Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsCataclysm: New 600-member hard cap imposed on guilds
by Fox Van Allen 
Oct 5th 2010 at 3:00AM
Blizzard was keenly aware of the problems that these large guilds suffered, promising earlier in the summer to address them for Cataclysm. Well, not-so-great news, members of giant mega guilds: Blizzard is effectively throwing in the towel on large guilds and imposing a hard cap of 600 members effective the moment patch 4.0.1 goes live.
While the official blue post by Mumper says this will have no effect on 99.9 percent of guilds, this move could effectively devastate the remaining 0.1 percent. The full text is available after the break.
Guild Member Caps for CataclysmWe will be introducing a new, hard cap of 600 members in a single guild for Cataclysm. This function will go live with patch 4.0.1 and is already live on the beta and PTR's.
As most of you already know, we have supported a soft cap of 500 members in a guild since World of Warcraft launched. We have allowed guilds to exceed the 500 limit up until now since being in a guild really just amounted to ranks and chat channels. With the advent of the new guild system in Cataclysm we are tracking many more things on each individual player in a guild and in order to support that, we need to limit the amount of members to a reasonable level.
The new cap of 600 members is fully supported in the new guild system and that means that everyone will be visible in the ui and able to contribute to all guild functions like experience and reputation gain. We have pulled a large number of statistics to get to the 600 member cap for guilds and we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft.
The small number of guilds that are over the 600 person cap will be able to keep their guilds intact (and fully supported in the new guild system), but they will not be able to add new members until they fall below the 600 member cap.
As most of you already know, we have supported a soft cap of 500 members in a guild since World of Warcraft launched. We have allowed guilds to exceed the 500 limit up until now since being in a guild really just amounted to ranks and chat channels. With the advent of the new guild system in Cataclysm we are tracking many more things on each individual player in a guild and in order to support that, we need to limit the amount of members to a reasonable level.
The new cap of 600 members is fully supported in the new guild system and that means that everyone will be visible in the ui and able to contribute to all guild functions like experience and reputation gain. We have pulled a large number of statistics to get to the 600 member cap for guilds and we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft.
The small number of guilds that are over the 600 person cap will be able to keep their guilds intact (and fully supported in the new guild system), but they will not be able to add new members until they fall below the 600 member cap.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.
Reader Comments (Page 6 of 9)
Faith Trust Oct 5th 2010 10:06AM
Actually quite the opposite the net gain value would be people who pay but barely play, since they dont use the resources as much as a person that plays more time, they are the ones that represent a bigger net value.
Bouncing Gnome Oct 5th 2010 11:59AM
Please be warned that the following post contains very controversial ideas!
@ BlackTiger
"If people are using guild to "socialyze" then they have even bigger problems then they think they have."
As a non-drinker I could say:
"If people are using alcohol to "socialyze" then they have even bigger problems then they think they have."
I do *not* mean to say that going down the pub with friends is a bad thing. I'm simply pointing out that different people see the world in different ways. I'm happy to sip lemonade, but have no interest in this whole Clubbing thing. You're happy to shoot mobs but have no interest in on-line friendships/etc. Neither of these points of view is any more correct or more wrong than the other.
Conclusion: Chill dude :) You may not like to live that way, but don't bash people who do.
Wolftech Oct 5th 2010 7:53AM
I know the 2 giant guilds on Proudmoore (that I know about), the older gamers and stonewall family already treat the softcap of 500 as a hard cap and have split into multiple smaller guilds and either use a central custom channel or the Guild2Guild addon.
Kylenne Oct 5th 2010 2:27PM
That's not true about Taint any more, and hasn't in in months. Back when the Guild leveling system was first announced, they actually disbanded all the sub-guilds except for the raiding ones (Taint Invaders, etc) and consolidated everyone into one big guild, anticipating the system.
So now they've got a week to revert back. Considering what a clusterfuck it was to merge all the guilds in the first place, or to get much of anything done in that guild, I don't envy the officers at all.
Smurrf Oct 5th 2010 7:56AM
Learn to math:
100.0% - 99.9% = 0.1% (not 0.01%)
Ronin Oct 5th 2010 12:13PM
Why rank this down? It's correct.
(cutaia) Oct 5th 2010 1:04PM
My guess? The original post has been corrected since this comment was left, so when people stumble upon it now, it probably doesn't make any sense. Watson...get me my pipe.
scott Oct 5th 2010 8:38AM
this is a very odd, incredibly late and unfortunate announcement for those guilds that have over 600 members.
little bit of notice might've been nice, eh blizz? especially as i haven't pre-ordered cata yet.
just sayin'. and this isn't going to break anyone, it's just going to be a pain in the ass to work around, but we'll find a way.
AIE will be just fine :)
Darias.Perenolde Oct 5th 2010 9:05AM
This is the notice. They've got until 4.0.1. Start sweeping.
Torwil Oct 5th 2010 8:47AM
Yet another reason not to come back to Wow.
