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Role Playing (Games)

A Guild - What's In It For You 38

Posted by Zonk from the watch-my-back dept.
The Escapist has a piece looking at the rationale behind joining a Guild, and what it takes to enjoy the experience. Guilds are a core component of most Massively Multiplayer Online Games, but they're also one of the hardest to get right. From the article: "If guild members don't get what they need from their group, whether that need is companionship or gear, they are going to leave it. The guilds that thrive are not the ones that recruit hundreds of members with no common interests - in this case, finding members might be easy, but keeping them would be impossible. Similarly, if players refuse to accept the costs of a guild such as sharing loot or defending castles, the guild will have a harder time functioning as an efficient unit. The guilds with higher rewards and lower costs are the ones that will last."
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A Guild - What's In It For You More

A Guild - What's In It For You

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  • Words of wisdom... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zegebbers ( 751020 )
    "The guilds with higher rewards and lower costs are the ones that will last."

    seriously, how is this any different to street gangs or any other social group?

  • Ugh (Score:5, Funny)

    by TripMaster Monkey ( 862126 ) * on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @08:48AM (#13556625)

    Gads...this entire article reads like the conversation you are forced to have with the sweaty fat nerd at the con...you know the one...the one who insists on telling you all about his character, all the while constantly violating your personal space and assaulting you with his nasty aroma of Stridex, B.O., and Dorito breath.

    (Hint: If this hasn't happened to you, odds are you're the one the rest of us are talking about.)

    One more thing...what is up with the picture on the last page of the article? Are those two characters in a romantic embrace???

    Far more information than I needed, thanks.
    • Jeez, now you made want to go and read TFA...
      • Jeez, now you made want to go and read TFA...
        What do you mean read the article? What is an article? This is /. and I don't think I've ever come across one of those here...
    • That's not called a romantic embrace, its called a contortionist orgy. Might be some bondage involved, I can't really tell from the silhouette shot though. Sorry.

    • Re:Ugh (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "If this hasn't happened to you, odds are you're the one the rest of us are talking about."

      No. Odds are, you don't go to conventions because you have real friends. Have fun at your cons.
    • "One more thing...what is up with the picture on the last page of the article? Are those two characters in a romantic embrace???"

      No, it's a human pyramid.

  • PlanetSide Outfits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fistfullast33l ( 819270 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @08:52AM (#13556673) Homepage Journal
    I'm a officer in one of the larger outfits in Planetside. I've played about 6 or 7 different MMO's in the past, but only got involved in guilds in 2 games. I tried creating one in SWG during the first months of its release but it just failed miserably. I was in one in Earth & Beyond that worked nicely. I think it's safe to say that guilds definitely are an excellent way to get yourself addicted to a game. If you're just soloing through the world, it's definitely more of an uphill battle than if you have people who you are competing against when leveling and trading and such.

    The best part of my E&B guild was that there were people who actually helped you level up. In Planetside, we coordinate our attacks and stick together when in combat. PS is unique in that you can definitely level without killing everything in sight. As a result, our players stick with our outfit because it's hard to find other outfits that do what we do consistently with excellent results. We often have people who show up for seven day trials that subscribe just so they can prolong their play with us. I think both of my experiences have shown the two good reasons why guilds should exist.

  • One of WoWs Best (Score:5, Informative)

    by LordYUK ( 552359 ) <jeffwright821.gmail@com> on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:10AM (#13556850)
    Okay, so I probably shouldnt even plug em seeing as I dont play the game anymore, but hey, when you're primo number one on the server and have officers whose guides are regarded as some of the finest in the game community, you gotta throw out the props.

    www.pacifistguild.org

    Check em out if you play WoW, their Onyxia and Ragnaros "bibles" are top notch.

    And to keep on topic. The officers here are some of the best people (and players) I've ever encountered in a MMO. They listen, they make changes, and ultimately they dont do whats best for them (even though they could and we'd probably let em) they do whats best for the guild as a whole. Great bunch of guys, definately the best on WoW's Kel Thuzad realm.

