Cataclysm: Guild cap revised, now 1,000 members
by Mathew McCurley 
Oct 8th 2010 at 10:00PM
While there are not a huge amount of guilds that go over the 1,000-player limit, those multitudes of players came out in anger over Blizzard's decision to set a hard cap. Now, with that cap raised, these guilds may potentially fall under the new rules, keeping their organizations intact. Hit the jump for the full announcement.
Bashiok -- Guild members capped in 4.0.1We previously announced in the Cataclysm Beta forums that we'd be enforcing a 600 guild member cap with patch 4.0.1. We've reevaluated what we believe the realms are capable of supporting and instead will be enforcing a guild member hard cap of 1,000 members. This means that guilds with more than 1,000 members will no longer be able to invite new members until they drop below the cap. For example, if a guild has 1,500 members they'll be able to continue as-is, playing and earning guild achievements for as long as they choose, through Cataclysm and beyond, but they will not be able to add new members until they fall below the 1,000 member cap. If a guild has fewer than 1,000 members, they won't be able to add members above that number.
This new guild cap is being enforced for several reasons, but they all factor into a need to control guild sizes in light of the new guild systems, including guild leveling and achievements. Previously, adding players to a guild was as simple as adding people to a chat channel. While approximately 500 members were visible in the UI, there was no real need to limit guild size. That is no longer the case. Guild leveling in Cataclysm features unified progression powered by a series of complex systems that track the contributions of all guild members. The larger the guild, the bigger the impact on these systems. We found it necessary to determine a maximum guild size to ensure continued performance now and into the future.
We want to reassure the few guilds that this does impact that they have ample time to plan and rearrange their guilds as they see fit. While this hard cap will go into effect with 4.0.1, guilds should feel safe rearranging members as necessary up to the release of Cataclysm on December 7 when the guild leveling system goes into effect. There will be no impact on guild leveling progression before then. If a guild were to disband after Cataclysm, or a group of people were to leave and start a new guild, they would lose the time and experience they previously contributed and potentially extend the amount of time it would take to regain the new guild perks.
While some players have used options including mods and custom chat channels to support large player and guild alliances that number multiple thousands, groups of that size aren't ideally suited to our design philosophy. As always, we're continually looking into adding new features to help facilitate guild management, scheduling, and player communication.
This new guild cap is being enforced for several reasons, but they all factor into a need to control guild sizes in light of the new guild systems, including guild leveling and achievements. Previously, adding players to a guild was as simple as adding people to a chat channel. While approximately 500 members were visible in the UI, there was no real need to limit guild size. That is no longer the case. Guild leveling in Cataclysm features unified progression powered by a series of complex systems that track the contributions of all guild members. The larger the guild, the bigger the impact on these systems. We found it necessary to determine a maximum guild size to ensure continued performance now and into the future.
We want to reassure the few guilds that this does impact that they have ample time to plan and rearrange their guilds as they see fit. While this hard cap will go into effect with 4.0.1, guilds should feel safe rearranging members as necessary up to the release of Cataclysm on December 7 when the guild leveling system goes into effect. There will be no impact on guild leveling progression before then. If a guild were to disband after Cataclysm, or a group of people were to leave and start a new guild, they would lose the time and experience they previously contributed and potentially extend the amount of time it would take to regain the new guild perks.
While some players have used options including mods and custom chat channels to support large player and guild alliances that number multiple thousands, groups of that size aren't ideally suited to our design philosophy. As always, we're continually looking into adding new features to help facilitate guild management, scheduling, and player communication.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
hahke Oct 8th 2010 10:02PM
ICFTB lives on!
Robin Torres Oct 8th 2010 11:08PM
While this will be great for our temp event guild, the split is still necessary. We have had up to 1700 members over level 10 at one point and even after splitting into 3 guilds, we are still over 500 in It came from the Blog.
Still this is nice news. :)
KJP Oct 9th 2010 1:29AM
All true enough, Robin, but it's at least one less split, and if we are diligent about purging the members who join once for a downtime event and never come back, who knows...
Anye Oct 9th 2010 3:08PM
If a pre-Cataclysm guild was, essentially, a glorified chat channel, couldn't a large guild that needs to split simply create their own custom channel on the server?
pancakes Oct 8th 2010 10:06PM
Yay! Still too low for ICFTB but it's better than nothing.
TonyMcS Oct 8th 2010 10:09PM
In the end it's all about the impact of new systems and the need to have limits to ensure stable gaming. Those few large guilds will just have to endure some inconvenience for the benefit of the majority. 1000 seems a good compromise.
