New Faces

You probably have it in your guild aswell now and then, perhaps even more at the moment, new people joining the guild.
For many raidguilds it's pretty common in this time that people are needed to fill spots in a raid due to Holidays or people just entirely quiting the game either for a long time or just till the expansion, or perhaps even guildquiters (got that rarely ourselves).
So people are recruited, if you're lucky you have some people to choose from or else you'll just have to be happy with what you can lay your greedy little hands on.

Now some of those people just say hi and thats about the last time you hear them say anything... some other people make you feel a shifting in the force.
Suddenly the chat is filled with this new persons chatter, not bad neccesarily but noticeable still. Annoying? Hmmm.. not yet at least.
You know there is a certain mood in the guild and you've grown to love it, the weirdness, the chats.. there is no doubt in what direction you are moving, straight ahead at a comfortable cruise speed on the highway. This new person gives you the feeling you're steering slightly to the left or the right as he/she is finding her/his own comfortable lane.
Instinctively you steer back, trying to get to the previous optimimal course... but is it still?

Fact is that more present people will change your guild but that isn't a bad thing, for them it's probably alot more to get used to then the other way around.
But when you've been playing Mariokart all the time, do you really want to try Crash Team Racing? It might be fun.. come join the dark side yound padawan. Things are likely to change with new people in your guild but it keeps it fresh that way, as long as those people have some common ground and do fit in a bit ofcourse.

When thinking back, we had someone join us half a year ago and we used to make a lot of anal sex jokes at that time (think we still do actually). We soon found out the guy that joined was gay, nothing wrong with that but it made us wonder if he would mind the jokes or not. It changed the way we talked in guildchat for awhile and it slowly evolved into something else, not less perferted though. ;)
So was it a bad thing? I don't think so, just something different which isn't bad in this case.

The trick is to look out for people with such a strong influence that they actually change the atmosphere in your guild all by themselves in a bad way.
Trying to get someone in who you think will fit in is very important because of that, if you love to talk about your fettishes.. don't recruit someone who sells bibles in his free time. Or perhaps if you want to pipe down the sicko's you dó take that guy in. ;)