Guilds - A Discussion

Wyrmrest Accord
21

I’ll actually chime in add to Maerlyn’s point, because it brings across something I’ve really taken to heart lately and another big bonus to guilds: Content Curation. Communities are less commitment, yes, and you can dip in and out without having to invest in the same buy-in as a guild, but the buy-in of a guild also makes sure that you’re RPing(At least in a good guild that’s competently run) with a carefully curated selection of people invested in upholding the themes and tone of the RP that you enjoy.

As far as racial guilds are concerned, at least when the server was more popular back in the day, you had a general idea of what the really serious guilds were, how hard it was to get into them, and the quality of content they created within themselves by making sure no one was harshing the fun. You also knew less tightly regulated guilds and what came out of them as a kind of softer, sillier side to it, for those who enjoy that.

This of course, and I’m repeating myself here but it needs to be repeated, relies on trusting the GM and Officers of the guild to maintain that quality, create events and a structure to RP in. Communities provide that only to a smaller degree.

I can be an old man about this and say that it feels like new RPers are less and less driven to make their own stuff. Back in MY day you’d have a new guild idea every other week! But no it does feel like things have kinda distilled down to walkup RP and social getups and the odd campaigns through Warcraft Conquest over on Moonguard. Even our Horde counterpart, which is the more populated side of this server, doesn’t really seem to be having any new guilds forming at all this year, maybe just one or two.

22

Haven’t racial themed guilds been on the decline even before Legion. I know there are a few exceptions (hot people guilds) but the game just doesn’t have the numbers like it used to. I imagine it’s probably harder to sustain a racial themed guild for the more less played races these days because you just don’t have the numbers anymore. I suspect it’s probably even harder with the number of Allied Races we have now compared to the past, sure some of them can be folded into some guilds (LFD and Draenei for example) but then others like Vulpera or Dracthyr are gonna have a harder time joining the Troll Tribe or the Gnomancy Electocracy guild.

On the other hand, cross faction guilds has really opened up a lot of neat themes and ideas we didn’t have access to before. I do see a lot of those these days, Vigil is technically cross faction as we have a full-time Horde player in the guild and our cult accepts everyone regardless of what nation they come from.

I’m curious how cross-server guilds are going to change things. I’ve considered moving some characters back to WRA since I can still be guilded with my buddies on MG

23

These question on RP servers always amuse me. Because clearly people don’t play on the very populated servers where guilds are active and thriving with hundreds of members all doing different types of content.

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24

WrA used to be very populated on both factions - I ran the biggest guild on the server at the end of LK with 7 raid teams and around 650 chars. I’ve played on high pop PVE servers - a lot of us still do for PVE content. But there are many, many more med/low pop servers than the handful of high pop PVE servers.

Other than hard core content runners, I’m interested in what the casual PVX player or RPer thinks about how things are. I’m sure there are still raid/mythic guilds who are thriving, but I also feel like those might be less in number than they used to be.

For instance, I have several groups of gaming friends. Most of them will drift back into WoW for new PVE content, but then leave for whatever new game flavor of the week is launching. I’m doing that now, too. I still RP, but I don’t raid or bother with mythics. I don’t gear. I don’t care. I did in the past. I liked raiding. I’m here for the RP and people I know.

I spend more time in Discord with friends than I do in-game. I don’t really see many new guilds popping up, but there are several guilds who seem to be going strong as far as maintaining a presence, RPing or otherwise. The WCP certainly helps.

I’m not sure what to expect with cross-server guilds. At this point what I feel is going to happen, is that MG and WrA players will pull all of their alts into whichever guild they feel works for them, and we’ll all be the same people (which we kind of are, anyway). But I could be wrong and then Enekie will surprise suplex me :stuck_out_tongue:

I feel like guilds would get a boost if Blizz was interested in updating them. Something like ESO, where you could be in several at once with the same character. So if you wanted to RP with different guilds on the same character, you could. If they gave us better perks, new incentives, updates, better UI function, tabard designs that weren’t 20 years old, etc. coughGuild Hallscough

Otherwise, there doesn’t seem to be as much reason to join for a casual player. My friend groups don’t really mix (3-4 different RP groups, 2 PVE groups on 2 different factions), and it’s a PITA to maintain jumping from guild to guild to see what’s up in gchat. Functions like scheduling (and basic chatting) are handled in Discord now.

Idk, that’s my $.02.

25

Many good points so far, loving this discussion.

Something not yet brought into the discussion has been the age of WoW itself and the medium age of the playerbase. The older the game and bell curve age of its playerbase, the less time spent into creative energies and forming new connections. Many folks either have decided to play solo for whatever personal reasons they may have or play with an established guild/community group they’ve known for years, and nothing is wrong with either. Games are played in our free time and folks should choose how they want to spend it.

