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Are we gaming in a "post-guild" era?
Beatnik59
Member UncommonPosts: 2,413
Something lizardbones said in the "Group Content Doesn't Work for Most People" thread really stuck with me. I'll paste it here:
"I am of the opinion, that we are in a post Guild era. Too many people have joined multiple groups on Facebook, or followed many people on Twitter or Tumblr, etc. The idea of joining one group, and only one group probably seems like an alien idea to a lot of gamers. Guilds as a game construct also seem to be limited to MMORPGs. For instance, a person playing an FPS or MOBA could join multiple guilds, and play each of those games as members of multiple guilds. They could play an MMORPG as a member of multiple out of game guilds too. But in game, it's one Guild, and one Guild only.
Maybe there needs to be something in addition to Guilds. Something that brings people together on a social level, but with looser ties than a Guild. Something that is the equivalent of a Facebook group, but in game. Players choose one Guild, but many groups, with all the social tools available to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr users. I know, I know, this sounds like the apocalypse, but the industry has to move with the players. It's not going to move any other way."
This is something I think we ought to discuss, because it seems clear to me that guilds, clans--whatever you want to call them--aren't as central to the games today. I mean, you have a game like League of Legends who grew to such extreme numbers without any formal guild system even attached. They are working to attach one now, but one wonders if it is even necessary.
Moreover, today's guild seems to be organized outside of the game, either on a webpage or on a voice server, and they don't seem to even play on the same game together when they log on. It is not uncommon to have two people in WoW, four people on LoL, five people on WildStar and a couple doing their own thing on Minecraft. You look at something like EVE, and you get these 1,000 person alliances where half or more of the members don't even log on unless there's a fleet action.
Don't get me wrong, people still join guilds, but it seems to me that the games are just as playable without them. Some may say this is a bad thing, some may say it is a good thing. Whatever you think of it, however, we ought to discuss it.
So I have a few questions:
1) Do we game in a "post-Guild" era today?
2) If we are, what do guilds need to do to "sell themselves" to players?
3) If we aren't, what is the guild doing to maintain its relevance today?
4) What did the guild do, what is the guild doing now, and what will the guild likely develop into in the future?
Feel free to answer those, or discuss whatever else you want.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Comments
I believe the days of guilds functioning as glorified chat rooms are largely gone for most people. The last thing I personally want in a game is to have yet another social network to worry about that doesn't really serve any purpose (many games now you can do almost everything solo). If it's a game based on PVP or some other large group actions I think guilds are still important though just as an organizing and community building tool or roleplay guilds in games that encourage roleplaying.
But in your average quest-grind themepark game what purpose does a guild of strangers really serve other than providing a less retarded alternative to the general chat?
Interesting conversation. Maybe we just need to revise the definition of Guild?
I wouldn't consider it a post-guild era, but we are at the point where developers have basically allowed players to use 3rd party communication tools without consequence and this has grown to be acceptable behaviour.
In other words, it is cheating that has become accept behaviour, and developers don't have an acceptable answer for it so they just ignore it.
1) Obviously I think so. :-)
2) Guilds were the best way through the Gear Treadmill. Unless developers are planning on not having a gear treadmill, this probably shouldn't change. There should be a most efficient method. I do think there's needs to be something in addition to this though. Loktofelt mentioned location based grouping within a game, like towns that players could gather in that are part of the game play, but also allow players to just "hang out" and group up or chat. Something simple would be some sort of in game system like a bulletin board so players can keep track of other player's while they aren't logged in.
3) Taking the opposite view, Guilds need to have more social tools instead of more management tools. That bulletin board system should exist for guild members. Players should have the option of if not joining other guilds being ambassadors or liaisons with other guilds to tie more people and more guilds together.
4) For me, guilds have always been primarily a social system, not a economic system for getting gear. When I joined guilds, I joined guilds because people I work with in real life or are friends with in real life were members of or ran those guilds. It seems like guilds are a system for players to consume content in a more efficient manner for most people though. I think this devalues the player's experience and most people should have the experience I had. Guilds as an extension of a larger set of social interactions. What will guilds become? I have no idea.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
When there's less interdependence and grouping becomes more automated, of course the importance of guilds is diminished.
