Guilds – Who needs em!
Apparently, the vast majority of gamers do!
I know what you’re thinking – guilds are made up of a cutthroat, boorish, selfish, insane group of diehards who only want to raid and can’t sleep till they get that laser awesome item.
10 years ago, that was a pretty fair assessment of guilds. Today, it’s completely different, yet it seems like games are still designing multiplayer (guild) content with that old label in mind. What’s surprising is how a decade of game evolution has failed to get up to speed with today’s breed of guild.
Over 80% of players are in guilds (or the equivalent term). I am one of them. But who are we?
We’re like jellyfish – little blobs of people floating around. We are a game’s best PR. Snag one of us, and it’s likely we’ll bring several more. We write, photograph, and even take video of our fun times. We stay with a game longer than a non-guilded player. We are not all about hardcore raiding and loot. And no, we’re not performing the prisoner’s dilemma each night we log in.
What’s especially important is that we transcend the games we play – more and more, guilds leave one game and move to another as a fairly intact unit. And it’s no coincidence that there are lots of pre-made, well-organized guilds ready to go even before an MMO even launches. We like the people we play with, and we want to do fun, cooperative, engaging activities with each other. On the flip side, when a guild dissolves, it often causes members to leave the game entirely.
In general, people in guilds are happy – but look at any given guild, at any given time, and what’s striking is that you always have a certain number of people online and on that roster who can’t do stuff with their guildmates. It’s like ground clutter on the radar. Why do we so easily accept that as the way it should be? People want to be in that guild, and do things with that guild, and can’t. Whether it’s a 24 man raid, or a 6 person group, the math will never work out.
Furthermore, in 10+ years of MMO game design, multi group content is basically raid, or PvP. The only major advancement in that time is PvP raiding, like seiges, battlegrounds, and keep warfare. And because of the level system in these games, multi-group content is always at the end of the grindy level ladder. If we’re a generally happy bunch of guildies, think of how happy we’d be to have more variety in what we can do together in game, and to be able to do it sooner.
Guilds just do not get appropriate treatment when a game is designed. It took months for Free Realms to put guild tags in game. Wizard 101 still doesn’t have it, which is absolutely shocking given how often you see packs of players hanging around town together. Age of Conan also had plenty of guild-related issues early on. That 20 minute walkthrough of Star Wars: The Old Republic looks super – but tell me what the gameplay is like for parties of 12, or 20, or more. I see the fun for the solo player, but what will the game be like for guilds?
For a while now, I’ve been making the assertion that the game to beat WoW will be one that markets to and attracts lumps of guilds, rather than individual players. And with WoW getting long in the tooth, that means they should look very carefully at how to keep their own community engaged and satisfied. It’s no coincidence that they are putting in a guild level system with the next expansion, similar to Everquest 2′s. That’s exactly the sort of gameplay that strengthens bonds and gets everyone feeling like part of the team.
Right now, I see MMOs doing a tremendous job with solo player content, and a decent job with group content. But multi-group content needs to be given more attention, because it’s the multiplayer aspect of MMOs that separate it from its console cousin. And there’s just no way that a PC based MMO can compete, head to head, with a console game.
So what would I like to see changed? Lots, and that’s what I’ll be blogging about going forward!
Posted by jayernh under Uncategorized | Comments (13)
Yay!
Comment by Michael — September 8, 2009 @ 7:40 pm
I look forward to hearing more from you. Since I tend to avoid guilds, I’m fascinated by your perspective. I do agree that guild content feels like an afterthought in most games.
Comment by Anjin — September 9, 2009 @ 1:52 am
Good to see you back writing again. I missed my weekly sojourn to your site — I love the pictures you post of all the action.
I too have finally found a guild that I enjoy. I am on the Kithicor server, if you remember.
Comment by Troy — September 9, 2009 @ 7:34 am
[...] Karen of Journeys with Jaye makes a stellar comeback to her too-long-dormant blog with a homily to the power of a good guild to turn a game into a community. I love guilds, but that’s a huge problem for a MMO mayfly like myself that floats from game to game. I do love my EVE corp, OtakuDyne, to death, though — the game would be far too frustrating without them. [...]
