I’m so glad you asked! We use google sheets and google docs a lot.
We make heavy use of google spreadsheets. Two of the most important ones we use as a guild are:
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raider roster, attendance tracking, and loot tracking. at the end of every raid, our officers manually type in who every piece of loot went to. when someone new starts raiding with us, an officer has to type in their name and class and specialization.
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loot priority. this is the first guild i’ve been in that uses a “Loot Council”[1] system of distribution. every week, the loot council meets on a tuesday, and spends hours talking about what every raider currently has, what they need, and who should get Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood, if it drops from Nefarian. lol. then they write down “who’s next” for a given piece of gear if it drops. this reduces confusion, and any member can see who’s next for a piece of gear. some pieces of gear that are really contested will have a whole list of people in order. i actually really like this system. it’s way better than DKP, especially DKP with bidding wars[2].
We also make heavy use of google docs. Some examples I can think of off the top of my head…
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Guild bylaws. Not only that, we used the “add suggestion” and “comment” features of google docs to allow members to suggest amendments. We voted on them in discord. This is a relatively static document.
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I created this document for a new system I made up that I called “Raid Buddies.” I wrote down everything I wished I knew when I was a new raider. I am encouraging people to buddy up. It has been helpful. Night Witches Raid Buddies - Google Docs This document changes whenever I feel like changing it. It feels like a work in progress still. I’m kinda overwhelmed by trying to recruit more experience raiders to accept a buddy lol. I am not an officer, and I didn’t even nominate myself for the latest round of officer voting lol. I’m just going to volunteer some random things once in a while. Still, I’m kinda proud of it.
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People use it to write and share RP (roleplaying) stories. Sometimes they’re backstories of a character. Sometimes they’re a retelling of a raid but in character. Sometimes they’re totally made up. Sometimes the stories are based on ingame interactions they had with NPCs or with other players. It’s actually really fun to be on an RP server and I wouldn’t have it any other way now.
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One of our newer members used her real-life organizing skills to create an RP event ingame called “Pull Up The People” where a bunch of us donated materials, crafted items like bags and armor and food, and found magical items, and then a bunch of us reported to the Crossroads (a town in the Barrens, the big early horde zone) to give out items to any lower level player, whether they were totally new to the game, new to the server, or just rolling an alt. It was an amazing event, and the amount of organization she put into it was incredible. It included an RP backstory for why we needed the event and what we hoped to accomplish. There were descriptions of upcoming RP events run by other people in the server. There were warnings about enemy alliance players who might try to come disrupt us (and they did! and we fought them off!). There were detailed and well-though-through asks of X number of silk bags, X number of runecloth bags, their required crafting materials, sign-ups so that people could say “hey i’m crafting the silk bags,” or “hey i’m going to craft these potions,” and so on. Then there were screenshots of where each volunteer distributor of goods was going to stand during the event. There were even sample scripts we could /say in game to advertise what we were giving away, and we were encouraged to write our own. Seriously the event was incredible and I was so happy to be a part of it. (I donated leather for bags, even farmed a bunch of heavy leather with my sister, out of our way lol; I also distributed magical items! I suggested in the google doc afterwards that next time, we have different volunteers assigned to distributing different types of armor because it was very overhwelming for me to match cloth armor to a mage while a warrior who needed mail and a rogue who needed leather were also whispering me lol.
Did I mention we are an explicitly LGBTQIA+ and leftist guild? I love playing this game with a bunch of gay communists. It’s seriously the best.
footnotes
[1] here is an example from 2010 about how one guild used loot council. Ten Ton Hammer | How to run a Loot Council . systems vary across guilds and across time. i just think this particular link is interesting as a piece of WoW history, and it’s not on fandom.com or on reddit lol
[2] lol wikipedia has an entry for DKP: Dragon kill points - Wikipedia