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by Robin Torres 
Oct 6th 2010 at 8:00PM
Blizzard says it looked at the data and reached the following conclusion:
But I believe their data is flawed. Their research cannot have taken into account the many guilds who have split themselves up in order to stay below the 500 member soft cap. For those of you who don't know, if you have a guild with more than 500 members, not all members show up on the roster, so you can't tell how many guildies you have online or even in the guild. It makes things clumsy and time-consuming when you need to promote or kick. Not only that, but there is no rhyme or reason as to who shows up and who doesn't. Recent invites may appear on the roster, whereas people inactive for months may not. So many guilds have chosen to split up and patiently wait for the bug to be fixed. Since there are no alliances and no checkbox for "part of a larger group of guilds" built in to the game, there is no way for Blizzard to gather the appropriate data....we are happy to say that this value covers more than 99.9% of all the active guilds in World of Warcraft
After the break, I'll be going into how this affects <It came from the Blog>, our staff/reader guild that has grown at points up to 1,700 members, and what our plans are for the immediate future. But first, have a poll:
Note: This poll is for entertainment purposes only, of course.
| Yes | |
|---|---|
| No | |
| I just want to see the votes |
I know that the number of large guilds is not huge, but I think that the people trying to stay below the soft cap may have affected Blizzard's choice of 600. Of course, these enormous guilds are chock-full of alts, and rarely do they include several hundred different accounts. But temporarily, our guild does -- whenever we have a huge event, like our server maintenance parties. And <It came from the Blog> is full of people playing alts as an escape from their raiding guilds or to just enjoy the game with a bunch of great, mature players from all over the globe. Regardless of the numbers involved, this will affect our guild dynamic.
The plan
With the patch almost upon us and the change already in place on the PTR and in beta, it's time to move forward. I have a plan. We're going to have to split the guild.
Many years ago, I joined the Penny Arcade fleet of guilds. The Spousal Unit and I were too late to join the first one and we were relegated to one of the less cool guilds that formed because of the roster bug. We didn't get the cool tag and we didn't get included in the cool chat. The chat channel wasn't used as much by the first guild as the rest of us hoped. So we lost interest and went elsewhere. I don't want to have that happen here. Instead, I'm splitting the guild into level ranges so that alts will be grouped together for easier forming of parties and raids.
This is my plan:
- <It came from the Blog> will now be the mid-range guild, encompassing characters from level 20 to 54.
- <Bloglings> will be our separate event guild. It will be the guild that IcftB originally was at the beginning. All people who wish to join us for events can join this guild. This guild will become the stepping stone for entrance into the other guilds, should players wish to play in between events. Everyone will be able to invite.
- <Blog Lurkers> will become the noob guild. Players in our new family of guilds that are in the level range of 1 through 20 will be here.
- <The Insiders> will become our new high-level guild. Characters from level 55 and up will be played here.
- We will have a global channel for general chat and camaraderie.
- An event channel will be used to coordinate events.
- WoW Insider staff characters will follow these level ranges so that we will have characters in most of the guilds.
How Blizzard could help
If Blizzard wanted to make some changes to help out big guilds like ours, I have a few suggestions:
- Raise the hard cap. I think the max would be more reasonable at 1,500.
- Implement guild alliances. If there were a shared chat and other common functionality implemented for guild alliances, then I think Blizzard could keep the cap where it is and we'd all be able to work with that.
- Limit guild benefits to a level range. Blizzard could take away the cap altogether and just say that the guild benefits only apply to level XX and above (say, level 40).
- Send us a thank-you pet. Blizzard could send us a personal thank-you for being loyal customers and to ease the pain of breaking up our guild. It could be an adorable non-combat pet that would be just for the large guilds that are affected by the change. Like a pink, sparkly, miniature pony. Yeah! Or a fierce widdle tiger. Rawr! Uh, I may have exceeded my normal dosage of Nutella today. /blush
Please join us on Zangarmarsh (US-PvE-H) in <It came from the Blog>. Guild ranks of Blog Lurker or above can invite, so /whisper Robiness or any online member. You are all welcome as long as you play by our simple rules -- basically, don't be a funsucker! Visit the guild FAQ for more details.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, It Came from the Blog, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 13)
Harvoc Oct 6th 2010 8:35PM
Again refer to Piper's previous post and both Robin and my explanations as to why we think Blizzard's data is flawed.
