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General: Outside the Box: Guilds
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
News Editor Garrett Fuller pens this most recent edition of his column, Outside the Box. Today, Garrett discusses the use of guilds in MMORPGs.
Guilds, Guilds, Guilds....this is what the MMO world has become. I know, there are many of you out there who feel that solo play is the way to go, but face it, unless you are part of the Guild, there are some parts of games you will never see. This week I wanted to talk a little about the guild structure we are seeing in MMOs. Mark Kern made a great comment last week in our interview about how being part of a guild can become like having a part time job. While I do believe guilds in MMOs are great, I definitely agree with Mark. How do we balance game play for a guild with game play for ourselves? If any guild leaders read this column I would like to hear your comments in the forums on experiences and ideas to make guilds better for everyone.
I have played in guilds ever since Ultima Online. The structure of a guild over the years of MMOs has changed little. There is a leader who decides to found the guild. Officers who can help call the shots. Then there are the members who all contribute to the community on many different levels. One of the hardest things I have found as a guild leader was that I felt I always had to be online. I would try to play and constantly get asked for help in doing quests and things. It got to the point where I was no longer enjoying my time in game because I was being pulled in so many directions. This can be tough to handle and also really eat up time.
Read the whole column here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Right now, we are spread across 3 games with some of us adding a 4th and 5th to the list of games played by members. We don't require anyone to have to show up as we all understand how busy life can get. One of our members is going through law school, another is about to start a PhD program in a couple months. One of our members is a RIT Firefighter working towards getting hired on. We have a few IT professions in the guild, one working for a major cable provider. We recently had someone join that lives in another country.
The best thing I love about my guild is the fact we like to do things with smaller groups. In EQ, we would constantly run the Hole in a single group when people constantly told us it couldn't be done. We would be in Kael Drakkal farming King Tormax's room with a single group and a Monk puller. Sometimes we had more, but it was more an exception to the rule. We were deep in Stonehenge farming right above the lizard pit at level 30 when all you could get was coin bags. We love taking on challenges that are too hard for most people. We did Strath, Scholo and BRS with smaller groups than normally went. I love my guild. We have a great time together.
I have a long history in the fansite / MMORPG scene with Hades Hall of Warfare-UO, Shadowbane Warcry - Total War, Coldfront Networks - Guild Wars, Asheron's Call - Warcry, etc.
In relation to this article I recently wrote about the State of MMORPG Online Gaming, and how even guilds have issues with forced grouping, quest grinding, etc in today's game. Even if you have a successful guild, the time you have to put into it to continue to be successful seems to increase the more "forced socialization" there is in a game.
In addition, I also wrote an article on Building and Maintaining Successful Guilds. This is based on my personal experience with leading a top tier competitive MMORPG PVP guild over the years, and ensuring that good junior leadership is developed as time goes on and new leaders are needed. Beckett's Online Gamer liked it a lot, and will probably publish it at a later date.
I do agree that games don't do a good job of supporting guilds. Too often you can't game with your friends if you outlevel them, so many guilds try to plan out their progression with plans that cover everything from character development to raid content. People join a guild to develop a network of friends to game with, and folks who aren't team players are usually quickly identified and dismissed. Like sports, a guild is a team effort and requires its members to do things for the good of the team. If the guild is successful, everyone shares in that success. That said, its very important for quality guilds to screen applicants and only select those who appear to have a desire to integrate with the guild.
Either way guilds are good for a game community if run correctly, and can be a positive gaming experience for casual or hard core gamers as long as they do research on potential guilds prior to joining.
Supreme Leader Hades
The Imperial Aces
Discord: https://discord.gg/CjBP4dc
Been running communities since Starcraft, though that was all friends in the same state, it amounted to the same thing. Went Online with Tribes and joined a great group of people from Strategic Alliance [S=A] where I was appart of running one of the largest tribes in that game. Everything from competition to casual play, like the previous posters we were in several games by the ned of it, and even a core of those members still create guilds in games such as City of Heros, Lineage II, WoW, LOTRO, ShadowBane, Guild Wars to name but a few.
In short I have seen alot of good and bad. I have been in the very small to the very large guild and each offers a unique expierence, I have worked my way up from a lowest grunt to leader, and started groups from scratch as the leader. I hate the word guild mostly becuase it doesn't explain what we do. We build communities, call it what you want.
The greatest thing that comes from community (Guild/Clan/Tribe/Gang/Superhero team) is being appart of something bigger than yourself, and knowing that you are surrounded for the most part by people who share your interest. It is being able to play with people who you can actually trust in game, and sometimes it will lead to real life friends. Thats the reward of the Guild.
What disappoints me the most is the lack of community building tools in most games. I'm not sure who decided that a chat channel, a tabard where all that guilds needed to organize themselves, but I really hope developers start to innovate in this area agian soon. The Cookie Cutter is broken and needs to be fixed.
Rage - Head Honcho of the Revilers
"Ragemore and Whine Less"
I've got limited experience of guilds and what experience I have got is in WOW. But my main problem with guilds, is that I seemed to be constantly asked by players much lower level than me, to hold their hands through quests. The OP mentioned this but it's really put me off being in a guild at all. If you refuse to help people too often you start being thought of an unhelpful guild member, but most of the time I want to be doing something that is close to my level so I can progess a little.
