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How do you go about finding a guild now days?
ragz45
Member UncommonPosts: 810
I'm curious, for anyone that has found themselves without a guild in a new or older MMO lately. How did you go about finding friends, and a guild, to play with? Did you look through forum posts? Group with people for a dungeon, and found you liked them? Or just answer a spam message in general chat?
Lately I've found myself without a tight knit guild, kind of bouncing around, feeling quite listless. Usually I find that the people I'm playing with tie me down to an MMO more than the MMO it's self. Granted the MMO still needs to be decent, but if you have a really good group of players, you often times will find yourself playing a game long past it's expiration date just to play with "friends".
Lately I've found myself without a tight knit guild, kind of bouncing around, feeling quite listless. Usually I find that the people I'm playing with tie me down to an MMO more than the MMO it's self. Granted the MMO still needs to be decent, but if you have a really good group of players, you often times will find yourself playing a game long past it's expiration date just to play with "friends".
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Redneck Gamer Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC59QVuMC0suY-jjTHneKYgAThe decade I raided I checked out guild forums a lot, would spend days finding the right match and then proceed to pick up conversations with people from said guilds ingame, get a feel for the members and guild management.
In new games I pick a guild from nice guild advertisements in public chats. It can take a day or a month before I see an advertisement I think clicks with me, but when new in a game I like to just pick up the ropes slowly on my own anyway, find out if I actually like the game first before I commit to a guild. No rush.
But mostly its been pure coincidence. Meet a player here and there, continue to bump into them, share views on a bit of this and that and often I end up getting invited to really great guilds.
Guilds just often are on a set timer, they perish over time, then I move on. Usually with relative ease, because I dont stop mingling with people outside the guilds, while I am in them. So a word to a friend, that a guild turned inactive and the doors are often open to new places.
I am in really great guilds now in the games I play, but I have a feeling once these guilds perish I am probably mostly done with being in guilds at all.
My gametime have become more and more limited over the years and investing myself in people, getting to know so many people, only to watch them move on eventually, it is a bit draining honestly.
But mingling with people, playing the game itself and just stumbling into nice folks, seems to have been my way of doing things.
So a bit of every suggestion you made.
Gl on your adventures!
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Really bummer, as an old school MMORPG player from the days of UO, EQ1, etc I look back and remember what the genre used to be like, how social and active the communities were. Then I look at what we have now, and I am saddened.
Someone in a thread the other day posted a similar concern i have with gaming..."guild hopping".To me it is like saying ok today you are my friends because i need something from you but tomorrow i have different friends because now i need to USE them and forget you.
I don't like it one bit and says a lot about the developer's who allow this crap.I feel EQ2 did the best job of creating a guild atmosphere.
So this is yet another hurdle in trying to find a quality developer behind a quality game.Just seems so many bad ideas in gaming right now,idk who started it all but i can surely see most like to copy all these bad ideas.
One of the best ideas i got a hint from was EQ2.They used to have this idea where your guild could go out on a sort of guild quest to kill some elite Boss.I don't remember all the details or rewards but something like that could be improved on in a similar fashion or spur other similar ideas.There is definitely a lot of ideas out there to bring about some meaningful guild ideas but developers are just so dam cheap and lazy when comes to actual content,aside from xp quests and instances.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Admittedly, I have only ever been in three guilds. One guild I have been in since 2007 and I joined because my real life boss was in it, my first guild was in SWG but I was very casual, then I had 2 months in WAR as a returning player where I needed a guild. However, I have been a guild leader for years, so I can offer some advice.
1) Determine what you want from the guild first. Then start searching.
No point joining a RP guild if all you want to do is raid, or joining a PvP guild if you love dungeons. If all you want is people to be sociable with, keep thinking. Being social is facilitated by content - shared experiences - so make sure the content you want to do matches the guild.
2) Never join new guilds
In my experience, they are the least stable, usually set up because the guild leader got kicked from a previous guild and is on an ego trip. There are exceptions, but they are rare. Better to go for an established guild - chances are they've worked out the kinks and established some good working practices. It can make it a bit harder to break into the cliques but I think it's worth it.
3) PUGs
There is nothing quite like doing dungeons with people to get to know them. This used to be my favourite recruiting tool, but with the solofication of MMOs this has become harder. In LotRO as guild leader, I would make a point of PUGing a lot. The dungeons were 6 man, so I'd get 2-4 from the guild and pug the rest. The game had built in voice chat, so it meant you could take on much harder content than if you were just using text chat, but you also got a better feel for people. The pugs would hear the friendly banter from me and my guildies, combined with seeing a successful run, and we'd get to know them.
That said, this same strategy failed miserably in SW:TOR. Without built in chat, most pugs were unwilling down download vent and connect to our server, so PUGing just became unbearable steamrolling of content with no chatting. It was dull and boring for everyone. Combined with the lack of challenge that game had, there was no way to really judge the skill of the player either.
4) Research
I am an endgame focused player - I get my fun from PvP and challenging group PvE - so I would need to know that the guild I want to join can handle it. This means I want a dedicated voice chat system (vent or equivalent, not skype), a dedicated website with forum (not just facebook) so we can discuss builds and strategies, as well as a robust scheduling and loot system.
Without these things, I know the guild is going to run into serious problems when tackling my favourite content. So, I do my research. I speak to existing members, read their forum posts and check out their website.
5) Find that personal connection
Granted, as I've basically only ever been in one guild, this has been easier, yet it is the personal connections that make guilds special. When I start LotRO, I joined my guild because my boss was it in, yet we weren't necessarily friends. However, various people "clicked" with me over the coming months and each one made the guild seem special. Over time we formed our own cliques within the guild.
Before joining a guild, I'd try to find someone to click with first. This makes integration within the guild much easier once you do join, but even if the rest of the guild sucks, at least you'll have that one person and chances are, if you then left, they'd come with you.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"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
WoW has raiding, which is something that brings the guild together to accomplish a goal. But 1) a lot of people hate raiding for one reason or another 2) the other 5-6 days of the week, often times no one is even online in that WoW guild, or they do nothing together. So this is also a flawed system.
Meeting someone while playing the game feels natural. Chances are you met them during an activity you both like, meaning you are likely to meet them again. This shared connection with at least a few members have always allowed me to feel like part of the guild. This does not necessarily need to be true when you join a guild through an advert or a global post.
There is a psychological concept called the propinquity effect. People tend to be friends with who they meet most often. If you meet the same person on your morning way to the office, chances are you'll become friends eventually, just because you meet them daily. A lot of games don't really support meeting people anymore - the zones are instanced, combat groups are randomly matched, sometimes you even group across servers. If you eliminate the possibility of repeatedly meeting the same stranger, it's going to be very hard to make any long term relationships at all.
Start with their forums, if they don't have one scratch the guild off your list. If they are using social media or some such instead of a forum, same thing. If the guild has no place for meaningful discussion about anything why join it?
If you are uncertain about the guild you might want to create an alt to test the water for you. But these days many MMOs allow you to see a players alts, social media profile and lifestyle details. Ok they are not that bad yet but you get the idea.
Good luck, their are still great guilds out there, in fact its one of the few MMO elements that modern MMO "innovation" has not yet removed or diluted down to such an extent it becomes meaningless.