Muchao Oct 6th 2010 8:45PM
"and no reason or motivation for Blizzard to lie to us about the reason. "
flawed - Blemished, damaged, or imperfect in some way ; Containing a mistake, weakness, or fault
lie - to speak falsely or utter untruth knowingly, as with intent to deceive
Please learn what words mean before you try to use them interchangeably. Thank you.
Discount_Llama Oct 6th 2010 8:25PM
Even a 1500 member cap wouldn't save those of us in AIE :(
a.atchinson Oct 6th 2010 8:27PM
I call shenanigans on the number of actual people in the survey who have a 500+ people guild.
Razzanor Oct 6th 2010 9:56PM
And I call shenanigans on your ability to understand the point of the survey. The question wasn't "Are you in a guild with over 600 people?" The question was "Does the guild cap of 600 affect you?"
I voted yes, and I'm not in a 600+ person guild. Heck, I'm not even in any guild at all. You know what? I actually don't even play WoW! I haven't subscribed in over a year, and I'm *still* affected by this unfortunate cap that was sprung upon everyone at the last minute.
I'm an avid listener of The Instance. I have, in the past, been a member of the giant farrago of pure, concentrated awesome that is known as AIE. I am fully aware that AIE is only a fraction of a tiny, tiny percentage of the total population that Blizzard needs to worry about... but hear me out.
You don't understand. You really don't. You haven't felt the ineffable euphoria that is being constantly surrounded by a net of people who you have never met before, yet *somehow* manage to be such amazing human beings to you despite that fact... yet still, the one thing that stands out above all else is that you can find these individuals no matter *what* you do, or *when* you do it.
I'm not a member of a mega-guild anymore, and I don't play WoW anymore. I still read WoW Insider because it's an amazing blog, and I still listen to The Instance because it's an amazing podcast. Simply by virtue of loyally following that show, I feel as though I have at least some tiny connection to what the AIE family is forced to suffer through right now.
I don't speak for the thousands of people who are directly affected by the guild cap. I speak for the *hundreds of thousands* of people who actually think this really sucks, and despite not having to go through the exclusion and segregation this unfortunate change will inevitably bring about, we honestly wish it didn't have to happen.
N-train Oct 7th 2010 12:16PM
@Razz
While their timing is a little unfortunate, what could Blizzard do? Up until Cata, they didn't do anything about their soft 500 person cap, it might as well have been a mild suggestion. It wasn't enforced and its not like Wow.com's massive guild was ever hit with any penalties or anything.
It shows that they really didn't care until they added these new guild functions, which I think everyone here will agree are pretty neat and enjoyable. They had to cap people at 600 people in order to keep large guilds from putting too much stress on the system.
It's either everyone's guild on these servers with massive guilds suffer, or they put in (a pretty reasonable) cap and only the rare 600+ size guilds suffer (and only if they want to add new people). It's not like they're doing this purposefully to cripple large guilds, they're doing it to be fair to everyone. So yes, while hundreds of thousands of players may be hurt now, there's millions of players who aren't going to be hurt due to this change.
SamLowry Oct 7th 2010 12:20AM
I get the feeling you're the kinda guy who has thousands of Facebook friends, and yet you have no idea who 99% of them are.
Akhi Oct 7th 2010 11:15AM
No offense to anyone, but the logic of polling a group of people (the readers of this blog) who have actually created one of the bloated guilds in question in order to find out how many of them are members of such a guild escapes me.
That's like going to a grocery store, waiting until you see someone put a meat product in their cart, and then using them as a poll base to find out how many vegetarians there are.
Sure, maybe some of them are buying meat for a guest or a spouse, but is it an accurate poll? No.
Ben Bishop Oct 6th 2010 8:38PM
Limit guild benefits to a level range. Blizzard could take away the cap altogether and just say that the guild benefits only apply to level XX and above (say, level 40). ???
HORRIBLE idea. sorry to critique, but really now? no love for alts or lvling characters? I don't think this issue can be solved or fixed that way.
Now I do agree with your issue. how about this: When your guild hits 500 members(below the cap) you can Petition a GM for a larger guild slot. Then the cap goes up to 1000. themn when ur close again, another petition. Then blizzard would have to add a robust system for very limited numbers of guilds. Solves the server side issue for their 99.9%, and helps out the special guilds like yours. just my 2 cents
Manorton Oct 6th 2010 8:37PM
wow, just wow. So much for open discussion. Looks like those who feel they DESERVE special rights have spoken and voted down mine and Piper's comments.
