Measure of membership

My year anniversary with the guild was in February. Somewhere in that time I’ve managed to move from a newcomer to an old timer in AGW. Still I find myself feeling new when new people join the guild that everyone else seems to know that I don’t. AGW is my first guild that I have ever been actively involved with. Most of my guildies have been involved in other guilds and have previous relationships developed. New people come into the guild and although they are new they may have more deeply established relationships with particular members of the guild than me. I find it an interesting dichotomy of being old yet newer than many.

I have started to keep an eye out for new members based on people posting they are looking for guilds on the discussion boards. A few weeks ago I found someone who was posting they were looking for a guild and it sounded like he was describing us. I sent him a message and he ended up joining. The exciting thing is how well he has ended up fitting in our guild. This makes me happy because he’s happy and because it means that I am evaluating our guild culture appropriately. He and I have ended up talking via IM quite a bit and it has been fun getting to know him individually as well as part of the group (it is fun to watch Grey’s Anatomy and chat about the stupidity of the characters).

Since the start of this project our guild leader has redone membership ranks. Ranks are designed to be a measurement of activity. Originally rank was determined by number of posts. New people could quickly move up the ranks by getting involved with discussions. After the guild was around for awhile this system wasn’t working so well. Some guild members have chosen to leave the guild to join another and then come back (for example some guilds battle other guilds and one of our members likes to battle so he hops in and out of our guild as the wars begin and end), some have had account problems causing them to lose their status, and finally people that were active and have 2000 posts can disappear and still have a high rank.

To fix this problem ranks were changed to reflect overall activity in the last month. People can be ranked as daily, weekly, monthly or vacationing. The expectation is that everyone should be weekly (show up 2-3 times a week) but real life sometimes gets in the way so the other ranks exist for temporary issues. I never have a problem because I chat everyday, but it has dramatically changed who’s what rank. It also makes you aware of the expectations of the community. If your rank is not weekly you are not eligible to participate in giveaways and fun events – many people only show up when events are going on to collect the goodies and then disappear again.

Just how active am I in the guild? If you take my number of posts divided by my number of days in the guild I average at 9 a day. I don’t know whether to be sad or proud. LOL