    Good luck in BWL gang, hope I didnt /. you!! ;-)

    - level 60 hunter
        former "joker" of pacifist

  • Structure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:25AM (#13556989) Journal
    FTA:"Guilds are the backbones of MMOGs, but even more importantly, players are the backbones of guilds. "

    Duh. Individuals are the backbone of any organization that exists for mutual gain. What guilds truly offer is a framework of trust and relationships for online characters.

    In an online world where negative repercussions for acting like a jerk are few and far between, guilds provide a way to encourage cooperative play, which depends on trust.

  • Good article for the novice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kongjie ( 639414 ) <kongjie&mac,com> on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:52AM (#13557207)
    who is wondering about why someone would ever join a guild in the first place. It's nice to see something that makes an attempt at intelligent discourse.

    I came to the MMOG world as an adult, starting with EQ for the Mac. A lot of the guilds seemed pretty immature and I was reluctant to join one, but as it happened I became friends with someone who brought me into a great guild. When I look back at the gaming experience, the guild was an integral part of my enjoyment.

    I think an adult trying out WoW, for example, would be even more reluctant to join a guild because, at least in the beginning, there were so many pseudo-guilds that turned out to be ego-driven. The PvP element in WoW makes that worse, I think.

    The basic reason that a guild can be a fundamental part of the MMOG experience is that it gives you an opportunity to spend most of your gaming time with people who take a similar approach to the game that you do, assuming you find the right guild.

    • I am an older mac gamer myself currently enjoying WoW. You would be surprised at the number of older gamers in WoW. You just have to know where to look for them. PvP is an ego driven endeavor to begin with so those servers tend to be filled with the gank happy leet script kiddies. The RP servers tend to have a much more laid back, adult approach. The guild I am currently in actually has a nice mix in age ranges so PvP, Raids, social interaction and PvE are all addressed. Our oldest member is 57 with the you
      • I was probably a little unclear about WoW in my post. I played WoW and enjoyed it immensely, got up to lvl 60 and found that my computer (G4 933 mhz w/ ATI Radeon 9000) wasn't up to the task for instances. The lag was unbearable and unplayable (like 5 fps LOL); that coupled with increasing demands on my time caused me to give up the game.

        I was part of a guild that was overall disappointing, but I know that good, mature guilds existed on other servers. Maybe I'll come back one day and look you up!

  • A noob's perspective. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Slime-dogg ( 120473 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @09:56AM (#13557252) Journal

    I don't really have the years of MMORPG experience that many others do, so this may come off as naive. In any case, this is my perspective, tastes, and so on. WoW is my first MMORPG, and I signed a guild charter Dec 2nd, and was one of the officers.

    The guild started small, recruitment was poor, but levels 1-55 experience do not demand large numbers. There was some small competition evident at first. I was the first to hit 60, with a druid, of all classes. At 60, though, I started to notice that there was a lack of people. I was friends with everyone, the discussion was good, but there was something missing.

    We had picked up more members along the way, but not enough high levels to create a 40-man raid, or even a 20-man. The members started going off on their own, doing things with other guilds, and not assisting the other members with pertinent things. The leadership of the guild seemed to stop caring, and the efforts of one officer were not enough to get things done. The other members of the guild have to cooperate, and that was not happening. I realized that if I wanted to do more than just those last lvl 55-60 instances, that I'd need a change of scenery.

    As I left, about 13 other people went with me. The old guild deflated, and might not survive. The new guild has a similar mindset to how our old guild started... close knit, friendly, joking, and helpful. We also are big enough to field a full raid, and the leadership is strong. There is some friendly competition as well.

    I had attended a couple of raids with the server's premier raiding guild, just to see if that fit for me. They operate with extreme efficiency, and make Molten Core look like Candyland. It was scary in a way, because what I thought was supposed to be hard was made to look trivial. The other thing that I noticed about that guild was the emphasis on items. The members really didn't seem to mesh with each other well, they worked together to the common goal of doing MC and BWL, and getting phat lewt, but I could tell that there was tension. That guild was less of a family/friend environment, and more of a machine.

