I don’t mince words when I talk about the official TOR forums. On one side of the coin, you will find some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet in any MMO gaming community. It is, let’s not forget, where I have met a great deal of Beskar’s members. On the flipside, however, you will meet some of the strangest people ever. From the trolls to the flamers, from the people hiding behind sock puppet accounts to the people who just have no clue about well, anything, it sometimes seems.

And it’s the people who just have no clue that I want to talk about here. Why? Because earlier today I saw a great example of clueless behaviour and it’s worth mentioning in a wider context. See, there is a section on the forum for people who are ‘LFG’ — that’s the abbreviation of “looking for (a) guild”. People post a little bio about themselves and guild representatives are invited to drop them a line by private message if they’re interested in talking to that person further. It’s a fairly straightforward process, and not really one you would think is easy to stuff up. Yet people manage to do just that.

This morning I saw, for what must be the 50th time, someone post their bio and then, within 20 minutes, or less, of doing that, declare that they had found a guild, and had duly wiped their bio clean.

Say what? I know LFG posts get hammered with replies, sometimes, but how many replies would someone get in just 20 minutes? And, further, how on earth could they get all those messages, read them all, communicate with the guilds that seemed interesting, and then make a careful, measured decision in just 20 minutes? I hate calling things impossible but… well… that’s impossible.

And what about guilds that might have wanted to see their bio an hour from now? 6 hours from now? 12 hours from now? They might represent some utterly amazing guilds, and might have been prepared to make some tremendous offer to that person but… oh no… for some unknown reason, they needed to judge all guilds, and make their choice inside of 20 minutes. How totally, utterly crazy.

Which leads me to the second part of this comment. Unless you are totally insincere about the process and aren’t really looking for a quality guild in any way, shape or form, you simply can’t decide on ANY guild within 20 minutes. That includes Beskar. That includes every guild out there. People who are unguilded owe it to themselves, in the case of posting a LFG post, to let that post settle for at least 24-48 hours before starting to evaluate the replies. Some will be easy to toss right away — the replies from guilds that are of the wrong faction, or poorly written, or blatant cut’n'paste jobs, etc.

What’s left, however, deserves careful consideration.

And, I don’t care whether you’re Superman, 20 minutes is not enough time to give any guild, let alone an entire selection of them, careful consideration. You just can’t do it. Period.

You know, no wonder so many guilds fail before MMOs are even released, or during their opening month(s), when they take on people like that; people who make up their mind in less than 20 minutes without properly evaluating what’s in front of them. Without wanting to be mean about it, they’re doomed before they start because they are choosing to have members who just don’t care.

At Beskar, meanwhile, there are no snap decisions. You come to our forum, you post your application… and then there’s a whole process of Q&A and conversation with our members which, depending on your content, our replies, and the speed at which all this happens, could take days. Not 20 minutes.

Ultimately, we’ve rejected more people’s applications than we’ll EVER accept and THAT is one of the key reasons Beskar is a strong guild. I try not to express it as quality over quantity because, with the goal of 100 members (we’re at 73 at present), we are seeking to have a fair degree of quantity as well, and I would never pretend any different. But it’s quantity WITH quality. And, yes folks, with good guild management, such as we have here at Beskar, quantity WITH quality is entirely possible.

I commend “our” method to all guilds out there which want to build a solid group, whether it’s made up of 10 people or 100 people. Without trying to be dramatic about it, if you want to be playing TOR with the same good people 12-24 months from now, this is how you do it. Trust me on that.