Way to go wow community.
MusedMoose Oct 6th 2010 8:40PM
No, people voted you both down because you clearly didn't read what Ms. Torres wrote beyond "I believe their data is flawed". She explains the reasoning behind that statement in the rest of the paragraph.
yoyoma Oct 6th 2010 8:42PM
That's the beauty of open discussion, you can say what you want and others can disagree with you.
Also, rather than having an discussion you immediately attacked the post, which I will say is probably way you got down voted. You can discuss something from the opposite perspective without sounding like a jerk.
darksky Oct 6th 2010 8:46PM
Wow is right. No one is demanding special rights or making any claims similar to that, so I'm not sure why you feel so offended that your comment ignoring the large, obvious, and astute observation by the author got downvoted.
It's not a matter of having all the data or not: Robin makes a good assumption, and asserts that Blizzard doesn't have the whole story. You can look at guild sizes all over Azeroth and say "oh yeah, there are only .1% of guilds that are over 600 members. Well, duh! Most of the ones who are larger than that have already by in large split up, but and aren't related in any way to Blizzard's giant SQL query that they ran that said "how many guilds are bigger than X" no matter how related they might be by human organization. There is no cross-account or cross-character relation in many of these cases, so no automated reporting would ever show the relationship.
Even looking at the admittedly-unscientific poll associated with this article tells you that there are a lot more than just 0.1% of guilds out there affected by this. Nobody's asking for special favors, there's just a subset of the WoW community that has long been prevented from effectively communicating as a group in-game, and there has been hope this problem would be fixed. Some guilds continued on in spite of the bugs that presented themselves with over 500 members. Blizzard's announcement was a surrender, saying that they didn't feel they needed to fix the problem because it didn't appear to really exists, when anecdotal evidence is that it does exist and Blizzard's tools have no way to really see what guild sizes WOULD be were the pre-existing barriers not there.
Harvoc Oct 6th 2010 8:47PM
Seriously? We don't think that we deserve special rights. I'm not even in a guild with more than 300 members. I'm just trying to say that we think that their data is flawed because of the previously stated reason. And as for your insistence that you're trying to have an open discussion, I doubt that telling us that our opinions about this change is wrong and that we shouldn't try to correct Blizzard on a mistake on their part is real "open."
Nyold Oct 6th 2010 8:54PM
We don't downvote you because we disagree, we downvote you because you're stupid, although usually we disagree with stupid people anyways.
Ty Oct 6th 2010 8:42PM
I will be sad the the WHU will have to be seperated...
LynMars Oct 6th 2010 8:42PM
How many of the 500+ guilds are individual players, not alts, or people with multiple accounts too? That accounts for the bloat in many guild situations, including many of the guilds over the softcap now, as the guild ui doesn't count accounts, but individual toons.
My personal view on guilds, though, are much smaller groups where people actually know one another, talk to each other, and play together, not just "I have this popular guild's tag under my name."
Granted, the larger guilds will have large bank access, multiple raid teams, plenty of help with professions and leveling gearing (in theory), but it seems to me that you lose a lot of the personal connections, trust, and support that can come with smaller guilds. In large guilds I'm left feeling like another number on the roster
Robin Torres Oct 6th 2010 8:45PM
Come hang with the WoW Insider family of guilds on Zangarmarsh for a little bit. You'll see that our huge guild keeps getting bigger and staying together because of the awesome camaraderie in between events. :)
Brett Porter Oct 6th 2010 9:07PM
Funny thing is, even though there are quite a few folks in our guild, we still know and recognize each others' names. For example, I go by Sebastien/Seb but play on a few alts more than Seb at the moment. However, most folks know who you're talking about when you say my name.
Sure there are a lot of folks that are in the guild and don't talk much in the gchat, but to be honest that's how it is in smaller guilds too. I absolutely *love* big guilds, because no matter when I logon there is always someone on. It's like having a family reunion every night or weekend. :)
aerinbear Oct 6th 2010 11:59PM
That can definitely be a problem. I'm in one of these huge guilds, Taint, and it can be easy to get lost. But we have several ways to deal with that. The coolest thing, to me, is that there are special interest chat channels within Taint. I'd never have found some truly awesome folk otherwise. I'm actually not all that attached to the larger Taint crew, but I'm just hooked on hanging out with the folk I met in a couple of our subchannels.
We also have a buddy program, new member channels, socials... it was just the subchannels that worked for me.