Managing the Guild Roster

As your guild starts to get larger you might begin to get overwhelmed by the number of players in the guild and perhaps their alternative characters depending on if you allow them in the guild.

I recommend starting early and figuring out how you will manage the roster before it gets too big.

How many Alts is enough?

How many alternative characters can a player have?   I have found that the majority of players will have 1 character.  Then, after that, about a 1/3 of the players will have from 2-3 and the remaining 1/3 of players will have from 5+ characters.

Since we are currently limited to 1,000 characters (not accounts) in a guild, it is important to decide in advance if you want 1/3 of your players taking up the lion share of your guild.

I understand you want all their toons in the guild so they feel welcome and can talk to their friends, but at some point it limits the number of players your guild can host.

For me, I have set the max at 5 and I will trim that back as the guild grows.

Here is what I do to keep track.

First, I run the add-on called ALTS.  The biggest plus to this add-on is that it allows me to export my entire roster to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file that I can import into Google Sheets.   It takes a little effort, but from there I can do all sorts of filters and manipulations to get a better look at what I have in terms of guild size, levels, ranks, etc.

Primarily what it does for me is:

1. Let's me set a note tag indicating the players main.
2. Let's me export to Google Sheets
3. Let's me see if I have typo's in mains/alts.
4. Announces the player's main name when they talk in chat so I don't lose who they are.

This add-on supports several formats of placing the information in either the officer or guild notes.   I chose guild note because everyone can see it and use the same add-on to help themselves track people.  Or, if they don't have the add-on, they can just look at the note and see who someone is.

Here is how I set the notes:

Toon1: 05/06/16
Toon2: ALT: Toon1

In my notes this tells me that Toon1 is a main and it joined the guild on 5/6/16.  Toon2 is an alt of Toon1.

There is a newer add-on that does something similar, but I am pretty well established with this one and this system works pretty good, but it's not perfect.  You have to stay on top of it because Toon1 might leave the guild and Toon2 is orphaned.  Players won't warn you.   This is why I always ping a toon on wowprogress.com.   It can help you track down those pesky alts and see what they are about and who they were.

Next, I run an add-on called Guild Tracker.  It tells me all the changes to the guild since I last logged in.   This is great because then I know that Toon1 left the guild.  I think it even tells me their note when they leave so I can see the "05/06/16" and quickly repair the associations.   Just be sure to turn off achievement tracking and level ups.  I mostly use it for join/leaves.   It's nice to know without going to look what has changed.

Finally, I use Guild Search, also created by the person that wrote ALTS.  This lets me find players quickly with a GUI instead of command line using only ALTS.   /gsearch Toon1, finds all their toons.

Huge Guild?

If your just that great of a guild that everyone wants to join.  Then, I recommend setting up a second guild using the GreenWall add-on.   Make all the "extra" alts go there.

The big plus for GreenWall is that users don't have to configure it.  Only Guild Leaders.

The big drawback for GreenWall is, that only those players that have it, see the conversations.