I’m wondering if guilds have been slowly losing popularity in WoW.
Do you think there are as many established guilds as there used to be? What about new guilds? Or PvX guilds? Have racial or specialty RP guilds vanished? Is it just our server or other servers? Did mass recruit guilds finally die out?
Is there less need for guilds than there was in past expacs? Is Discord taking the place of guild groups? Does anyone still wear a guild tabard?
In my pure anecdotal experience, guilds are not nearly as important as they use to be.
Still looking for any info on evil guilds.
Dunno. Can’t answer this one. My gut worms say probably not exclusive to WRA
I hope so. I did have to mute a guy spamming guild recruiting in remix the other day though.
Definitely. You really don’t need a guild for most content anymore.
No.
I would if Blizzard updated the textures.
back in my day, if you wanted to do end game content or hang out, you joined a guild
but communities, discord, cross server AND faction grouping, also LFG and LFR have made guilds little more than a social club for most servers
Ive seen more pvp guilds than pve.
idk where the racial guilds stigma comes from, but im sure thats why theres none (cept ‘OG Horde’ guilds) but the Blood Elves of the Sunfury Battalion will be around for the foreseeable future
Something something radical nationalism something something something.
Oh my god I know exactly who you’re talking about, that guy that was spamming general chat even when he was raiding? Augh, it was so frustrating, because I have been looking for a guild to join, but when I saw that, even I was like “it ain’t it, chief”
WRA in specific has absolutely been hit hard. There’s maybe three, four guilds with any kind of meaningful population/presence on Alliance side, can’t speak for Horde.
At this point, guilds are either a social club, a mythic raiding experience, or on RP servers a unifying theme to gather RPers around. Just due to WRA’s small population in general no one’s starting any “niche” guilds because who are you going to interact with or recruit from? Anyone without an established core or history has to make their concept as generic as possible to make the most of anyone they can snag. Most of the new Alliance guilds I’ve seen in the past two years have had the most basic “adventurer” theme you can think of, and who can blame ‘em? When you’ve got to look high and low for a single recruit, you can’t risk them slipping away because you’re doing a Gilnean Kingdom guild and they’re a gnome.
A portal opens, a distant traveler appears.
Greetings from Moon Guard, I will add in my two cents here a bit too! As of a few months ago, I was running a Scourge Remnant/Cult of the Damned guild. A niche type of guild, of course, but we got a decent size and plenty of activity within. That said, I noticed that there is a big push for communities. Among people that I talked to about joining, or who were interested, a lot were looking more for an in-game community versus a guild.
I believe a huge part of this is due to the freedom that is obtained with communities. You’re not “shackled” to a guild. If a person messes up within it? You can more easily untie yourself. More importantly: your character has the room to grow on their own more.
Is this still a thing or was it folded into a community?
I think the number of guilds overall is probably still relatively the same in proportion to the size of the overall community as it always was. Most people I see running around have a guild tag under their name.
New guilds are probably coming and going similarly to how they always have as well. I do think the importance and quantity of guilds is more pronounced in the PvE space, particularly in guilds that do high-end raiding or high keys. You can technically do those things without a guild, but to reliably have a spot on a roster that makes good, consistent progress, you’re going to have to join a guild.
RP guilds are still important too, and they’re a bigger deal in some places than others. For instance, over on MG, there are a lot of RP guilds of all sizes. Many fly comfortably under the radar, content to inhabit the space they do while others try to grow and join projects for increased presence and visibility. Niche guilds are hard these days with how the RP community has shifted over the years. There are far fewer standards across the community, with a more “do whatever you want” mentality prevailing instead. There are also a lot of preconceptions and trust issues born from past experiences when it comes to limited-race guilds, and few people want to entertain even the thought of those things in the current social atmosphere we live in.
The challenge is particularly noticeable here on WrA. Our RP community is small compared to a server like MG, and Raseri has a good point in stating that basically beggars can’t be choosers here. You take interested parties into your guilds as you can find them. The pool just isn’t that deep here.