That said, it hasn’t helped that the game itself hasn’t added new incentives to join or invest time in guilds since nearly Cataclysm. Guild reputation, mounts, pets, speedy mail/hearthstone perks, etc. are helpful but are ultimately icing on a cake when compared to social and grouping needs. Between LFD/LFR and mass Discord communities formed for the purpose of easy grouping, many can fulfill that need without ever accepting a /ginvite.

As for potential changes that could shift the current culture, I’d be a very big fan of the GW2 approach of letting folks join more than one guild on a character. Many GW2 players have their RP-focused guild, raid guild, and PvP guild (for example), and not only does this let players find everything they’re looking for but it gives guilds the flexibility of specializing in a niche role instead of the catch-all approach many have in WoW. I could imagine a many more race-centric and other niche RP guilds pop up if we had the option to participate in guild chat, see the calendar, and overall interact with all 3 sets of guildies without having to log onto a different character.

While in-game communities can somewhat fit this role, their UI/UX and implementation has been un-intuitive (and in my opinion incomplete), which has hurt more than help player adoption. With cross-realm guilds and other community-related updates coming in TWW, I hope Blizzard has put in meaningful updates that makes guilds more flexible and fun for everyone involved.

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26

I wonder if you could “engineer” some kind of casual content to encourage players to stay together and make friends. High-end content forms tight-knit groups by necessity–you just can’t rely on a rando to get you through your high end content, I guess.

But casual content is not really guild-friendly since you can just pick up 4 randos, do a dungeon easily without talking, and call it a day. That’s fine, but it isn’t really a worthwhile social experience, and maybe nothing was really lost when they decided you could just do normal dungeons with NPCs instead.

It would be interesting to see some sort of setup designed to encourage longer-term connections, like a kind of heroic that offers special rewards, but where your members have to come from some player-selected dungeoneering lineup of ~10 players who you can only change once a month or something–basically, a mechanic encouraging you to pick a handful of people to play non-HC content with, rather than LFD, which encourages you to play with people you will not interact with ever again.

Anything requiring “forced” interaction like that could be drama-prone, but right now there’s just no reason to ever interact with people for casual PvE content.

IDK that’s not a great idea but I don’t know how else to make casual PvE stuff social other than “delete all matchmaking tools”, which is nonviable.

Really even back in the first 3 expansions when no matchmaking existed most of my friends as a casual player came from RP, not PvE–the non-raider social scene has always been a little weak, I guess. But back then I at least had some friends I’d do quests with, because at the time it was useful to have some backup when you fight a murloc camp or whatever. I’d also be really interested in seeing a group-focused “remix” event–something like this MoP thing, but where the whole world would be scaled to require grouping at almost all times just for leveling or dailies. Obviously not everyone’s cup of tea, but a remix event is an opportunity to test niche ideas, and it could be interesting to see the social impact of content like that.

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27

I feel like this happened a lot back in the day. You’d meet someone while you were leveling, put them on your friend list because they were a tank and you needed one. You’d message them when you wanted to run content and you liked their tanking. You got to talking about RP. You started hanging out with them and their friends. They met your friends. You were all in the same zones at the same time. You helped each other with harder quests. Bonds happened.

But that was before LFG. The problem now is, that Blizz could never remove LFG from retail, and most servers don’t have the type of population that they did back in the day. There are too many small servers. People aren’t spamming alts. They play differently than they did 20 years ago. Now we log on, do a couple of hours here and there every week and log off. I used to be online 7+ hours a day every weekday on WoW and about 14 hours on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. I don’t do anything like that now. My WoW time is scheduled for whenever and wherever the RP is happening. I log on for a few hours and then log off. I suspect most of us do.

It’d be fun to have some kind of “pair up” or “group up” where you and friends (or randoms) could run content together and get a reward when you maxxed out. I just don’t see it happening, though. It would be more effort than the profit would be worth, most likely, even if they used the tools they had for Recruit-A-Friend. Or if there were better rewards for guild achievements like 3+ guild people running a dungeon. Right now it’s just a guild achievement - big deal unless you’re having an achievement run. I only get in the mood to do something like that about once every couple years…maybe.

There’s got to be a good way to encourage players in an MMO to actually group repeatedly. I’m just not sure what that is. Smaller server pop? Having something like 100-200 players per faction per server where you group up and apply together? Mass servers where there are sub-servers within them and you can set rules and run things your own way? Changing quest difficulty so harder quests mean better rewards? Making leveling more important to the MMO experience?

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28

It is interesting that you bring up recruit-a-friend, I sorta forgot about it but it did have some mechanics to encourage “pairing” with someone just for casual stuff. Bonuses for playing together, special teleportation tools, level granting… I doubt many of us have actually used it much, since recruiting someone to pay a sub is sort of awkward, but similar mechanics which would let you link up to someone already paying for a sub on their own accord could be neat for getting people to stick together.

