Endgame guild closeup
by Jennie Lees 
Jan 5th 2006 at 12:30PM
This fairly old, but interesting, article from
Nick Yee's Daedalus project gives an insight into one of the "uberguilds", guilds that persist across games
and aim for the top. As the first to kill Ragnaros on their server, Talon's guild is a marvel of military organisation,
but not without criticism--the guild leader prefers not to let women in the guild, for example.Talon's rules for membership are especially clear: you need to be able to take criticism, have good attendance for events, and have the "guild comes first" attitude. Many of us have just joined guilds that were openly recruiting, that had friends in, or that a party member invited us into because they liked our style--this is very different territory.
Filed under: Guilds
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Stormgaard Jan 6th 2006 9:19AM
Wow. It was alarming to see how much that guild has in common with my own. Even though we cater to the Casual Player our basic philosophies are exactly the same. This part really caught my attention:
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"People playing LOTS are no good. Super hardcore people are useless. What happens is they play loads and loads, then they gain lots of items. Then within 8-16 months, they take a look in the mirror and don?t like what they see (someone who hasn?t left the house for those months) and then they quit. They just plain vanish with all the gear they got.
In fact, Talon specifically tries to avoid recruiting hard-core players for that specific reason. These ?burn-out? personalities in fact are looked upon as wasted investments and to be avoided at all costs. "
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This is THE reason I started my guild last year.
http://www.se7ensamurai.com
The group I was in was full of great gamers - but they powergamed and didn't make a point to put the guild as a whole first. They play as they feel and move on when they get bored. They don't ever really "Commit". Most guilds out there are like that. In fact this seems mostly to be a cultural trait on the part of American/Western gamers. The guy who runs Terra Nova pointed that out in a brief study he did on Japanese MMORPG culture in this article here.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/10/mmoging_in_japa.html
Our guild teams are founded upon the same ideas Talon and the Japanese guilds use. And yeah, even though we set the bar lower in terms of achievement (we don't have any dreams of killing Onyxia any time soon!)everyone on the teams has to have good attendence, be patient with other members, and be good team players.
And this is just a personal beef here, but I couldn't be in a guild if it wasn't set up that way. What's the point of being in a guild in the first place then? In fact - think about most online gaming guilds, and then compare them to any other Real Life gaming or entertainment club people engage in (bowling, chess clubs, RPG clubs, book clubs). If those Real Life clubs were run the way most MMORGP guilds were run they would collapse in a matter of weeks (people not showing up unless they felt like it, working on different projects than the other members, getting into petty disputes, leaving and joining the club repeatedly etc..)
I guess most gamers enjoy the fact that they don't have to commit - kind of like people who frequent singles bars and thrive on one-night-stands in RL. But that kind of environment just drives me nuts.
make money fast king Jan 9th 2006 8:30AM
yeah i think that lack of commitment is whats missing in these guilds. but sometimes you find that when many interesting people leave a guild others are inclined to want to leave the guild too and in the end the guild becomes dead.