Mass-recruit guilds still exist, but they’re bigger on other servers.
Discord isn’t replacing guilds so much as it is replacing or has already completely replaced guild websites and forums. Even this forum sees less activity because of Discord.
And lastly, personally, my character will wear her guild tabard if the RP event calls for it somehow. Otherwise, she’s usually no tabard or wearing one of the prettier, more modern tabards.
It was shut down.
Edit:
I should say we voluntarily shut it down for now™.
Oh, that’s unfortunate. It sounded like something I might have been interested in. I am considering dusting off my own dark aligned undeath/necromancy themed guild/community concept since there does not seem to be anyone else filling that niche. At least that I am aware of.
Guilds really have become less important to playing the game. The game content has become pretty much soloable and the group search stuff Blizzard has given us makes it fairly easy to find teams for raids, mythics, basic dungeons, etc.
I believe that Discord has had a larger impact on Guild and RP participation than most of us realize. There’s no doubt that it helps connect different playerbases on a very large scale and across many different platforms. I’m just one of those players who feels that having multiple windows open and tabbing back and forth between them takes away from my immersion in the game. I also don’t put too much faith in a system like Discord where the owner of the channel can just shut it down on a whim. To each their own.
I blame Bizzard because they let the in game channels get blatantly misused and exploited and didn’t have the fortitude to clean them up. That pretty much forced us to have to turn to Discord. But, I still don’t like it. Lol.
Cheers!
Honestly, as much as I’ve basically ignored Communities as a feature since they were added, they do make a lot of sense, especially for RP.
Bit of a tangent, but back in the day on WRA, we ran a Raid Team. Never made anyone join the Guild. It meant we could pull from, you know, 5 different RP Guilds without actually “poaching”. It’s not like Guild Achievements mattered for anything.
But that can apply generally too. People have reasons to stick to certain guilds, whether its for RP / Content, Socialization, the Customized Tabard (or guild name as a title), Nostalgia, Bank Space, whatever.
Communities let people more officially participate in a thing without having to abandon anything. Though I do have to say at that point it might as well just be a Discord server.
They’re still a big thing on my OCE server – people still do end-game content as guilds.
The pre-patch allows us to join from other servers, too, which will be great.
But overall, guilds in the context of a server culture have definitely shifted.
There are too many constraints on it, too, like a great change would be to let people join up to 3 guilds.
WoW Communities suffered from poor UX design. Guilds do, too, but with guilds being cross faction and cross server, and communities being designed so poorly, they should just focus on making guilds much better for modern players.
That means revamped UX/UI, uplifted comms capabilities and lots of new features IMO.
Sadly, I doubt we’ll see it.
I’ve said this in other posts in the past, but there is no real incentive to be in guilds anymore, and the way the UI is built does not make anything easier or get people excited. Our Guild Tabards are so dated, and you can pretty much have one without a guild now.
Guild ranks are kind of broken in a sense that they used to have better customisation between ranks, and yet that was taken away. To give specific permissions, you have to give ALL permissions that fall into what Blizzard decided was a “Officer” role, and those permissions are a Cable Company bundle that can’t be un-bundled. Other than a name under your character (which if you are an RPer doesn’t matter much anyways since we have TRP or some sort), so what really drives people to be in a guild and not just a community?
The last time they added something a guild could earn other than a title, like a pet, or mount, or cosmetic was, can anyone guess?
Warlord’s of Draenor.
Legion, BfA, Shadowlands, and Dragonflight, and now The War Within…and still nothing new for Guilds at all, ever. Only Mythic Plus related achievements that award nothing other than maybe a title.