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29

I tried it a couple of times. It was good, but it was also limiting. It felt like it had more potential than what it was used for.

30

Same here, like, I could not imagine getting anything done PvE-wise outside of the guilds I play in. For those (not RP server guilds), discord is just used as voice. No one is reading much of anything posted in guild chat or the discord. It’s talking with friends colleagues.

31

You know, I’m thinking of how hands off a lot was on the OOC side for my first year or two in the land of WoW RP. It was common for me to not even know one character was someone else’s alt until it was outright mentioned.

Nowadays, I couldn’t even tell you the last time I met someone new through ingame means first.

32

Other than joining new guilds or recruiting, I don’t organically meet people in-game. I’ve seen some people around Duskwood, but other than a few shared IC lines, nothing there really clicked into friendship or otherwise.

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33

Re: Making OOC friends via in-game walk up…

I meandered into Duskwood with a vague starting character concept a year ago and ended up making some fun OOC friends and collabing on some fantastic storylines. It was unexpected but welcomed. All of this was outside the guild I run so it was an extra treat to not always be DM and just be equal part of an RP writing experience again.

I wasn’t able to do quite the same over in the Silvermoon walk-up scene. I found parts of it welcoming and other parts inaccessible depending on who you knew/guild tag. That said, that’s not necessarily unique to WrA and sometimes is a side effect of a large population. When I stuck to it, I was eventually able to find and hang with fellow chill regulars.

I haven’t waded into Orgrimmar or found consistent walk-up in Stormwind just yet. WrA Stormwind is still very event- and (for lack of better words) appointment-based. We don’t have the sustained population or interest in Stormwind as a scene to maintain walk up. I’m always down to team up and change that, though.

I experienced this exactly. My friends list pre-Wrath was filled with healer, DPS, CC, and Tank friends, plus roleplayers and fellow GMs. Not all of us were in the same guild or needed to be because guild achievements were not a thing yet. But the moment LFG was implemented, my friends list collected dust until Bnet was integrated. Even then, I used Bnet mostly used for guild and server contacts to organize events — then Discord came about and replaced that.

Blizzard hasn’t meaningfully added features to enhance the community of the game in a long time, it’s instead benefited from outside innovations and players taking initiative. OW1/2 has endorsement systems and group bonuses to encourage players to stick together for more than one match and also stay civil, but it’s not always effective. I feel that if the answer was simple, we would have had a solution a long time ago, but I also feel that C-suite doesn’t see the profit in having a direct hand in player communities if they can basically trust players to create their own means of banding together out of necessity.

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34

I think the idea of “How to make Stormwind come back” has been floated so many times that it’s just a pipe dream at this point. It needs to be more than one person, it needs multiple people with sustained interest who can draw crowds around them and both provide and indulge in content. I don’t see that happening on WRA right now, for a number of reasons.

35

Honestly, if you’ve been to Duskwood more than once I consider you a friend and you can always chat me up.

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36

I superficially mentioned it once on the forums, but I had an eventful and miserable experience with a stalker-y situation quite a few years ago. The pathetic response by TPTB just made it worse.

When I say I don’t speak to anyone in the game, I literally mean…I don’t speak to anyone in game. No one. I log in and go play, do the things I feel like doing, occasionally spam cheese references or bad puns in trade chat. I’ll sometimes respond to requests for LW services, jump into LFR or more likely hit up a random BG. Log out when I’m done.

Warcraft has been a single-player game for me, for a very, very long time. I wish it wasn’t the case but that experience really put me off. It would probably take an act of god for me to genuinely trust another Wow player.

37

The guild UI needs an overhaul, rank permissions need to be separated again and the guild tabard designer is the same one we had in 2004 and is super jarring compared to every updated UI element we have gotten since then. Other than that guilds seem fine.

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38

I sometimes see you around, but you’re usually surrounded. It’s all good, though. I’m usually surrounded, too. Right now, the guild is back to mains instead of Duskwood alts. That’ll probably change either after Pandaria or after the mad rush at the expac launch.

I know! I saw you at one of the SW markets! You were just there. It was good to see you, though.

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39

Yeah, I remember that one. I always feel bad when I go away for a few minutes, come back and it’s apparent someone tried getting my attention. I’m never ignoring someone to be a jerk. It’s an ongoing internal debate whether to engage with anyone. lol

I should say, there are rare occasions. A few good-hearted gnomie players did get me into discord last year. They are very kind and genuine people. I’m just really wary of people.

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40

I’ve had some really weird stalker-ish stuff happen as well, two different very bizarre situations before moving to WrA. And a few odd things after, but luckily didn’t fall into any of the wild WrA psycho-stalker stuff from the wra .net days.

I just don’t care, though, I will 100% meet some of my current guildies irl, i love them.

I did have someone really latch onto my voice after they heard me in vent back in the day, but I married her so <3

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