    The personalities in a guild have to mesh first, I think. If there is a strong core of members that enjoy each others' company, then the guild will last. However, if there are enough bad apples, sometimes it only takes one in the wrong position, the guild will not survive.

  • Thoughts on guild size (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bradbeattie ( 908320 ) <bradbeattie&alumni,uwaterloo,ca> on Wednesday September 14, 2005 @11:20AM (#13558054) Homepage Journal
    When I played WoW, I had a guild of my own. With about 30 members at its peak, it was fairly small compared to the 100+ member guilds out there. We had the opportunity to merge with some other guilds, but declined.

    Thing is, when a guild has more than 30 people or so, it becomes difficult to maintain a feeling of knowing everyone in the guild. Isn't that familiarity what a guild's about? I'd tried out a number of the larger guilds, but it always ended up feeling more like an organization than a family.

    The downside to a small guild is that some people are looking for something larger, and when your numbers dwindle, you really feel it. A few left here, a few left there, and before we knew it we were down to a guild of 15. Problem there is that 4 people are on at a time, at tops. We eventually just merged into a larger guild and that was that.

    For me, that killed the feeling of closeness and contributed to me leaving the game. And no, you can't have my stuff.
    • My guild hit that point pretty hard recently. We've got around 25 active members, so when we hit level 60, we were very lucky to be able to scrape up enough people for high level instances.

      There is a solution, though, and it actually works quite well: Build a network of guilds and set up a shared LFG channel for you. We've hooked up with five other small guilds on our server which area also starting to get level 60 members, and now we can almost always get a 10-man raid set up on short notice, and we're to
      • we can usually scrape together a functional Onyxia raid with about two or three hours of preparation
        While it's off topic for me to call attention to it, you just hit on another reason why I stopped playing WoW. I don't want to spend 2 or 3 hours preparing my casual entertainment.
        • I'd argue that once you get to the Raid-level content of WoW, its not casual entertainment. My guild can muster and enter one of the raid instances in less than 30 minutes, this is after 2 months of doing them every week, at the same time. That level of organization + the time involved w/ the actual instaces, I think would move it beyond the casual player.
  • EQ and DikuMud varients have guilding mostly to organize killing MOBs in an efficient matter mostly because the game requires it regardless of the bonding between players.

    Games like Ultima Online (pre-Trammel) and Shadow Bane have guilds as its street gangs and warring tribes would. It requires a bit more trust and has quite a bit more politics involved since a player can switch sides and often the group with the bigger number wins.

    However sometimes guilds in PvP games are just the biggest organization that

  • Doesn't say much... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sentack ( 610177 )
    I have to agree with a nother poster and say first of all, this article does read very much like a MMOG Geek trying to recount too many of his rather dull experiences. (Okay I've been guilty of that too on occasion) Sugar coated to make it look like an article about Guilds. Over all, the whole article really doesn't tell us much about guilds at all, other then really the flat obvious that yes, guilds can be nice and can be bad.

    Had the author focused more on various traps guilds fall into, the cycles
  • ARRGGHH my eyess!! um, resize your browser window to be short and wide. Note how you can't to see all the text even with scrolling? How and why did they do this? Peopel resize their browse windows! Don't break the web.
  • I created a guild in WoW named "Incomitatus". [nd.edu] I'm the only member. I do it for personal amusement.
  • I play a game called Kingdom of loathing and there are many reasons in this game to join a clan, such benefits are mainly geared to lower levels/newbies but as a clan gets higher or has a more elite player list can get amazing..

    For lower levels the benefits are
    1. Extra turns per day (as the game is Adv based)
    2. Free Meat (the currencu of the game... seriously)
    3. Access to the clan channel where questions and stuff can be discussed freely
    4. the Clan stash.. a dumping ground for all sorts of food/drink and it

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