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Role of Guilds? Can they be improved?
irpugboss
Member UncommonPosts: 427
I would love to see what this community thinks about Guilds or player grouping in online games. The questions below will hopefully reflect what most of our baseline experiences with guilds are, and what can be done to improve them.
1. Please list the game(s) including guild like grouping that you will be using for consideration for the following questions.
2. What roles do you feel are filled by your game Guilds?
Roles being impact on the world through war, trading, politics, simple grouping, etc. Feel free to elaborate on any roles you think the Guilds fulfill in your game.
3. What role should Guilds fulfill in the game's worlds?
Roles being impact on the world through war, trading, politics, simple grouping, etc. Feel free to elaborate on any roles you think the Guilds fulfill should fulfill in games.
4. What features do you commonly see in your preferred game Guilds, or player grouping?
- Feature here
- Feature here
- Feature here
- Make as many as needed
5. What features do you think should be added into Guild interfaces and/or functions?
- Feature here
- Feature here
- Feature here
- Make as many as needed
6. Feel free to discuss other factors, thoughts or opinions below.
Comments
For me.. Guilds would be the best attributes from many games I have played in the past.. IN MY OPINION..
I view guilds as another social outlet, one of which has been ignored more and more each released game.. LFG should not be your first option to finding a group in a game.. In fact I think the LFG option in most games actually makes a guild less attractive.. Same can be said for the LFR option as well.. I have always viewed being in a guild as the best option to communicate with other players other then the standard general chat.. The more and more devs turn games into lobby based queuing end games, the less important social guilds become..
My guild experience started in EQ with needing to join one to do raids in ToV (Vel expansion).. As much as the guild was rating me, I was in turn rating them.. Being compatible with a guild works both ways.. Many times when just looking for a group, I used guild chat FIRST to find some action.. In many cases there would be 3 or 4 of us instantly grouping up and with our guild tags, we had no problem EVER finding more to fill out the group.. Our guild tag meant something, which was nice.. We were an honorable guild and had a very good reputation.. Most of the time our guild was involved in 90% of the boss kills in the game..
Over the years I was blessed, in joining 2 other guilds in 2 different games (SWG and WoW) in where being in a guild was great.. However, towards the end of my WoW years and in other games, guilds became a ghost town as well.. Guild chats were only used for raid talking, and was often empty socializing.. Even when ventrillo came about, audio guild chat was just as empty.. The only time the guilds were active is when it was raid night.. BORING.. People were often playing alts (NOT IN THE GUILD) and with using lfg option never needed a guild till end game..
I enjoyed the guild ranking system that WoW uses for the most part and love guild banking and storage..
1. Please list the game(s) including guild like grouping that you will be using for consideration for the following questions.
Runescape - Clans (In RS Clans=Guild, the difference is only in name convention)
2. What roles do you feel are filled by your game Guilds?
Power in numbers. When I collect resources for my clans citadel I get bonus experience while doing so, and experience giving items to use when I am skilling out side the citadel. The more people who cap weekly resources the higher our rank and the more improved out citadel becomes. Higher rank = more benefits to the individual. But, beyond this there is more readily available help when I need it. Being able to rally people to go boss, dung, do challenges, or minigame is great. And having a group of people to poll for an answer to questions the wikia doesn't address is also wonderful.
3. What role should Guilds fulfill in the game's worlds?
Guilds should first and foremost be examples to the unaffiliated. They should be symbols of unity and solidarity. And, they should always strive to uphold ethical conduct within respects to the game. A good guild should be a games best face.
4. What features do you commonly see in your preferred game Guilds, or player grouping?
5. What features do you think should be added into Guild interfaces and/or functions?
6. Feel free to discuss other factors, thoughts or opinions below.
Most of this pertains to my MMORPG of choice, Runescape. But, for guilding in general. The biggest bane for me, is that it seems most guilds in most games I have played have a heavy downtime. And, because of that a lot of games have downtime hours, where there is just not a lot of active people on.
1. I'll refer to three experiences: UO (the only game where I had multiple accounts and one of the main motivations was to be able to create a solo guild), EvE (lived happily in a corp of 1), WoW (unguilded becasue machanics are hostile to players creating solo guilds and I didn't want to to open multiple accounts for a game again or pester people to help me manage my guild)
2. The role of guilds to me is mostly to prevent people from noticing that I'm not in a guild ( whether it's paranoia or not, I feel that non-guilded players are stimitized ). It also served as flag that would let people know my alts were me (in UO, friends knew me by my guild).
3. I'm not big on "shoulds" (especially when I'm using guilds in a fairly unorthodox way in the first place), but in general I see them as a way for comunities/subcultures to flag themselves and (for all reasons good and bad), distinguish between "them" and "us".
4. Grouping mechanics that are aware of your prefered relationships/subculture seem good - essentially a way of managing friends lists on a larger scale. I do not believe that guilds should have *any* function that is not available to a singular character (although some projects might not be feasable for a single player).
5. I'm going to skip this one because my thoughts are sort of scattered and all over the place on group quests/tasks, roles and responsibilities.
6. I would like to see relationships with guilds that go beyond memeber / not-member. It would be interesting to have ways of having a sort of casual contact - non-membership roles as a supplier or a mercenary that don't involve actually joining a guild, acting more like the NPC reputation mechanics, just helping make us aware of each others' existance. I liked EvE's relationship mechanics as a starting point.
Great responses, hopefully some more MMORPGers throw in their thoughts as well
1. Please list the game(s) including guild like grouping that you will be using for consideration for the following questions.
Star Wars The Old Republic
Age of Wushu
2. What roles do you feel are filled by your game Guilds?
SWTOR 15% exp bonus (granted I am still low level, 23, and have not needed them for much else yet.)
AOW - Immediate contacts for information, supplies, protection, instance assistance, and sales.
3. What role should Guilds fulfill in the game's worlds?
A guild should readily supply its members with information on the game. It should also serve as the first place a member should go to buy/sell/trade for goods and services. A guild should also provide its members with a common agenda such as obtaining this thing or building that, or being this certain kind of way or that, this allows the members to come together as a single entity and not just a conglomerate of individuals with no real focus or reason to ride under the same banner. Finally a guild should provide a certain social environment, no matter what that environment be. If you are a group of people who like to joke around then this should be supported thematically throughout the guild, likewise if you are an entirely serious bunch, the same. Of course there is always room for a straight man or a cut up, but on the most part I think that mixing people who like to talk about donkey punches with people who like to talk about Jesus is a recipe for disaster. The best way to avert this disaster then is to be up front about what you are about as a group.
4. What features do you commonly see in your preferred game Guilds, or player grouping?
5. What features do you think should be added into Guild interfaces and/or functions?
6. Feel free to discuss other factors, thoughts or opinions below.
Guilds have been pretty much dead to me for a while. I've met some nice people, done some things with them, but a lot of the time it has seemed like just about every single person you run into is "tunnel vision" focused on what they, and they alone, want and when they, and they alone, want it. The idea of not leaving someone behind, or even worse, going through something twice in order to catch them up is all but lost, even to the closest of friends. For this reason I believe that we have to institute certain rewards for solid group play if for no other reason than to show those who's vision does not exceed their limited scope that there is a good reason for actually being social in these games.
That's the theory I am rolling on for this post, and that is the base of where all of my answers came from.