I am giving it a go to try and see if this last guild concept will finally work as a cross faction and cross realm guild, but if that doesn’t work. Honestly…the community is the better option anyways. It allows people to come and go without any obligations, and no real need for anyone to be tied to each other if drama breaks out either. Like, I want there to be a sense of pride in a guild and excitement for what that means, but I honestly don’t think the average MMO gamer really care about that and guild pride like people used to in MMOs.
For me, at this point, guilds serve virtually ‘zero’ purposes. They have not done so in over a decade. The typical guild experience is playing an entire session without word from any members. Most players seem to prefer using closed/private channels in Discord. I’m not a huge fan of voice chatting with a bunch of strangers who I never intend to meet unless there is an in-game event that requires it such as PVP or raiding. I mostly play as single-player RPG.
The last time I was in a guild was Wrath, so I’m probably not adding anything to this discussion.
I just wish we had more guild cosmetics.
The Sunreavers remain a racial guild, to be lore-abiding. There was pressure to allow vulpera and then drakthyr, but we never went that route as it would not have made sense.
The guild serves a role-play purpose exclusively as we don’t raid or PVP. Its a small, tight-knit group of characters that fit into a theme and enjoy role-playing together.
Theres dozens of us!
…
…
I’m being told theres less than one dozen of us
It definitely seems to me that the popularity of guilds has waned considerably over the last few years, likely for all of the many good reasons mentioned above (and perhaps more as well).
As a GM of one of the aforementioned “racial or specialty guilds”, I can say that these have always seemed like a more niche idea and therefore have always seemed to accumulate smaller consistent populations, especially when you’re playing a race with a very niche racial concept. Many of Warcraft’s races have strong, well-developed racial identities that are fun for players to explore for a time, but few are those who are willing to commit to months and years of writing a character within a guild angled toward that specific racial identity. I think this is why those of us who have staked a lot of our RP efforts on such guilds are very familiar with the eager new member who shows up to one or two events, speaks actively in Discord or guild chat for a couple of weeks, and then vanishes without a trace.
And to be clear, I’m not saying this to knock anyone who’s done that: I’ve done it. You, dear reader, may have done it once or twice yourself. I think the fact that this urge to dive into a particular race’s culture via RP even exists is a testament to the love many of us have for Warcraft and the many interesting high concept cultures it boasts.
So, for that reason alone, I am glad that there are still racial guilds out there, even if they are smaller (even as I think they’ve always been on the smaller side). I also think that this isn’t something that could be done as effectively with the Communities feature or with Discord servers because within some of these races, you have groups that may choose to focus their interests on different elements of what makes that race unique.
Just because these guilds offer smaller communities doesn’t, in my opinion, necessarily mean that they’re destined to die out. It may be harder to cultivate a sizable membership for one, but I personally don’t see this as as bad of a thing as some might. I prefer the feeling of smaller communities where, for the most part, everyone’s character knows one another and the focus can be on developing stories over constant introductions or feeling like a face in the crowd where the impact of your character’s presence seems to mean less.
This is also why—as I’m sure no one will be surprised to hear—I find large community Discords a bit less engaging and rewarding. I absolutely think they serve a valuable purpose in bringing together a large number of players around a common theme, but in helping players to develop more close-knit relationships around a more specific theme, I don’t think they’re anywhere near as effective as guilds.
And again, keep in mind that I am a GM of a Forsaken guild with a heavy Cult of Forgotten Shadows theme (a “niche within a niche”), so take everything I say with a grain of salt, as you may simply prefer a different gaming/community experience than I do—which is absolutely okay and totally valid. And yet for me, after having tried dozens upon dozens of different walk-up or “let’s arrange to meet for RP” encounters in bustling population hubs (such as MG Stormwind or community Discords), I can say with 100% confidence that having a small guild experience like this is endlessly more satisfying and enjoyable for me in the long term.
And while I may not wear my guild’s tabard (because let’s be honest, those new Forsaken tabards from the heritage armor quest look way too good to not use), there’s one thing a community can’t get you: BANNERS! And who doesn’t love a good guild banner.