Alstroemeria:Declassified

For those who don't know me, I'm Ruiha aka DeadProphecy and I am the founder of the Alstroemeria Guild and I'll be sharing with you my experience as a first time admin to a first time guild. Some people that have known me have held me in high regard but I don't like to think that. I'm flawed as a person, very flawed.

Running Alstroemeria “Alst” was my very first experience in a guild administrative position. Originally Alst was going to be a friend of friends type of guild to keep things tight knit. But from the time we set that stone down in the fields of Dunbarton to its quiet disbandment, I’ve learned a lot being part of the administrative side of guild from beginning to end. I started writing this as sort of a behind the scenes of Alstroemeria but it turned into a short novel/recap of Alst history. I hope you’ll find something to learn from my experience.

Rough Start
It’s no secret that Alstroemeria was sort of a revenge guild against my previous guild. I had ideas and things I really wanted to do to push my previous guild to being a functional community. However, the guild leader would never acknowledge my presence and just shrug off my ideas.

It was difficult to find friends there and even so I was struggling to make friends to begin with, it was rare to find people ever saying hi to greet me. And even though we shared the same guild name, when I was in town with other members I felt alone and isolated whenever I’d try to approach another member. I couldn’t really stand that and the guild meeting I went to was probably the last straw. I had a grand idea to push for a mercenary style guild and to create a platform for it. The guild leader side stepped my idea but found a small section in the forums where people could ask for help created by the guild officer.

I gathered two of my closest friends and said that I wanted to make my own guild. My biggest thing was wanting the community to be extremely tight so that if you were to ever see two of guildies together, they were buddies or at least “friends of friends”. I quit that guild and Alstroemeria was formed soon after with thehacker169, Wolfwarmage, ammerthorn, and Biumphant.

Spoilers:
It was hard to find a fifth person so I just signed on my friend's alt account (with his permission, mind you).

Manifest Destiny
Thinking back on what it meant to be “friends of friends” was simply trying to get to know people and bring them into a circle. Azurine was the first person to reach out to me as soon as the guild was formed and she was completely obsessed with the idea of being an officer of Alst. After deliberation with the current members, we opened our doors with her as our first “outsider” member and first guild officer. We started getting a few more people into our ranks.

After a while, she had to part ways citing that it felt like she was difficult to manage some persons of the guild for their behaviors. That brought to my attention that in order for the guild to last, I’d have to quickly formulate a solid foundation. That foundation came in the form of guild rules which were fairly lenient but I believed were fair. Namely just a code of conduct.

However, we still encountered problems with a few other members that were ruining the experience for our other members namely with sexual harassment.

The Gender Swap

Oh and actually, if you were wondering why I play as girl in Mabinogi. Playing as guy characters from 2001 up until 2008, I was ignored a lot which ended up making me leave a lot of MMOs early from the boredom. It didn't help that I was shy and introverted and was basically waiting for some extrovert to take me in and introduce me to a wonderful social life.

But I honestly wanted to know what kind of behaviors females were subjected to. I never really had a conversation with girls in real life before other than family. And what I found out really disgusted me. A lot of males are horn dogs and it's really annoying to deal with them and shake them off. On top of that, a lot will go to great lengths to find out any personal information about you.

It became more of wanting to know all the kinds of tricks people would use to get girls. And most of what I've seen are straight up blunt and disrespectful.

But I found it a lot more hilarious how people would stop talking to me as soon as they found out I was a guy. But I'd often use that as an advantage to quickly find identify those who just joined Alst with the sole purpose to pick up girls.

Driven to Excel
In response to increasing threat of sexual harassment among our memberbase: Kouta, Kohane, Doctrina and myself implemented Interviews for new recruits starting in late 2015. This served us as a mental aptitude test as well as serve as a way to form a bond between the new recruit and the staff. As much as it may turn some shy people away, we strongly emphasized that it was not to disqualify but to get to know a person and their personality.

All of the interview data was recorded on a spreadsheet and access was shared among the staff. This helped us quickly identify members who were most likely problematic and prevent most from joining the community.

Discipline and Lack Thereof
The staff team (myself included) at the turn of 2015 and 2016 was inexperienced, non-confrontational, and preferred to expand on the community than discipline members. We would constantly talk to the offenders and try to bring them back into the community as an upstanding member and often mistakenly give them one too many chances. Most of the time, we removed these troublemakers as soon as they passed their inactive window without letting them back into the community. This took about 3 weeks and by then, there was too much damage done psychologically to our members into thinking we harbor these terrible people.

