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Why Guilds need to be restricted
hutch2007
Member Posts: 7
Apologies in advance for the partly inflammatory subject, but it's something I feel strongly about and hope to foster some intelligent conversation about guilds in MMORPG.
I think that creating a Guild should not be an easy thing to do... because running a successful one is more than slightly challenging.
Just creating a guild should take a lot of game time and game money, in my opinion.
I do believe that players should be able to create fellowships so they can buddy up quickly and easily, but by allowing the creation of what is effectively a gameworld faction to be trivial, you reduce the cool factor of being part of something bigger than the sum of its members.
I think one of the better examples of "guild" is the Corporation/Alliance system in Eve Online.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to restrict guilds solely to the games "elite", but I really believe that creating and running a guild, should be a labor of love, not a quick "Hey, let me spam 10 people I don't know to help sign a charter"
What do you guys think about that subject?
Comments
I agree that guilds should be a labor of love for those that create them. However I see no reason to restrict the way that they should be created. In fact I would go to say that the idea of "spamming 10 folks to get a signature" is ridiculos, but I owuld lower to it to even less...say 3-4 to start. Those that have a very small, tight nit group of folks they game with shouldn't be regulated to having some others they don't know sign up merely to get a guild name registered. It should not require a significat amount of time or effort for my adventuring group to create a name for ourselves. It should, however, require alot of time and effort to for that guild name to mean something to the community, good or bad (though bad is easier to get).
Maybe if they create a system where folks can start off as a "named" adventure group and grow at their own pace to a guild, with benifits received for the larger guilds.
I also agree Alliances should be used more in MMO's. Guilds should be able to work together and still keep their name rather than detagging or merging together to participate in events.
"If we don't attack them, they will attack us first. So we'd better retaliate before they have a chance to strike"
If somebody doesn't put the work into maintaining their guild, then it sort of dies, doesn't it? Darwinism
MMO games played or tested: EQ, DAoC, Archlord, Auto Assault, CoH, CoV, EQ2, EVE, Guild Wars, Hellgate: London, Linneage II, LOTRO, MxO, Planetside, SWG, Sword of the New World, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard, WWIIOL, WOW, Age of Conan
I think guilds should have their own experience/level thing and skills and such. a bit of brainstorming...
By leveling up a guild could go from Fellowship to Guild to Kingdom
Level requeriments for building a castle, for guarding it with npc guards, and such.
Quests for the guild with rewards for the guild.
requeriments for each level....
"to get the Guild rank you need to have 15 members for longer than 2 months, 200 gold in the guild bank for longer than 1 month, complete this and this quest, and that"
It means something in L2 when someone has a level 5 guild..... ability to form alliances, increases in overall guild size etc...
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
yeah in WoW it was too easy to make a guild- the result was lots of small guilds trying to recruit you and then joining with noone ever online.
Thinking about it small guilds serve a purpose when you have a small group of friends that just easily want to get together and don't want too much difficulty in creating the guild. But I think there also could be some sort of larger guild structure, maybe called a clan where it is more difficult to make but you get much more perks. So then you satisfy small guilders and large guilders.
This makes no sense to me.
The law of natural selection works quite well in this regard. Good guilds will thrive, bad guilds will die out.
There is no need to create an artificial filter to control this.
The same thing was annoying for me back in the DAOC days. Always getting guild spam from every noob with "a few friends". And yea, once in a while, someone would have an interesting idea for a guild, so I'd join up with my alt, only to watch the members disappear within a week.
Personally, I think that such a restriction on guilds should only be neccessary in games that allow guilds to own territory, like EVE. In games like WoW (games where guilds can't own land or even conquer land for the faction they're a part of), guilds don't really matter until you get to the endgame. Whenevr I play WoW I see guilds only as an extra chat channel. Nothing more.
The whole "spamming 10 people" thing comes about from having artificial restrictions in place. I see it happen in WoW all the time, and many of those that sign the charter don't stay - they're only invited so the guild can become real, which defeats the purpose of needing them in the first place.
I think two people, three at most, should be required to be grouped together at the guild registrar in order to create a guild (if you don't know one or two people, you don't need to be making a guild). After that, the "labor of love" should come from leveling the guild in a system similar to Everquest II, gaining prestige and special privileges for its members.
A gameworld faction doesn't have to be a large and influential group. It can be as small as just a few people. The Fantastic Four are a perfect example from the world of comic book superheroes - they're a team, they're complete, they have a headquarters, and they are a force to be reckoned with. And there are four of them. And even if one died, or left, the group would most likely still exist (although they'd eventually need to recruit a new member or change their name).
I don't see any reason to not let everyone make a guild/organisation/fellowship/whatever. Does it harm anyone, or ruin some immersion? I say let everyone make their own one-man organisations if they want. Tons of people have those in real life.
However, I very much like the idea of a guild level or reputation system with some meaning like in e.g. Lineage II. Make it possible to register different types of organisations, with different requirements, suited for different needs. There are significant differences between a one-man company made only to be able to register domain names, a local gaming club, the Boyscouts, Microsoft, the Catholic Church, and the US Army, to just pull some examples out of thin air.
And yeah, some way to get rid of the invite spam would be nice too.
I used to use my wow alt to sign anyone's charter that needed it so obviously it doesn't bother me how many guilds are out there.
Good guilds take work? nah not really. Organized guilds take work? that I'd agree with. I was in a good guild that had no website, didn't use voice and still did fine with no one collaborating/leading what we did. The players can make the guild. Another guild had a fancy website no one used because the load time was slow. Voice there became people hiding in channels away from those they didn't like to listen to. Ya, that's a real sense of community when you avoid each other and you decide which clic to join lol
If you have less guilds you end up with more people in each guild just because they have to join or be guildless. Too many members seem to make guilds worse, the less you need to rely on someone - the less you care about them. I recall a guild where they had so many people coming and going that when someone quit people would say who was that? did they ever talk in guild chat? or worse snide comments. I've noticed that smaller guilds seem to be tighter but if you cross them by not agreeing with someone respected, welp that's the end of your inclusion in the group. Smaller ones seem to get affected more by attitudes.
I tried many times to find an answer to your topic in your own OP (Why guilds need to be restricted), but I had to conclude that your answer is: Because you say so. You think it is silly to have guilds spam invites at random people. That is why you want to restrict them.
When I first saw the topic I figured it would be a thread about how uber good guilds are and that they steal all the fun away from casual guilds. That would have made more sense than your post. Guilds are dynamic in nature because they rely upon the human resources that make them up. Most humans are pretty complicated and hard to predict at times, and not to mention they have big appetites for different things - which is perhaps one of the biggest challanges in running a successful guild. If you dont love it, you will fail. So humans already restrict guilds. Maybe there are too few of them, too many, too different, too young, too ambitious etc.
Most MMOs Ive been in have had options to automatically turn down offers to join guilds. Same with fellowships/teams. If your point is that this feature should be upheld and continued in the future then I agree. If it isn't your point, then I dont know what your point is...