Pingback by West Karana » Daily Blogroll 9/9/09 – Galaxy Express edition — September 9, 2009 @ 9:08 am
[...] Karen of Journeys with Jaye makes a stellar comeback to her too-long-dormant blog with a homily to the power of a good guild to turn a game into a community. I love guilds, but that’s a huge problem for a MMO mayfly like myself that floats from game to game. I do love my EVE corp, OtakuDyne, to death, though — the game would be far too frustrating without them. [...]
Pingback by West Karana Daily Blogroll 9/9/09 Galaxy Express edition – CelebrityTwitterGossip.com — September 9, 2009 @ 10:11 am
I’ll just echo Michael’s comment. Yay! Great to see you back on the blogging scene.
About damn time.
Jason (resident drunken idiot of Channel Massive)
Comment by Jason — September 9, 2009 @ 11:01 am
Jaye your back! Great post! I agree, I think games need to focus on guilds and I should add on social aspects as well.
Good to see you posting again!
Comment by Lumio — September 9, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
Welcome back!
The social networking angle with respect to guilds is an interesting take.
One would wonder how soon it will be before we see plugins or integration options for guilds to social networking tools like Facebook or Twitter. I know this is partially available today through 3rd party add ons (playXpert for WoW and EQ2 Guild Web Chat among others), but think that this could be vastly improved upon by game designers.
For that matter, I still think most traditional MMOs have yet to latch on to some of the features that make the lighter weight web based MMOs so ubiquitos. That being access to game features through a browser.
Comment by JoseJones — September 10, 2009 @ 11:14 am
I dislike being in a guild. Not because of the negative things you list at the start of the article, although I’ve seen some of those, but for a simple, practical reason.
When I log in, I almost always have things I want to do, and most of those things involve playing very slowly indeed, while losing myself in the detail of what I’m doing. If I’m in a guld, and I’ve been in many, then people talk to me, often. It breaks the mood, it’s distracting, and it’s almost always on non-game related topics, unless its requests for me to go and do something other than the thing I logged in to do (usually sorting my banks or gathering materials for crafting, or jumping from character to character doing little housekeeping things).
Guilds, to me, represent much of the social pressuures I took to MMOs to avoid in the first place.
I much prefer chat channels, where there’sa background buzz of conversation that doesn’t require any specific social response, but in and out of which I can jump as the mood takes me. If guilds, and guild content, could be re-designed to reduce the social responsibility and increrase the casualness of membership, then I’d be much more likely to join again.
Comment by Bhagpuss — September 10, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
Guilds are indeed a very powerful thing, even if you move between guilds every so often, the fact that they do move as a unit through multiple games (often at the same time) makes guilds quite attractive.
Comment by Grimwell — September 11, 2009 @ 2:53 pm
[...] Filed under: Guilds, Opinion, The Daily Grind With the seeming trend moving more and more towards the single-player option of soloing through MMOGs, we’ve noticed that there’s been a move away from guild content in many newer games. Apparently we aren’t the only ones who noticed it as there is an excellent post out on Journeys with Jaye that delves into guilds and makes some bold statements about what MMOs are doing wrong – or right – in regards to guilds and what developers should look at doing. [...]
Pingback by Massively: The Daily Grind: Guilds as groups, not just chat? | MMORPG News — September 12, 2009 @ 5:32 am
[...] Filed under: Guilds, Opinion, The Daily Grind With the seeming trend moving more and more towards the single-player option of soloing through MMOGs, we’ve noticed that there’s been a move away from guild content in many newer games. Apparently we aren’t the only ones who noticed it as there is an excellent post out on Journeys with Jaye that delves into guilds and makes some bold statements about what MMOs are doing wrong – or right – in regards to guilds and what developers should look at doing. [...]
Pingback by Massively: The Daily Grind: Guilds as groups, not just chat? | MMORPG News — September 12, 2009 @ 5:32 am
[...] Hoje enquanto ouvia mais um episódio do PodCast “Shut Up. We’re Talking” a co-apresentadora Karen (a.k.a. Jaye) levantou uma questão que me pareceu pertinente (para quem não quiser ouvir pode também ler no seu blog). E, basicamente, a questão é “estarão os jogos mais recentes a ter em conta as necessidades das Guilds?”. [...]
Pingback by Para além do Avatar » Guilds? até quando? — September 16, 2009 @ 7:25 am