For me personally - i don't know anyone who plays MMO's in real life so the guild is still important to me. I also like to keep my online life separate from my real one so guilds serve this purpose as well.
I don't care much for FPS, MOBA's, Facebook, or Twitter so again a guild is all i need. Would i like guilds to be expanded on? For sure. Do i want them turned into social media? Fuck no.
Getting into a good guild makes the game so much better. It requires some effort and time and I can see why some casual players avoid them.
http://gnomophobia.com
can't talk for you, but i am surely not playing in a post-guild area.
still in the same guild since diablo 1.
"believe me, mike.. i calculated the odds of this working against the odds that i was doing something incredibly stupid and i did it anyway!"
I would definitely agree that it's a post-guild era, brought about by changes in how modern gamers communication and the linear nature of most MMOs.
I really expected devs to start building for the modern gamer a half a decade ago , but we really haven't seen anything more than Twitch integration and the ability to post achievements to Facebook. In that regard, I'm very disappointed in MMO developers as a whole, as they seem to be stuck in some pre-social media age, where no one owns cell phones (let alone the pocket computers that they are now) and 1010 WINS' (You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world) is the fastest way to get late breaking news.
The linear nature is also a blocker. When guilds advertise, they are almost always one of three things:
Crafting guilds rarely last because the games don't support that as a dedicated path. Progression guilds are, well... I was surprised to see how far we have fallen. I'll leave it as that. Casual guilds often have no direction, often because there is little to do other than chat in voice comms, level casually, and not be bothered by the disparity in levels.
"But in your average quest-grind themepark game what purpose does a guild of strangers really serve other than providing a less retarded alternative to the general chat?" - iridescence
Very good point.
Check out Kaneva. Browse the web-based portal and explore the 3D virtual world. Try to imagine some of those features in a modern MMO. Several MMO developers are already incorporating some of those ideas in upcoming titles, but this should have been here years ago. When your bread and butter is based on the greatest boon to the advancement of communication and technology since the railroad, there is no excuse for being behind the times.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
As long as the guild members do things together on a regular basis there are good reasons to be together in a guild. The problem is that most guilds lack a purpose, and players remain in a guild just to be in a guild.
You can replace a guild with a chat channel and a forum, that's how I conducted raiding back in vanilla wow. The reasons for this was being on an rp-server and it never caused us any problems. However, it did cause lots of friction in other guilds that saw their members raiding with us, so many of our players did end up in a single guild, mostly just to get away from guild drama.
The "connections" that we make on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the myriad other social media are all transient and essentially shallow. You can "friend" somebody just as easily (and quickly) as you can drop them.
The way MMO's are played nowadays is similar. It's transient and short-term, and the players demand that everything must be accessible if they "don't have time" to group. During the race to level cap after launch, nobody has time to wait for a specific group to all be around so they can progress. They just hit the group finder, join a pug and continue powerleveling.
If they do join a guild, it's just to get the maximum benefit during their 2 months ingame. Nobody bothers talking, because after 2 months you'll probably be done with the game and never "see" those guildies again.
None of the modern MMO's are designed in ways that make guild membership desirable. Players only need one character (due to flexible classes) and you can easily solo to level-cap. You may even have a shot at BiS gear if you feel like grinding dailies for long enough.
If you're part of a big online multigaming clan, then you'll probably play an MMO in a group that you already know. The ingame guild structure will possibly make your gameplay easier, but it won't tie you to the game, because your "guild" is independant of any single MMO.
I agree, Loktofeit, but what I find interesting is how the notion of a "roleplay guild" is almost entirely absent from the discussion of guilds these days.
Because coming out of the MUSH era, the only guilds which were running around were roleplay guilds. If you weren't interested in roleplaying a theme, there would really be no point in joining a guild.
Now when we talk roleplay guilds, we need to think of it in two ways:
"Roleplay/Thematic"
You saw this kind of guild in games like SWG or UO, who were a bunch of folks who roleplayed a common theme. Perhaps they roleplayed a knightly order, with all sorts of associated rituals. Perhaps in SWG, they played a stormtrooper regiment or a political faction associated with the Rebellion. You saw this kind of thing in CoH to a greater or lesser extent.
