Author: C.S. McFarland

Why run a guild? You aren’t going to get any financial reward for it. It’s unlikely you will get much praise or thanks for the work you do.

In my times of reflection about what frustrates me about the guild, I often come back to the idea that I wanted to make a guild that I would enjoy. A guild based on a belief that WoW requires different things from people based on their goals in the game. A guild that I could “get behind” when it came to an ideal.

No one cares about that crap.

In my time as a guild leader, I saw a lot of good people come into the guild who were perfectly willing to agree to the policies. These people enjoyed playing with the guild, and they fit in well with the existing members. But they did not have any stake in the guilds design. As long as they got what they wanted, the concept of the guild, the design of the guild, the philosophy of the guild, was all irrelevant. This created situations were people only have input on how the guild operates when they don’t get what they think they should get. And then, their solutions are designed to get them what they want, not to reinforce the guild concept.

The result? Your concept is worthless to the people enjoying it. There’s no admission that you, and your concept, are anything other than a vehicle to get what they want out of their own effort. Is there any wonder so many guild leaders give themselves loot, or take cash out of the bank? There might be some rational to those actions, but it gets the guild leader something tangible that they want. And even then, if you are like me, the rewards and feedback you get will never be worth the hard work, the complaining, the gnashing of teeth that guild leaders must endure.

I enjoy World of Warcraft a great deal. At it’s inception, it was clearly an attempt to take the existing MMORPG genre and refine it to be a better game. And over it’s many patches and last expansion, the game has evolved to be a better game. Interface improvements, raid and guild management changes, etc. For all my griping in this blog about WoW, it’s impossible to imagine running a guild in DAoC or EQ.

My guild is moving through high level raiding content in WoW. I enjoy the mechanics in the game. I like playing a class and doing it well. I like PvE. But there are things I want to see change. Fundamental issues that seem to plague every MMORPG out there. Things that I think could be changed to make things even better.

1) Teach players how to play your game. You can play a hunter in WoW and make it to the max level having never learned about shot rotations. Either the class should not require you to know how that works, or the game should reveal that information to the player during the course of their playing. Not only does it keep people from being “another stupid hunter”, but it opens the higher and more in-depth aspects of the game to more people. The mechanics of a class should not be hidden from players. Even if it’s just an in-game manual, it would be a huge help.

2) Don’t make me have to consult an offline resource, or do complex math, to try and figure out if an item is an upgrade for me. This is similar to my first issue in that it involves the game hiding the game mechanics from me. Sure, give me options in my upgrades, but why should I have to try and determine if +34 Agility is better or worse than +20 Hit Rating for my class role? If people can write mods to distill all this information down to a relative number, why can’t that be designed into the game? It sure would help people know how to tank/heal/dps/etc better instead of guessing, or making huge mistakes on what they think is good upgrades. Heck, removing stats from armor or items might be a good step. Have all your armor be just armor and let people add the class appropriate upgrades as enchantments.

3) Give me good rewards when I do something. Let’s say I turn in a quest, I should not see a list of items that are useless to me. I should also not see two items I have to decide between, knowing I can never change my mind or get the other item again. Every quest should net me something I can really use. I should never complete an objective and feel like I need to pick the item that will sell to a vendor for the most cash. Why not just give me money?

4) Don’t make me solo with morons. I appreciate the scope and open environment of an MMORPG. I really do. The ability to play with lots of other people is the reason I keep playing MMORPGs. But if you want to allow me to solo, then let me do it alone. There’s no need to force me to be exposed to the other knuckle-heads when I am playing by myself. No matter how massively multi-player your game is, I don’t need some jerk stealing my stuff, killing my quest goals, and making my life more difficult. The game should be fun to play with people, and fun to play when I am doing something on my own.

I know what games were like before World of Warcraft. I know about arduous corpse runs and losing experience every time you died. I remember when quests did not really exist and you leveled by killing monsters over and over. I was there. I know game designers can make the games more fun without sucking all the challenge out. But do not think that WoW’s success is some validation that there’s no more ways to make the genre better. It can be better, and being better might not get you WoW’s subscription numbers, but it will make a great game that people enjoy and keep playing for a long time.

