Officer handbook

“Running a guild is freaking ridiculously difficult,” said one guild master in the research, and a survey of 280 guild leaders found many described their play as an obligation. verified The structural problem is that leadership takes the game’s reward loop and adds responsibility, so the leader cannot log off without social consequences. verified This handbook is built to keep officer hours under six a week, keep decisions consistent, and make sure the guild survives any one person going quiet, including the GM.

Officer roles

The rank FAQ in the research warns that too many officers become a clique; five is the ceiling under 60 accounts. verified Each role has a one-paragraph job description here and a named deputy in the officer roster.

Role	Owns	Does not own
Guild Master	The charter, the bank ledger, the final appeal, the monthly meeting	Anything operational. The GM is not the raid leader, the recruiter, or the bank alt
Raid Lead (one per raid size once there are two teams)	The raid playbook, rosters, bench rotation	Loot decisions alone
Recruitment and Trials	The funnel, coach and buddy assignments, the rejection SLA	Rank promotion above Member
Loot and Logs	The council, the loot history, the review threads	Changing the rubric mid-tier
Community and Events	The rituals calendar, contests, the guest-host rota, the state-of-the-guild draft	Conduct rulings
Bank	The ledger, the bank alts, the consumables program. See Guild bank	Spending without a ledger line

Rules:

Every duty has a deputy. If the loot officer is on holiday, the deputy runs the council. Deputies are named in the roster, not improvised.
Officer on duty rotates weekly. One person is the first responder for the week: seeds voice, opens the Screenshot Friday thread, answers the tavern. Everyone else is off duty.
Officers are appointed after a season as a pod captain or event host. The test is whether they went power-hungry with a little responsibility. verified
Term is one year, renewable. The annual “do you still want this job” check in the state-of-the-guild post is cheap and prevents quiet resentment.
Institutional dissent. Officers are expected to disagree with each other in officer chat. A guild that valued “constructive disagreements with officers” to avoid yes-men is the one that eventually won a world first; the one that handled things internally imploded. verified

Succession

The part everyone forgets.

Backup GM is named in writing in the officer roster, with an in-game character able to take over. The GM holds a backup-GM character too. There are only three character slots per account in the name-reservation window, so this is planned, not improvised. verified
/gleader <name> transfers leadership. The new leader must be a different character on a different account, both logged in. A guild leader’s character cannot be deleted or transferred off-realm until leadership is reassigned. verified
Rehearse it once before launch week, on a throwaway guild if needed.
The 30-day rule. If the GM is silent for 30 days with no note, the backup GM takes leadership by charter. Retail’s automatic inactive-leader replacement (90 days, ranks 2 to 4 only) may not exist in Forever; assume it does not. unverified
Planned absences: the GM hands over in game before any absence longer than two weeks. Not after.
If the founder loses the fun, the guild follows within about a year. That is the Ensidia lesson. Plan succession before it is needed, not during. verified

The monthly state-of-the-guild

Posted by the GM in the tavern, drafted by the Community officer. Also read aloud at the 20-minute monthly voice meeting for those who prefer listening. Contents, in order:

What happened this month (three lines, from the Chronicle).
The health metrics table, with colors. Yellow and red rows get one sentence on what changes.
Goals ladder: three-month, six-month, one-year goals and where each stands. Example: guild formed day one; 10-player raid cleared by January; 20-player by spring; 40-player Onyxia attempt by summer. Dates move with unlock schedules, which are contested.
Hall of Deeds additions and title awards. See Achievements.
Thank-yous: buddies, guest hosts, the Bank Goblin.
Feedback summary: what came in through the form and the suggestion box, and what changed because of it.
Any charter change, with the version number.
Once a year: “do you still want this job” for every officer, including the GM.

Guilds with codified procedures had happier members and fewer fights in the research. verified This post is where the procedures become visible.

Feedback and the anonymous suggestion box

Feedback form on the site, results summarized in the monthly post. Nothing disappears into a void.
Anonymous suggestion box: a bot modal that posts to officer chat without the author. Stated rule: anonymous abuse is ignored; anonymous suggestions are answered in the monthly post.
Seasonal survey: five questions, anonymous, including “would you invite a friend” on a 10-point scale. That number is a health metric.
Officer log: one line per decision, private. Memory for the next officer. Rank changes, conduct outcomes, loot reversals, bank decisions.
Close the loop publicly. The single strongest motivator in the community-design research is “having an impact on a community you care about.” Feedback that visibly changes something is worth ten feedback forms that do not. verified

The conflict ladder

Published so nobody can say it changed.

Direct, private, same day. “Hey, that call on voice felt off, can we talk?”
One officer, private. The officer’s first job is to listen, not to rule.
Two officers plus the GM if it involves loot or a removal.
Written outcome to both parties, and a one-line note in the officer log.

Rules of the ladder:

Nothing in public channels. Enforced by deleting and DMing, not by public warnings.
Recusal. Officers step out of any conflict involving partners, family, or their own trial.
Cooling-off. Nobody is kicked on raid night for a raid-night incident. Sleep on it.
Mediation script: each side speaks uninterrupted for two minutes, the officer restates both positions, both confirm the restatement, then the officer proposes one change. One.
Conduct reports are seen by two officers, acted on within 72 hours, and the outcome is told to the reporter.
Clique dynamics: “one person in a clique having a disagreement with an officer, and the rest of the clique follows the /gquit” is a documented death pattern. It is why pods mix friend groups and why officer count stays small. verified

Kick policy

Instant removal, no ladder: real-money trading, gold buying or selling, GDKP organizing under the guild’s name, scamming the bank, harassment, hate speech, account sharing that puts the bank at risk. Blizzard bans permanently for gold buying in Forever, so this is self-protection too. verified

Ladder removal: repeated no-shows without absence posts, voice conduct, ninja-looting in pugs while wearing the tabard.

Inactivity: 90 days offline with no note gets a courtesy DM. Removal to the alumni list at 120 days. Never silent. The alumni page exists so this is not a rejection, and returning earns the Returning Hero title.

Appeals: 7 days, to the GM, one written reply.

Announcements: only the fact, never the reasons. “X is no longer with us; questions to officers privately.”

Do not prune to “clean up.” Inactive members are not hurting anything, and a roster of 80 with 30 active looks healthier to a returning friend than a roster of 30. verified

Burnout policy

Officer hours are capped at six a week, self-reported in the health table. Over ten is a red row.
Every officer takes a month off a year. Their deputy runs it. This is expected, not tolerated.
The GM takes one week fully off per quarter with the backup GM in charge. Fully off means not reading officer chat.
Raid leaders rotate off every tier.
No post-raid DM debriefs. Feedback goes in a thread with a 24-hour reply window.
Any raider can declare a 2 to 4 week break without losing rank.
Two scheduled nights maximum for the core. No mandatory fun. Everything optional is labeled optional.
Someone stepping back is treated with dignity. Never guilted, never confirmshamed. The gamification research’s own rule: honor cancellation flows with dignity. verified

The welfare habit

An officer DMs anyone who has gone silent for three weeks. Not to recruit them back. To ask if they are okay. This is the one practice long-lived guilds share and rarely write down. It is the author’s synthesis rather than a sourced claim, and it is still the most important line on this page. unverified

Unknown as of 2026-09-24

Whether Forever or Classic Era has any inactive-leader replacement rule. Assume none.
Whether Forever’s guild UI is the modern one, which affects how rank permissions and notes are edited.