LOTRO: State of the Kinship
Hi all wanted to start a thread to talk about the state of our kinship and all that jazz.
Basically while we do have a decent number of players for the most part we are very casual which leads to the issue of few people on at any given time working on same quests/level ranges/what have you.
A few of us have been talking about trying to grow the kinship a bit and while not aim to be a raiding guild or anything of the kind but instead raise the active users on per night. We of course would promote the same atmosphere that we currently have and at same time point new member to our internet community here on GWJ.
With that in mind here were some of the ideas we tossed out there.
1. Trim our roster of inactive players. This is just to see what we really have. We have a lot of users that have not been on in over a month and in some cases over 2 months. Obviously if any of these players started playing again we would add them back in the kinship but by triming our roster say all character not on in 2 months we can get a better idea of our player numbers.
2. Increase rights of active officers. Not sure if this is possible but look to give Badferret and/or myself more rights so we can manage guild a bit more. I am not advocating being leader so much as that as we are the 2 most active officers it might be helpful if we could do more of things in the guild that we currently can not. This includes making new officers, setting titles, and so on.
3. Look into the titles/ranks that can be set by leader/officer(with rights) into making some sort of titles that can help manage our users. We have a lot of players with alts and it is really hard to tie people with board names so we might want to look into titles for mains vs alt or even a way to get GWJ user names in the titles.
4. Recruit more users. This is a tough one because we do not want to mess with our community but suggest advertising our guild on the LOTRO Official boards and the Landroval community board. We will direct people to our site and sell ourselves as a casual guild based arround our internet gaming community.
So basically that is the plan.
I will admit that part of this is being driven by my desire (and others) to have more people to fellow with. As it is we often can not form a full fellowship off users working on the same things. In many cases we can not even field a fellow of people of similiar levels.
Thoughts? Input?
I like your ideas and have a little to add.
Regarding #1, Are people automatically removed from the kinships they're in if they cancel their accounts? They should probably be removed but I think anyone with an active account should stay on, we can sort by date to see who is active.
#2 Maladen and Badferret are on almost every night, so I agree that you two should have full officer rights if that's possible (also Dahc (Wyser?) if he wants them.)
#3 Not sure that this is a big point until the kinship grows. It would be great to be able to associate characters in with their board names though.
#4 I'm not sure that the kind of casual players we're looking for would be visiting the LoTRO and Landroval sites that often but it would be worth trying, especially if they're directed here to get a feel for the community.
Another idea is that it might be nice to have some kind of a kinship bank, I have loads of crafting recipes and some mats that I give away to GWJers when I can but my bank is still filling up with stuff I don't want to vendor but haven't been able to share.
XboxLive: georobGWJ
Reading the Dev chat, the Book 10 update will bring storage bags that work with vaults, so hopefully in another month storage will be less of an issue.
As far as recruitment, I doubt the powers that be would go for it, but I wonder if mention of this thread in the weekly podcast would bring in any recruits. I am guessing there is a sizable audience that listens to the podcast but are not active participants in the forums, and since Rabbit et all have pimped LOTRO so much on the podcast already there might be folks who would be interested in joining up.
Finally, we need to find a way to shut Fed up, we don't need a WoW-head actively campaigning against us while we are trying to grow.
Posting on the boards is easy. The trick is to kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Chiggie Von Richthofen on how to transition from lurker to poster.
So, I admit I haven't been able to spend as much time in game (in ANY game) as I'd like in the last month, due to insane freelance load. I'd be happy to abdicate the actual leader position to any one of the hardcore that want it for a while.
As for privs, as far as I know there's one leader, any number of officers, and everyone else. Not sure there's anything more granular than that.
As for trimming -- remember that a TON of the names on that big list are alts. I've got two alts in the list that I havent logged on since the first week.
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"In other news, Miyamoto pissed on my head, and gave me a forecast of rain." - *Le
We are definitely not knocking you Rabbit, RL always takes priority over a game. As far as trimming, if we cut somebody's alt or some decides to re-subscribe we will of course add them back to the roll upon request, its just that right now I am guessing there are 100ish names and only 30 or so toons who log in regularly.
Posting on the boards is easy. The trick is to kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Chiggie Von Richthofen on how to transition from lurker to poster.
So wait, Canceling your account removes you from kinships? That.. kind of sucks.
On the additions, it seems like you have a fair amount of people who haven't even logged in since 3 months ago, but since i'm rather new to the kinship I don't have much to put out there. But mentioning it on the podcast and possibly posting on the boards sounds like a good idea. I have noticed that there just seems to be a wide variety of time zones, it looks like, for most people. I would (assume) that's what would be holding the majority of however many of us there are from being online at once.
Its like, dinosaurs, WITH GUNS! - GFW podcast 8/21/07
Time zones is certainly an issue but the big issue is that we are realatively small in active members most of which are very casual. This is not an issue by itself but what it ends up doing is making it hard to do much as a kinship on any given night.