"Roleplay/Functional"
This was the kind of thing you saw mainly in PK games like UO. You'd have a group of PKers who wanted to play bandits, and you had in response a group of players who would task themselves with anti-PK. You still find this kind of thing in EVE to some extent.
In both cases, however, the point of the guild is to produce content, specifically for their members, but perhaps for others as well. These days, however, your typical gamer or guild boss doesn't think of a guild as a means to "produce" content in a game, but as a means of "consuming" content in a game.
Does that sound accurate?
On an unrelated note...
I'm of the thought that the death of the guild wasn't a recent phenomenon, but was already apparent even deep in the WoW era. Once you get the people interacting with each other out of the game (on TS or Vent), there's really nothing substantial tying you to the game anymore.
Which is why, I suspect, the games are becoming less guild-centric as time goes on. I actually have to disagree with some of the posters here who say that "it is in the interest of the developers to promote guilds, because guilds tie you to the game longer than if you had no guild." That may have been the case at one time, but after studying guild dynamics as of late, the exact opposite is happening.
Far too many times, I've seen scenarios like this in guild chat.
Player A logs in...
Player A: "Hey, what's up?"
Player B: "Hey man."
Player C: "Yo."
Player
"Wassup?"
Player A: "Dude, you should see what I just did in Minecraft...my lair is so cool."
Player B: "Really?"
Player A: "Yeah, it's the bomb."
Player B: "Hey C, are you still grinding to level 45?"
Player C: "Yeah...I'll be there in, like, less than ten minutes."
Player
"We were going to do the [insert content here] chain with C...wanna join, A?"
Player A: "I don't have much time...I need to get back to Minecraft."
Player B: "Dude, I want to see what you did in Minecraft, A."
Player
"Me too. Hey C...we're going to Minecraft while you finish up."
Player C: "KK."
Player A, B and D logout.
Ten minutes later...
Player C: "Hey, I'm ready to raid!"
Silence...Player C tabs out and goes AFK.
Time passes...
Time passes...
Time passes...
Player C logs out.
See what happened here? Far from connecting people to the game, guilds today tear people from the game. And things only get worse once TeamSpeak or other VOIP is involved, because you can actually hear other people having fun in other games, and you don't want to miss out.
Is it any wonder, therefore, why the Devs may have wanted to move us into a post-Guild era?
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
To ask if this is a post-guild era is to imply that there has ever been a guild era. I'm skeptical that there ever was, and even if there ever was one, it ended at least a decade ago.
The only MMORPG I've ever played where guilds had important functionality other than as a chat channel was A Tale in the Desert. Probably not coincidentally, ATITD was also the only MMORPG I've played where players could join and be active in multiple guilds simultaneously. Indeed, multi-guilding was not merely accepted but largely encouraged, with many players in a dozen guilds or more.
Some games like GW2 and FFXIV have thrown on some buffs to try to give guilds a point. Puzzle Pirates had island ownership, but that was really just something for a few elites in an alliance to tinker with. Some games might let you have a guild hall or some such, but that's decorative, not something that the game is built around.
Most MMORPGs seem to actively discourage doing much with guilds due to their level system. If a level 40 can't reasonably group with a level 50, then guild groups are probably out of the question for most of the playerbase.
I say it is a good thing. Why would a group of people who want to play games want to be limited by a single game? Most people play multiple games, and if the function of a guild is social, then it has MORE power across multiple games, than limited to just one?
1) Yes
2) Nothing ... they should just "join" the new form of guilds. Guilds on a single game single server is way of the past. There is no reason not to move forward.
3) Just become a group of friends who play games.
4) Dunno .. may be they will be gone, and everyone just maintain a friend list.
Post-guild, no.
Community-guild, yes.
Guilds dedicated to any one specific game tend to do less well each year. People are too spread out across multiple games. Very few games have people that stick to them almost exclusively. (Basically you have LoL, CS:GO, WoW, etc.)
