Beskar has been interviewed by The Guild Emblem.
You can see the original here, or just read it below.
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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.