To add some more evidence to my previous post, I have the following hypothetical situation.

Let’s say you join a raiding guild. You always show up on time, perform flawlessly, bring consumables. You are online before invites start and at the entrance to the raiding instance. You are the top performer in your class/role. You log out when the raid is done. You don’t talk to anyone and you never converse socially.

Except in some rare situations, you will never be considered a valuable member of the guild. So socially expectant are guilds, that being non-social is a problem. I’m not talking about being anti-social, just being quiet and doing your job.

The problem is raiding successfully. Guilds are social creatures. Imagine that a guild is your family and raiding is your job. Do you see your co-workers as your family? Are they the ones you want to talk to socially and be in constant touch with? Maybe. But, would you work with your family members? Would you want your mom to do what you do, be your boss, or be your employee? Unlikely.

I have been enamored by the Leftovers concept. It detaches the progression that raiding demands from the social stigma of guild hopping. The fact is that raiding does not demand lots of in-game socializing and contact. There are very few practical advantages to building a raiding group around a guild. There are very good reasons to build your social life around a guild. Before I saw this Leftovers concept, I had an idea for the No Guild Guild. Individual members in WoW would join a guild they liked, or be guildless. But, they could join an offline community whose sole purpose was to coordinate raiding and progression in the game. No more social tangles of having to leave your guild to raid. No more guild shopping to find a guild that offers both social interaction AND raiding at the right level for you.

Detaching guilds from raiding is the future.

No one joins a guild because they want to join a guild. Especially a raiding guild. There is only one reason to ever join such a guild. To get what you want out of the game.

Socializing? Bullshit.

Making friends? Liar.

Enjoying content with like-minded folks? Your pants are on fire.

Get in, get what you want, and get out. Planning to leave? Spend all your DKP! Can’t get your alt into runs? Don’t offer to run some alt-raids, just play alts in other guilds and leave the moment you aren’t getting what you want. Don’t like how the guild policies work? Quietly grumble under your breath and tolerate the guild stepping on your freedoms to get loot until you can’t take it and bail.

WoW isn’t about being friends or having fun. WoW is about greed.

There is something about high end, hardcore, raiding guilds. Something that instills a sense of political maneuvering in it’s members. When ex-hardcore raiders join my “casual” guild, they rarely voice their opinions in the open. They find the group of technically proficient players and join that group. They begin complaining about mistakes and poor decisions of others. They don’t point out errors or problems publicly in the forums. It’s all hush-hush, and “I don’t want to rock the boat.”

Like we can’t take it. We’ll be offended. That someone else is a good player with good ideas. Instead of “Hey man, try doing X and see if your DPS goes up.”, we get snickers behind people’s backs.

Jerks.

When your guild is small, everyone is friends. You know everyone because you play with them and things are kinda normal. As the guild grows, that goes away. People form cliques and you end up with people who just won’t even group with other people. And the guild leader is often stuck in the middle of everything. I get to hear everyone complain and mock everyone else. Even when I agree, I know I’m going to have to deal with the personality clashes at some point. It means playing the game with people in the guild is a constant reminder of how much the entire guild is a society. A group of people who enjoy spending their free time playing the same game, and still manage to build walls between them and others.

I don’t really care that someone else made you feel bad. I don’t care that they did something and now you feel left out. I don’t care that someone said something offensive and someone else stopped playing the game and we lost a valuable player. I’m not here to make sure everyone gets along. I have a hard enough time getting people to understand the DKP system, or how signing up for a raid works. I have to make sure people’s forum access is set up right. I have to talk to people who applied to join the guild and make sure they are not jerks. I have to check the bank and make sure we didn’t have a bunch of stuff stolen. I have to write down policies so people stop asking me questions over and over. Of all the things that the guild needs done, at what point did you think the guild was kindergarten and you needed the teacher to make Billy stop calling Suzy names?