WoW, part 2...

This will hopefully be shorter than my last WoW post...  I suppose I tend to ramble.

 So I'm in a guild, a fairly big guild.  We're a casual guild that does some raiding.  A guild is a group of people with similar goals.  Some guilds are "hardcore" and focused on getting to new content and gearing out as fast as possible; some guilds are built around PVPing as as team (player versus player combat); some are just a bunch of friends, online or off.  Our guild falls into that third category.

Since we're a big guild, with a lot of good players, we've been able to get into some of the "end game" content - the stuff you can only do at the highest level, usually with a group of 20-40 people.  End game content, of course, has the best in-game rewards; since we're not hardcore raiders, though, we haven't gotten to the highest levels of content.  We have a lot of parents, students (college and high school), people with full-time jobs, and so forth - most of our people can't dedicate 4-8 hours a day of intense raiding.

I'm also an officer in the guild - basically an administrative position.  Officers set policy, though we try to keep our concrete, written policies to a minimum - we aim for flexibility.  We have meetings, generally weekly, to deal with issues that come up.  We consult on whether to accept a new member, enroll alts (people's secondary characters), set official raid times, and set up special events (such as raids on the opposing faction's cities).  Sometimes we have to set policies about who we'll accept into the guild, or the procedures for applying, or how we're going to decide who gets to go on raids, or how to fairly distribute loot in big raid dungeons.  We spend about 65% of the time just talking, though.