Torwil Oct 5th 2010 10:07AM
Blizzard made alot of money off people transfering to Earthen Ring to be in AIE. Now they are screwing those people.
Faith Trust Oct 5th 2010 10:16AM
When you want to complain about something, you will find any reason to do so.
If you are not coming back to WoW I dont mean to be rude mate, but just move on.
Sleutel Oct 5th 2010 8:43AM
I've never been in a guild with much more than 200 members, and I think this change is crap. I have no urge to join one of those megaguilds, but I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to exist. WoW is an MMO--in case Blizzard has forgotten, those first two letters stand for "massively multiplayer." I can't help but feel that this is another sign of the "new" Blizzard since they joined Activision. The "old" Blizzard wouldn't be dealing with problems they'd promised to fix by breaking existing functionality--not in a way that harms the ability of people to play with who they want to in this very social game.
I can't help but wonder what they would have come up with if everyone assigned to implementing RealID had been fixing guild interfaces instead.
Sleutel Oct 5th 2010 8:57AM
I also find it very telling that Blizzard is telling us how many GUILDS this affects, now how many CHARACTERS or ACCOUNTS. Saying "99.9 percent of guilds" means nothing. It weights an inactive guild that someone created for their bank alt and then abandoned exactly the same as a megaguild with thousands of players in it. If they want to be honest about the impact, they need to talk about the percentage of the PLAYERBASE who will be affected.
Brambt Oct 5th 2010 9:00AM
Its .1% of guilds that are affected, but what % of the player base is that? probably A LOT more than .1%. Specially when you realize that the guilds over 500 characters have exactly that, over 500 characters.
Think of it this way, say a server has 20 guilds. 19 guilds have 50 characters in them, and 1 has 1000. 51% of players the server is in 1 guild. But that guild represents just 5% of the "active guilds" on the server.
So sure, it only will affect 5% of the guilds, but in reality it will affect 51% of the players on the server.
Artificial Oct 5th 2010 4:42PM
You're point is technically correct but probably not terribly relevant. Instead of your contrived example, let's talk with some more realistic numbers. Even those 0.1% of guilds, despite being over the cap, still never have more than a few thousand members, and most of them are probably only a few hundred over the cap. So, there are maybe tens of thousands of users affected, among a population of about eleven million users. Realistically speaking, it's highly unlikely that even expressed in terms of users rather than guilds that this affects even 1% of users (that would be over a hundred thousand people). It would certainly never come anywhere near 51%.
quasarsglow Oct 5th 2010 9:13AM
The issue I see with breaking a large guild into 2 or more smaller ones and linking them via chat is that it will likely create some sort of bank issue.
Granted most huge guilds probably only allow limited access to the bank in the first place, which means its highly likely that no one really contributes much to the gold in the bank because the bank is not the focus of being in the guild, its the social aspect. However, there are people who like grabbing a bit of cloth for their alt to level first aid occasionally or look for a gear upgrade for cheap.
So Guild Mark 1 creates Guild Mark 2 to help avoid the member cap. Guild Mark 1, has about 2000 gold in the bank (remember, no one contributes gold, just things they find) and gives half of that to Guild Mark 2 for repairs, buying tabs. Maybe some of the contents move, but who has the time? So Guild Mark 2 has a big empty vault that is promptly filled with junk no one wants to keep on their alt anymore. Folks in Guild Mark 2 who need some mats start pestering people from Guild Mark 1 to grab something and give it to them. Or, more likely Guild Mark 2 member CrankyPants starts complaining in /g that folks in Guild Mark 1 are hoarding the good stuff. This spills over to the shared channel..
Drama ensues.
Jason B. Oct 5th 2010 10:37AM
Making two smaller guilds from one, large behemoth doesn't have to be difficult, not if your members have some competency. For example, you can split your players into two tiers: Leveling and Endgame. The "levelers" can all run together and work their way up doing low-level dungeons and content, quests, battlegrounds, etc. They can maintain their own bank system and rank structure, and inter-guild chat can be achieved by making a private channel or with the help of an addon.
As for bank content and gold distribution, if the GL from the original guild creates the second one on an alt, he/she can easily control gold/content sharing. I've even seen some guild alliances use alts as "runner" toons to deliver bank items between guilds. The big catch here is that it would require effort an coordination from the GL and all members in order to be successful.
Kar On E Oct 5th 2010 9:22AM
As much as I already hate this decision, it's made worse by the short notice that larger guilds have been given. If the rumors are true that 4.0.1 is supposed to be out next week, that gives larger guilds only one week to completely plan their new guild structure and enrollment methods.
If you're going to throw something like this out there, make it happen in 4.0.3 or maybe even with Cata release so that guilds have some planning time.
/soapbox
Spellotape Oct 5th 2010 9:33AM
While this is disappointing in some respects, I cannot imagine the small number of guilds that exceed 600 members are simply going to fall apart at this news or be unable to find ways to manage it.
From what was stated in the announcement, it does not appear Blizzard is doing this for no reason, and if all they ever did was things to accommodate the smallest number of people, the game would likely be much worse off.