for more players for a group or to run with.

3) Rooster (own guild/officer/&membership agreeing?) Make sure communication w/I the Guild and notifications/ surveys, etc. are done to keep everyone informed and in the loop about the future possibilities, or processes that are being done.

Do we get the go ahead from just the GM’s, GMs & Officers, and or membership at large.
Are all officers in support?
Are all members in support?
What should the membership expect?

How will the transfers be done? And at what rate?

Each will have to decide where their priority lays as far as which priority comes first- Is it your membership (the rooster)? Is it the end result (the egg)? Or does it even matter (the chicken) I tested their guild and I don’t want a merge anymore! So there’s no reason to worry the membership.

Process- We are going to Merge- What Now?

Communicate the Change – In-game Mail, Forums, GMotD, Guild Info, Meeting, Etc.
Implement the Change from the decisions resulting in your analysis (Charter, Tabard, Rules, Member transfer)
Timeline for Change – How long can this process take?
Remember, this is a relationship. It depends on the goals you have set forth. Abrupt change can be difficult on some, so it can be beneficial to implement the merge itself over the course of 1 to 4 weeks or more.

What to do with the old guilds?

There are many options including, but not limited to: A personal pad (for personal alts, or fall back purposes), A leveling guild (pending there is leadership to take over), Giving it away (ask in a town if someone wants a free guild), /gdisband (leaving possibly a few members guildless). Whatever the change, don’t forget to update any other things that may be attached: Website (and payments), VOIP (and payments), DKP Accounts, etc.

Things to Remember (Courtesy of Stix, C H A O S, Skywall)

*Retention will be bad. Expect to keep only about 50% of the merged players. Some people don’t like change – others take the opportunity to make change.

*Don’t be afraid to gkick – ever. Give warnings, then /byebye. Don’t sacrifice your guilds culture. They need you more than you need them. You don’t need to keep their *Bad Apples* – guild merger doesn’t mean you have to take their old problems.

* As a GL – keep focus of your vision of your guild. (If you have no vision of what your guild is – then you might have some major assimilation issues)