Most of the guilds that have endured have accepted this. And have structured themselves in a way to allow their members to play multiple games, without being punished for it. Those that don't, tend to have repeated problems with membership. As people continuously leave to play something else.
PvE is moving away from group/guild and probably rightfully so. Interactive movies are new thing and you shouldn't be forced to bring friends just to watch scenes.
Guilds still serve a place in PvP and always will. You can't just go in as unorganized cluster and expect to be successful.
That's a very good point. Devs acknowledged that shift early on, which is why you see a lot of post-WOW MMOs put restrictions of some sort on the number of people and such needed to form a guild. The hope was so that there wouldn't be a billion one-man guilds but that people would join together under those with the resources and interest to at least meet the creation requirement. I think that's been pretty much abandoned, at least in the West.
The shift, however, from producing to consuming is very evident.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
this^
I think the concept of Guilds need to be revised, and it needs to evolve. An in game guild in its current state is not a real guild. It is similar to a facebook group or steam group with no interaction outside of maybe a couple friends that belong to it. The bigger the guild becomes the more anti social the system is.
I dont know how but Guilds need to be drastically overhauled and change to something where members depend on each other. For example, if its a crafting guild, have guild outposts where only members of the guild can work on them and players go there and interact with the guild workers to get crafting stuff done, not just having an npc with a shop like ESO is doing. Real guild members offering the service to other players. And add to that a system like XIV where your crafting profession is your entire class so you only have to focus on your trade. Therefore making you more dependable on guild members to interact with each other when things require more than one profession to be created. But do not allow each character more than one crafting profession, that only takes away from player interaction and dependance on the guild.
If people cant depend on each other to do things, then there is no point in having ¨social¨ features in a game. Mind as well remove the chat box and let everyone on their own.
Yup this was pretty much my experience also. Out of probably 200 to 300 players stil listed in our guild, only about 5 still play. Some played for months, others come and go in weeks or less. Most of the time they just leave as well, with no explanation either. So eventually after a month or so you say, " I guess ole whatshisface isn't coming back" hard to plan anything when you don't know if people will show up the next day.
Its hard to find anyone willing to commit to a game anymore, unless that game is WoW, and now its time is ending. People just don't have the patience, and generally aside from socializing there is not much use for the guild as it stands today.
I always love the new players that just come into a mature game and immediately want to start their own guild instead of joining an established one. 99% of the time they are gone within a month.
A good guild is a wonderful thing while it lasts, but I agree, they need to become more relevant in games and not just chat rooms.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
What you both describe is a problem with guild leaders, not with guilds.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I gotta disagree with you there Loktofeit, I think we had one of the best players in the game as our leader. This guy had the experience , knew everything about the game, was helpful etc. He was the main reason I stayed.
He related a story to me how he spent a lot of time training a certain player to improve his PvP. At first he did not expect much but then apparently this player had some type of aptitude for it and became quite deadly at it. And then he disapeared. Just like that. So all that time grooming a player and expecting him to take a major role in the guild and it just all goes for nothing. Constant recruiting of players, only to watch them get 10 or 15 levels and disappear. He went so far as to craft all members a uniform , so that we could show up at game functions in our own guild gear. This guy tried, and we tried to help, but people just seem to drift away to the next big game, and leave it all behind.
Thats why I think its a post guild era. The vast majority of gamers will spend less than 6 months in a game. No point in having guilds if it is just a revolving door, where by the time you learn their name they are gone.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
I agree, if only for the reason that when less trust is given at the start, there is less hurt when said trust is inevitably not equivalently repayed. I've been a guild leader myself at one point, and it certainly is a heartbreaking job sometimes.
As long as I don't have to read them.
If people want to chat, i don't see a reason not to provide a chat-box (which is cheap to implement).
But I agree ... i don't mind if games eliminate social features. You can always do it outside of the game (from SKYPE to FB) anyway.
Lost any interest in big guilds as soon one of them in classic wow wanted an "interview" and a "probe period". I only care about small friendly guilds with people I like to chat with, I don't care about how good players are them as long they are nice and able to have a nice chat.So I am quite glad that gold era of guilds in mmos is over,I can't wait for a mmo with no guilds at all,a friend list is more than enough.