What Makes a Guild?

I was breezing through some of the blogs on this site, and came upon a post about guilds, which really got me to thinking about what exactly makes a guild. To begin, I want to share just a bit of my own personal MMORPG background.  My journey into the world of the MMORPG didn't come from UO, Meridian 59, or any of the graphical MUDS of the era but the original Everquest -- a game that many in this community love, hate, or flat out love to hate.  At twenty years of age, I may be young by the standards of many you here as this forum seems to attract an older crowd, but I was thirteen when I first started playing EQ.  Released in 1999, EQ, as I understand it, was once an extremely group friendly game with no requirements to gather huge raiding forces or requirements to min/max your toons, or to read countless guides detailing every small nuance about an individual encounter.  Given my age, I came into the game around late 2003 and early 2004.  During this time period, the game was still the undisputed king of the genre, but the raid game had long since reared its head (whether or not it's an "ugly" head is up to your own interpretation).

Even though raiding was very prevalent in EQ around this time, and the best guild was obtained by raiding, the entire community didn't seem to have a focus on raiding.  There were just as many players sitting at max level, entirely content on running the same group instances over and over, rolling alts, helping lowbies, and generally playing casually without any desire to touch the raid content.  I began my MMORPG "life" around people of that nature, and they influenced my perspective on guilds greatly.  There was a tight knit, elite core or raiding guilds on my personal server, and the rest of the guilds ran the gamut between all sorts of playstyles.  Many guilds consisted of hardcore raiders. many guilds consisted of low level players. many guilds had a mixture of levels.  Many guilds raided casually.  Many guilds had hardcore raid alliances.

What interests me so greatly about the shift from the types of guilds available from EQ to the types of guilds available in many games today is the overwhelming desire for progression.  A guild is no longer viewed as a "family" so to speak, but instead, as a means to an end.  Players join guilds these days for the sole reason of progressing gear.  Players join guilds entirely for advancing THEIR own characters.  The guilds themselves are no exception.  I hate to use WoW as an example as it's really beating a dead horse, but the issue is far more prevalent in WoW than in games like EQ2 and LoTRO.  I admit though to seeing this trend initially in Aion, though I didn't follow the game long enough to see if that's still the case.   I once did a forum search for guild recruitmeant, and after reading through twelve pages of guilds recruiting on my server (Scarlet Crusade), I never once found a single guild that wasn't devoted to raiding.  As a player who doesn't care about raiding, and simply wants a nice place to call home while grinding through the levels, this is a serious turnoff and one of a plethora of reasons World of Warcraft never appealed to me.

Now, it's not that I mind raiding.  Quite frankly, I could care less about raiding.  I've been on a few raids and had a great deal of fun, but not only does my schedule prevent me from ever getting heavily involved with raid content but I just have no desire to play a game in a competitive sense.  I could care less what my gear is as long as I can perform at an adequate level.   I don't have to do top DPS, but I simply strive to be an average player.  I don't want to read class forums shuffling through piles of raid parse data that's largely useful to me just to find answers to simple quests.   I don't want to read a forum telling me each and every way I can potentially maximize my DPS, as that sort of thing takes away from the sense of relaxation I get from the game.  I do enough reading and studying in college, and I prefer not to take it with me while I'm playing a video game.  The issue I seem to have is somewhere along the line, I feel that many guilds have lost what I believe is honestly the true meaning behind what makes a guild a guild and that is a family.