For me being forced to be in a guild to experience some of the high level content isn't very desirable. It feels more like a job if you have to be on at a certain time to do an instance. I would like to see all instances require a max of 5 people so you could get a group together fairly easily and on the spur of the moment, not require loads of planning. Ideally the skill of the players should decide whether you are successful in an instance, not how many people you've got, or what uber kit they've got.
I believe a lot of players strive for both competitive and cooperative play in their gaming experience. I think developers need to focus more on these drivers than just character development. Whether it is fighting for a city you built, a faction/nation or something else, players want to compete against other players but they also want to form social groups in the game that are fighting and striving for the same end. People have very strong pack insticts and being made to feel part of something greater than working towards your avatar's next level is important to achieving a sustaining player base and a fun game in my opinion. Lessen the drive for gear, levels, and/or money for your character and focusing the game on team goals should be the goals developers are designing into their games. Guilds or guild-like structures are needed to make these goals achievable.
Tools need to continue to develop to not only assist guilded players in organizing to achieving team goals in a game, but unguilded players also need to feel they can participate in these meta-goals. An example, would be to assign a new player to a unit, clan, watch, etc. populated with other unguilded players and provide these non-player created entities with the same tools as guilds with maybe the additional help of a CM to check in and provide missions/goals for the unit to achieve.
I lead my FPS Clan, while my girlfriend leads our guild in KalOnline. It already works like 2 years and we have experienced bad times and a lot of good times. But it really eats time. Luckily I can spend this time with my girlfriend, so we have something we both like to do. You always have a helping hand or a person that understands your problems. Also, if she needs some outtime, I can take over leading the guild. But most guild-leaders aint in this lucky situation. They are on their own. And if you aint 24/7 online for your guild, your guild breaks down. As leading a clan is time-eating and also taking most of your ingame time, its sad that leaders or the leadership at all dont get any special bonus from their doing. If their would be a bonus, more people would show up for helping to lead a guild.
The good thing in KAL is, if you are into party and the lowest char to the highest char differs more than 15 lvl, the lower char doesnt get any EXP and (Quest)Drops, maybe some money. So, you always have an excuse for not going with the lowest chars for their quests. From time to time we just buy some cheap quest items for our noobs.
Garret Fuller asked for a reward system. KalOnline has a reward system for helping noobs. They have a teacher/student program. Both, teacher and student receive money, but this only works a few level. After that the teacher gets the rest of the students playtime from every money bag about 5-10%. So, the teacher has to equip their student with some good stuff. Now guess what?! This system was abused but some players by creating more and more characters and just gathering more and more stuff from nice teachers. Nower days you can only have one teacher each Game-ID, but three chars on each Game-ID, but abusing this system keeps going on, thatwhy most players dont agree to students, neither to help smaller chars.
Yeah...rewards...for the time a guild leader spends on leading he should get a special reward - something like a "guild-leader-only-armor". This armor does not need to have special attributes, just if a Leader wears it, it should change the color or some mythtical blurr around the char, just to show:"Step aside - I am guildleader!"
But you can not give leaders a bonus like extraExp or money, as suddenly noobguilds will pop-up faster than any annoying ad on your browser. Maybe leaders should get a reward due to the level of the guild and time he/she already leads it. Both combined, lets say, a guild with 3/4 of the maximum number of players, highest guild-lvl possible and both already lead over a year: give the leader a special armor. Or open the possibilty to enter special areas, extra EXP...something special that helps in daily PvE and PvP.
The main thing is that you have to ask yourself what type of guild do I want?
For me it was simple.. a guild that liked to have fun, was helpful and was respectful to not only other members but to all players as well.
We have gone through about 3 guild leaders (each remained with the guild just passed on the torch) and each time I have been pretty much the #2 guy. Taking on civic duties and guild duties is quite a bit of stuff to be responsible for. It got to the point for me where I created another account just so I could escape and play for a while without a tell every 2 minutes.
Over time things got easier. The leaders appointed senate members. Witch helped distribute the responsibilities. Having a core group of players who you trust and share the same vision is important .
What I would like to see is better communication venues for guild members. I did like the way EVE had setup their communication systems. Multiple windows and multiple groups and being able to view them all.
Communication is a guild leaders best friend and and feature that helps that is always a plus.
From my experience as a guildleader of several WoW RP guilds there is a number of things that can be done to make things easier for guildmasters.
Guild-Alliance
Guild alliances should be available and easy to set up (similar to guildwars). This is especially handy on an RP server, because you obviously get a lot of small guilds there. Right now in games like WoW guildmasters need to do everything, so it would be nice to see the ability for setting up a PVE guildalliance should be way easier. Such a guild-alliance would not share guildchat, but would automatically open an alliance chat (similar to guildwars).
Guild-bank & inbuild DKP system
This would be great, especially if guildmasters can set this up easily. A DKP system would have to be versatile and could work especially great if time spend and appointmens made can be automatically tracked and guildmasters/officers can give penalties/rewards based on behavior in this system. Either that or make instancing/looting in such a way that a DKP system isn’t needed.
Advanced guild calendar and guild options
There should be an advanced guild roster/agenda in the game, giving guildleaders the option to share information with members. To many times guildleaders have to use their website forums. What I mean is guildleaders should be able to make big notes about players, the message of the day should be bigger, all members should be able to view a calendar where events can be posted by officers. Furthermore it would be great to have officers be able to automate ingame reminders for important events. Furthermore it should be possible for officers to track notes of individual members, for example to automatically set a warning so other officers can view the warning.
Jenner
url=http://www.enjin.com]
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