Drakkion's team from mid 2015 until our disband in 2017 was a lot more proactive with taking down offensive members. With turnaround times ranging from a few hours to less than 7 days of being in Alst.

Flower Power
As soon as a solid foundation was made for Alst, I really wanted others to feel a sense of pride behind it. There was a lot of things that I was personally ensuring to make sure that the Alstroemeria name was synonymous with a good and professional community.

I strongly encouraged the staff helping others, and I would always look for people to help (especially beginners) to spread the name of Alst. Our presence in 2015 and 2016 was strong and a lot of beginners would come back to find an Alst member and know that they would be taken care of.

Social engineering was part of it, but I looked into an online presence as well. I researched extensively and looked at every guild stone I could find to check their websites and see what features people put into them. In mid 2013, I put together a decent looking website (asmguild.webs.com) which served as a guild hub for quests and to get news on the guild. The response was favorable but I really wanted to take Alst to the next level of presentation using HTML 5 animations and the like.

Alst.co (2015 snapshot) was born out of it and was heavily inspired by Windows’ Modern design language at the time. It was often criticized as sensory overload but was very well received. Later part of 2016 would see a new redesign based on the Apple website which was received even better and currently used today. The web presence was a sort of pride thing, as I really wanted people to say, “Yeah, that’s my guild.” Whenever they told prospective recruits about Alst and its glorious web presence.

Financial Burden
I heavily invested in the online presence. The cost of running the Alst website is $150/year + $10/year for the domain (Alst.co) in addition to the Alst forum being Ad-free for members which is $7/month.

For a short period of time, I came up with a way to sort of pay members & staff through Alst “Credits” that people could redeem for Karma Koin or other Mabinogi Cash Shop goodies. Though after the first few months, there was a lot of backorder and I was ending up paying almost $300/monthly to get everyone’s order in. It was a huge differentiator and probably a large bribe to pay to get people to be involved in Alst. At the end of its service, Credits were being farmed by a few people through really low quality posts that probably killed off the forum with one word responses.

Oh and the Premium service to keep the guild was also a wonderful $15/month.

Downfall
As the staff grew, we became stagnant in our character development entering the “mid-level” crisis where everything is either too easy or too hard. It was probably by mid 2016 when I asked myself why I still tried to sign onto Mabi that I fell off the inspiration to better Alst. My motivation to keep Alst going was pretty strong until then, but in early 2017 Celinus was probably the last staff member to really push for Alst success before being burned out by the lack of progress that myself and the rest of the staff were making. As for everyone, we became busy and absorbed with real life obligations to the point that Mabinogi just got in the way of it all.

Activity from the staff sharply declined, online XX weeks ago suddenly became the new norm. And when I was able to resolve the VPN issues with Nexon. So much damage had been done. Alstroemeria wasn’t in the same position it was a year ago. There weren’t that many new players to help out with and they were quickly being absorbed by other guilds.

It dawned on me that Alstromeria has become irrelevant in 2017. With a few spin off guilds from Alst’s former members, it was probably best to stop people from coming back to something that is only fueled by nostalgia (at least as it was for me).
Alstroemeria is a community that I considered to be an accomplishment in its four year run. I hope all the staff can agree with me that it really was the best community in its glory days. But I disbanded it to make sure that those other guilds with futures and bright lively communities can be given chances to shine and I hope that Alstroemeria served as an example in both good and bad respects.

Growth
It might be hard to believe, but I was once a shy and timid individual. And in some sense, I kind of still am. But over the course of the four years I learned a lot about how to manage people, deal with others and take initiative to make the vision that I had for a guild to come alive. I did lose some friends on the way up, and even more on the way down. I’ve gotten into disagreements and arguments with trying to stand for what I thought was right. Sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I’d apologize and not know what I could do to make amends. Sometimes, you lose your best friend. Sometimes you lose all your friends. Sometimes, they never talk to you ever again.

Alstroemeria was no easy journey. There was a lot of should’ve/would’ve/could’ves but there’s always a lesson behind every decision and every consequence. From hesitating to terminate offenders, disagreeing with staff members, to giving too many responsibilities.