I don't know this for a fact but it kind of makes sense. I could be wrong, it's happened once or twice before
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Its like, dinosaurs, WITH GUNS! - GFW podcast 8/21/07
Similar to Rabbit, I've been tied up in RL for the last two months, doing the vacation and job interview thing. Good news is that I should be able to jump back in in the next couple of days.
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I should be one of the inactives. Feel free to give me the boot. I would love to play more but there simply are not enough hours...aww you know the rest.
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I want to make clear we do not want to boot people who arereally playing even if it is once a month. We were just interested in cleaning our some of the accounts that have not been played since open beta and of course will add anybody back in if they pick up the game.
Too be honest though if we are not going to do any sort of active recruitment cleaning up the roster while nice in a, lets keep the roster more trim sort of way is not going to help advance our low number issues.
So, just curious why we need to actually clean anything up? We're not hitting any caps? What if someone just has been out for a while, your gonna make them track down an officer again?
Gamertag: GWJ Rabbit | Last.fm | Twitter
"In other news, Miyamoto pissed on my head, and gave me a forecast of rain." - *Le
We don't if we are going to keep going as is in our guild. The only reason to trim roster is if we are going to recruit more. If the recruit more is something we do not want to do we can let my suggestions die for the most part as there is no reason to do any of the other stuff really.
Which is fine if that is what the guild decides but wanted to toss out there some ideas.
So basically do we want to grow the guild by actively recruiting and in doing so send them to our forums here to see what we as a GWJ community are all about or do we want to operate as we do now? This is really the big question.
Well I'm cool with anything really, waldorf and statler just log on every other day or say and do a level or 2.
My other toons are pretty much slowly getting leveled in between times of using these guys.
I don't know how much I want to deal with people outside of GWJ, I've had so many horrible experiences with others in MMOs.
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Just thought I'd throw in my two cents.
I've played a couple of other MMO's but never seriously and never joined a guild. For LOTRO I thought I'd go all in and find an active group to hang out with. I've lurked here for quite a while so when I saw you all had a guild I thought I'd give you a try. I've enjoyed my time with you (Reddot has helped me a good deal and I've quested with a couple of others) but in general I don't see more than 3-4 other kinship members on when I play and there is not alot of Kinship activity.
So for all the reasons maladen mentioned I'm going to move on. There are some other people I play regularly with and they have joined Shadow Company I've decided to join them and see what a more active kinship experience is like.
Good luck to all of you and feel free to PST me if you need a Minstrel (Lyane) for a quest....
Good luck, Lyane... enjoyed grouping with you.
Mercury's been in retrograde most of the week. It's like a full moon with a side of kicked-in-the-nuts. -- H.P. Lovesauce
Like it or not, I think this is a recurring pattern for GWJ guilds. Not just the LOTRO one. After the initial excitement of a game wears off, you're usually left with the core folks that really take to the game in question.
I think at the end of the day you just have to decide what the goal of the guild is. For the most part, I think the GWJ guilds have worked out to be the "friends list for GWJers that want to play that game at the time". That's an admirable goal, but it won't usually satisfy the folks that really want to get into the meat of the game.
My suggestion would be to create a second sister guild for the hard core LOTRO players. Move your mains in there and leave the GWJ guild as the "casual" guild. You can leave your alts there. If a player in the "hardcore" guild stops showing, then you can always boot that person and send them an invite to the GWJ guild.
That way the hardcore guild can do all the things a serious guild needs to do without annoying the more casual element in the GWJ guild.
Just a suggestion. I say this as someone in the "casual" category of LOTRO right now though I faced similar issues with various GW guilds. (Not just the GWJ one.)
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You are correct DevilStick I was just trying to find a way to make it work for both groups.
It may be that my play style does not fit with the general thrust of the GWJ and I knew from start that may be an issue.
So as DevilStick said what is the goal of the kinship?
I'm surprised this is coming up already...I guess there's just not that much content in LOTRO or something? Usually these discussions arise after the guild has exhausted all of the non-raid content in the game and just wants to move on to other things. Personally, I still haven't gotten a character past level 21 (and still haven't found a GWJ group to run Book 1 Chapter 11)...
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There is lots of content, but the endgame requires full groups or close to it. Right now I am having fun leveling an Alt, and still am missing quest because there is to much to do pre-40. I also think many folks have mmo fatigue, and the newness of LOTRO could only distract from their overall condition for so long. I am coming in fresh with a year and half off since I last played an mmo so my stamina for the genre and this game may be greater than others.
As far as Book 1 Chapter 11, would you mind being baby sat through it? Most active players are well past that point, but I know I would be willing to run it with you, though the presence of several 30-40 something players would trivialize it. City of Heroes style grouping would help greatly and I imagine that will come at some point but I don't expect it in the next few months.
I don't know what the answer is. I like the casual quality of the guild, the witty banter in kinship chat (quoting from Best in Show "we can talk or not talk for hours and still find thing to not talk about"), but I very much want to do the "current" endgame 6 mans, or even midgame 6 mans with a stable play group.
I guess my dream goal for the current kinship would be the ability to occasionally run 6 mans as a kinship, and often form 4-5 man groups only needing to bring in 1-2 others. During that process we might even find others who fit in with the GWJ mentality.