To put it simply, just as players who join guilds have lost a sense of dedication to the great guild community, too many guilds now have a philosophy of "What can you do for us?!" not "What can we do for you?!"  In short, a guild should never be established on how well it can succeed, but instead how well the guild can help others to succeed.  Some games have a limit on how many players can be invited into the guild, but the overwhelming majority of MMOs I've experienced have no such caps, so I've always been perplexed when looking at a raid guild's website in which nearly all of them have a class listing on the side bar stating just how badly the guild needs a certain class.  The tank and healer slots are usually always listed as "high" need, and the melee DPS is usually stuck at "medium" with a few random classes who, unfortunately, are not being recruited at the moment.  Given my philosophy on guilds as a family, I've never understood this.  Why is a single class wanted more than another?  Any guild can have a core raid force no matter what level ranges the guild recruits, and it's understandable, especially given the limiting size of raids in today's MMOs, that a raid force only has room for a specific amount of players.  A raid can't be filled with 14 tanks nor can it be filled with 30 healers.  There has to be a balance, and raiders take the time to study the various encounters to tweak that balance, and that's how they estimate how many of a certain class the guild recruits.  The question is that, Why, as a level 14 mage, can I not get into said guild?  Most people would laugh at me and probably say something along the lines of, "I cannot benefit the guild."

In my view, guilds should not be so concerned with selfish issues such as how I may be able to benefit them, but instead, they should try to be as accommodating to me as possible because I am a new member.  Likewise, it is my job to prove to the guild that I'm a friendly person who's willing to help and make the guild a better place.  Instead, the two roles have swapped and guilds now seek ways in which I can accommodate them, and I seek ways in which a guild can accommodate me. 

Guilds seem to have lost the focus so many guilds from EQ and other games once had -- the focus of a family, and have instead replaced them with far to great of a focus on loot grabbing and character advancement.  Guilds stopped being a source of community where players can learn the game, play casually, and do what they choose and have simply become nothing more than a means to obtain gear.  The small amount of guilds that do choose a more casual, family oriented route often consist of nothing but low level players who can't get into any established guilds and have no one to learn from or are known as feeder guilds, simply put in place to feed their members to raid guilds once they reach the came, thus once a player reaches the max level, most of them don't even stay in the casual guilds which helped them level up.  Why?  I'm sure there could be a plethora of reasons, but mostly it's gear progression.   All the gratitude for the help and assistance small guild x did for a fresh level 80 player goes right out the window as the player seeks a raid guild so that he or she can advance his or her character.  I simply do not feel that this is what guilds should be about.  

Some of the greatest guilds I've ever been a part of were those dreaded guilds which advertise in general chat.  Granted, they didn't spam the chat, but it was used.  Some of the greatest guilds I've ever been a part of were those "catch all" guilds who weren't trying to build a group of "efficient players," but to simply swell their ranks.  Those guilds didn't require applications which rivaled the complexity of a job application to Wal-Mart, and many new players were attracted -- some good, some bad-- but I love that.  During my initial months in EQ, I was far from the player any guild dubbed halfway decent would pick up, but the guild that was kind enough to take me in didn't care how efficient I was.  They didn't care how well I played my class.  They cared about me as a person.  Grouping wasn't about how much DPS I did.  Grouping was about how my day went or how I felt I did on a test I had taken in school.  I wasn't judged by stats, by how many numbers I could put up, or my class.  I wasn't judged by my character, but I was judged by the person behind the character.  My guild appreciated me for who I was as a person at the age of thirteen, not how well I tanked or how much damage I did.  Many of those catch all guilds I've been a part of functioned the same way.  A few bad apples (which all guilds get) aside, I enjoy teaching new players the ropes of Everquest 2 and trying to teach players new to the entire genre the proper MMORPG etiquette.  I could care less at how efficient that player is.  As long as the individual is having a good time and is showing a desire to learn, I couldn't even care less what his capacity to learn said information was.

Voice chat, level requirement, websites -- all those requirements for so called "real" or "serious" guilds are entirely superficial.  I've been a member of guilds which hosted voice chat, a level requirement, and a high end website, and some were fun, but others were a drag.  None of that is essential a good guild -- not class, not level, not voice chat, not a website, not anything else other than the player behind the character.  Lastly, while it would seem I have a problem with raiding, again, I don't.   I simply have a problem with much of the philosophy that comes from it and how much the modern day guild has changed from a philosophy of helping the member to a philosophy of how the member can help the guild.