Being the Worst
Probably the worst thing I’ve done out of it all was expecting too much from someone who cared so much. Kohanetsu shouldn’t be a strange name for those who were with us from 2013-2016. She took Alstroemeria and pushed for a lot of things that made Alst a really close knit community. Not only did she take the role of Ambassador to interview, welcome and help new members, but she also did a lot of things behind the scenes taking a lot of event planning and initiative and pushing them through often bearing the worst criticisms not worthy of all the efforts she put into things. At one point she was the Guild Leader while I was set to be away for a few months, but after a few months of dealing with all the problems that we had while we were still developing, it was too stressful.

The worst offense was when I was in serious danger of dropping out of an accelerated program for failing too many tests. During that time, I didn’t give much notice for the guild staff and they were fending for themselves for six whole months while I was pushing for my real life obligations. One day though, I got a message from Kohane. Unfortunately I lost the transcript but the gist of it was that she was fed up with me not being there for the guild and how there was so much expected from her and I wasn’t doing anything. I couldn’t remember too much of what I said back to her but I think I was in a really upset mood that I lashed back with harsh words.

After the hardest part of my program was done months down the road, I looked back onto everything and realized what an idiot I was to talk with just emotions and deeply apologized. But I haven’t heard from her since to this day. It took maybe three months to finally realize my best friend for so long was gone and it really hurt that the whole reason Alstroemeria was still alive from 2014 to 2015 was mainly because of the hard work she put into keeping herself, the staff, and the guild together. It was incredibly difficult to keep Alst going after she quit, then Doctrina, and Loni after.

A New Start
After Kohane’s team left, I still chugged on Alst for a bit longer. All of the problems became clear to me as why the entire staff was so stressed before Drakkion came along to volunteer as Guild Officer. Relya, Celinus, and Valiancy soon joined and we had a strong lineup for a new Alstroemeria.

Drakkion took Alst values to heart and didn’t hesitate to throw offenders under the bus. Celinus brought many great ideas to Alst including the Inquisitor (policy enforcement) position and really pushed for us to grow as a guild. Valiancy took the homefront of providing assistance in-game during her tenure. Relya took a backseat and managed most of the guild’s online resources including the Discord and website but was capable of helping in-game when needed.

The major complaint members had was the lack of events. By the end of 2015, we thought to solve that with weekly gatherings and questing and kicked off weekly guild events in 2016 dubbed Wind. The initial response was hugely successful and brought the community to life. However, the monotony of the events quickly bore on and was terminated by October with declining attendance. Originally, we wanted to push more events catered to what members want.

Not with a Bang
The rest of 2016 came and went almost without anything going on as we were constantly at a stalemate and hesitated to deliver on these events. The last major event was the jousting tournament fueled by my accidental second purchase of Overwatch which was probably the final nail in the coffin coming too little, too late, and with piss poor planning on my part. Things continued stagnating and to the point where we were practically offline for weeks at a time. Members soon followed this trend. Celinus was probably the last person to care about having a community on Mabinogi and went on to found his own guild. As for the rest of us, we fell out of communication.

Originally, I was planning to kill off Alst much earlier (as early as April) but VPN issues and being burned out daily from my overseas tour kept me from doing so. There was a plan set out to have Alstroemeria go out with a bang with some revived guild events and giveaways for rare goods donated by members previously. But weeks came to months and guild activity was at an astonishing low that I’d see “[#username] was last online XX weeks ago” and feel solely responsible for making the game boring by not being there to deliver the guild/community experience or unite the staff to help deliver that.

But with a Whimper
I constantly look back and wonder how differently things would have came out if I would have just said hello or how is everyone doing at least once in a while. And I think that lack of communication really reinforced the perception that I didn’t care. I’ve been feeling really behind on the things I should have been caught up on months ago. In fact, it’s just hitting me that I did disband the community officially already and there’s nothing I -should- do to revive it.

Let the sleeping dogs lie
My decision to not revive Alst is largely that being in the admin side of it too long has really brought me to forget a lot of things and in turn, be behind in a lot of things. I used to be super responsive but nowadays I delay a lot of things that I feel like I’ve forgotten where I came from. I’ve become more reactive than proactive and often that reaction is weeks and months too late. But life goes on, no matter what. I constantly feel like I’m stuck in the past, in nostalgia of what great times used to be. I've faulted heavily on that lack of communication I've loathed so much from my previous guild and it's made me a hypocrite for the longest time. For now, I’m going to better myself as a person and apply these lessons I’ve learned from being the best and worst. Someday, I hope to be a person and role model that people will look up to again. 



Until then,
See you in the next game.

- Ruiha , Guild Founder