Some of the most fun I have had with the game was grouping with Gimmi, Dahc, Amako and Mont forming a nice tight 5 man group, but as Mont and Amako have gone inactive the 40 somethings are down to Gimmi, Dahc and myself, with Geo on his way to joining us. Unfortunately in the current game there is not tons of content for even 4 man groups post 40, though that particular class mix might be able to compensate somewhat.
Posting on the boards is easy. The trick is to kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Chiggie Von Richthofen on how to transition from lurker to poster.
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Ferret's dream goal fits in quite well with mine, with the addition of some Kinship PvMP. Since coming back from probably a month long stint of Creep play I've been going at it hard to try and catch up with the higher leveled guildies (from 14 to 36 in about two weeks, heh). Mainly to be able to do that 40+ group content with GWJ folk. I also want to participate in PvMP from the Freep side as well.
I really like the idea of four mans from the kinship and bringing in 1 or 2 outsiders and, as Ferret said, possibly finding some that fit in with the GWJ mentality. I'm a relative newcomer to the site, and prior to a PM on a different "mature" gamer site, and I know this might be hard to believe, I had never heard of GWJ. I am most grateful for the PM cluing me in. I now rarely visit any place but this one for my gaming news, info, review and commentary. It would be great to possibly be able to return that favor to someone via LotRO.
I suggest holding back from posting on the LotRO forums for the moment. The game is still pretty new yet and we might just have to grow the kinship slowly over time. That might mean some of our mains miss doing the higher end content as a kinship, but there is always those alts
. I know I will probably not mothball Reddot to wait for enough kin to do the 40+ stuff (mainly because I want to Monster Play Freepside), but I do have Aria the minstrel that I would almost certainly want to do most everything with GWJ members.
Regardless, I really enjoy being a part of our current kinship and I am pretty easy in regards to what direction the kinship gets taken. As long as it stays free of drama and controversy, I'll be around.
I'd like to be able to join you guys in that 40-level content as well, but as long as I have a wife who needs lovin' and proofreadin' and two kids who need tuckin' in and a yard that needs cuttin', I'm afraid that my progress will continue to progress at it's current lemurish two-hour-a-night pace.
Unfortunately, if I ever lost that stuff I'd probably dive into a bottle of whiskey, never to be seen again, so chances of me getting there any faster than I am now are pretty slim. Expect for me to arrive around the time your third alt does.
Mercury's been in retrograde most of the week. It's like a full moon with a side of kicked-in-the-nuts. -- H.P. Lovesauce
I agree with what Badferret and Killer said, we should have enough 40+ people real soon to mostly fill out a group.
As far as casual players go, they will still have problems grouping with fellow GWJers and I don't know an easy solution to that. Maybe if there were nights scheduled where lower level freeps agreed to sign on to play together? I would be willing to help out lower level people on group quests with the same caveats that Badferret mentioned in his post above.
Slightly off topic, thanks for posting Reddot. I wasn't sure who you were on the boards but have noticed you flying up through the levels lately.
XboxLive: georobGWJ
Jeb we all understand and this was never meant to be a knock on other players.
I myself have to kids, a wife, a yard, and a job that demand my attention. We all have various commitments and we all understand that. It is one of the things about our community that is great is that we do know it is just a game and not a second job.
I guess for lower level players they are going to have to PUG the content or have a higher level player trivalize it for them. My thought of getting in more people to the kinship to make it easier to do it in kinship is not going far it seems.
If Red, Geo, Gimmi, Dahc, and Ak formed a group for the higher level content that would certainly be great. I look forward to when we can do that too.
Since we now have two Champion's rapidly approaching 40 (Red and Dahc's alt, Ulrod) how feasible would it be for one of them to trait themselves for tanking? Now I know a Champ tank build want equal a Guard, but it would allow the above mentioned 5 man to sport two LMs. If Red was willing it would leave open the possibility of Champ, LM, LM, Minstrel, Hunter which I think could do quite well.
Posting on the boards is easy. The trick is to kick someone's ass the first day, or become someone's bitch. Chiggie Von Richthofen on how to transition from lurker to poster.
Somebody had to link it. Found some screenshots from the last GWJ LOTRO guild run.
Your Quote Here!
You might have this a little backward...GWJ is Gamers with Jobs - by definition we're casual players. We're not the exception. Every GWJ guild I've seen has more or less been a casual guild. Make peace with that and everybody wins!
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I have come to peace with the fact and am going to move on. I will of course help any GWJ people out any way I can, especially with armor, tools and the like just let me know.
It is just clear that my play style is not going to mesh with our guild so I think it will be better for all this way.
My job will never allow me to be more than a casual MMO-er. So until i retire, i will continue to join the GWJ guilds in MMO's i undertake, because i like the guild chat and casual nature of play. My one excursion into the Barrows with a Emyn Ien crew was awesome. If i adopted a more hardcore 'raiding' guild mentality, i'd have to find another group, but that's ok too.
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