However, I haven't seen any articles about wow.com - have a look. It appears the spammers have won ;-)
broadwaybobby831 Oct 8th 2010 10:10PM
this going to alter the new icftb setup?
lazymangaka Oct 8th 2010 10:32PM
Most large guilds should be able to get below 1000 just by shedding inactive or low-level characters. Some guilds, like AIE, will still be sort of screwed by it but there's enough ingenuity in the community to come up with a reasonable solution.
SteveW Oct 9th 2010 7:21AM
Why do they even have to shed members. Blizzard have again repeated that the existing large guilds are fully supported - they just can't recruit.
Organian Oct 9th 2010 9:33AM
A large and robust minority is not a contradiction in terms.... Do u even understand what the words mean? All you have to be is %49.9 to be in the minority and that is still quite large and if boisterous, a minorities' opinions could be considered very robust. There are many political groups in our society that make up less than 10% but end up controlling the behavior of the rest of us.
Lou Gagliardi Oct 9th 2010 1:01PM
@SteveW Why? Dude, AIE is a guild that's over like 6000+ members. That's 6 of these 1K capped guilds. If they want to add new members, they'll have to make an AIE-1 or something or more if necessary.
Personally, I think this is good. I remember back in my time in AIE when people would complain of lag on the server (though I think they made it up personally.)
Phos Oct 8th 2010 10:41PM
So it looks like Blizzard caved, cowards. I sure hope this doesn't result in less than optimal performance for the rest/majority of us.
lazymangaka Oct 8th 2010 10:44PM
To be fair, while the number of guilds affected might have represented a minority, they were a surprisingly large and robust one. The .1% of guilds potentially represented 1% or more of accounts, which with the enormous player base could be hundreds of thousands of accounts.
I doubt Blizzard would have upped the cap if they didn't think they could manage it. I'm sure our performance will be fine.
Inahu Oct 9th 2010 6:23AM
A surprisingly large and robust minority..? That's a contradiction of terms. Guilds tend to become insulated from the reality that most of us prefer for whatever reason not to join a guild. It's disappointing that Blizzard has learnt almost nothing from what worked best in WotLK and is attempting to steer players back toward pre-formed group play.
Organian Oct 9th 2010 9:36AM
And I fail at comment placement. Sorry fir the double post above......
A large and robust minority is not a contradiction in terms.... Do u
even understand what the words mean? All you have to be is %49.9 to be
in the minority and that is still quite large and if boisterous, a
minorities' opinions could be considered very robust. There are many
political groups in our society that make up less than 10% but end up
controlling the behavior of the rest of us.
Lonely Child Oct 8th 2010 10:46PM
Keep bitching for the cap to hit 2k :)
ScytheNoire Oct 8th 2010 10:59PM
Blizzard confirms in later posts that the reason for the cap is due to stability issues, the bug that has been reported about in the beta where you disconnect with guilds over 1,000. So this is all about technical issues on their side, nothing more. Since Guild XP is already capped, it doesn't have anything to do with that.
Shame that Blizzard doesn't have better programmers. Hopefully though they will do as they say and add in a Guild Alliance chat channel. It will be very needed and something a lot of guilds even outside of the mega guilds can use. The chat system needs a huge upgrade.
I don't see them though supporting the mega guilds once Cataclysm comes out, as a bug is a bug, and not much they can do but fix it. And if they fix it, there is no need for the guild cap. So the large guilds are going to have to break up probably any way you look at it.
Cephas Oct 8th 2010 11:55PM
I can sympathize with the fact that this guild cap is forcing your guild to break into several smaller guilds, but it irritates me that you're implying that this problem wouldn't exist if Blizzard hired better programmers. The fact of the matter is that Blizzard has some of the best programmers around, and they've been working their tails off to implement a ton of new features for Cataclysm, which includes some awesome new Guild features. Features which will work for 99.9% of all guilds.
In a perfect world, Blizzard would devote an unlimited amount of time, money, and man-hours to make all features 100% perfect for 100% of their playerbase, but at the end of the day they need to get a product out the door, and they eventually have to make a decision about which issues they will and won't be able to fix. Feel free to vent about how much this sucks for you, but don't blame the programmers.
sullyXXX Oct 9th 2010 2:59AM
So, if they had better programmers, there would no be no realm size limits, there would be 1000000 whelps in the Onyxia fight, Azeroth would be 1000000 square miles, and our flying mounts would be a 2000% increase in speed?
Any programmer would know that systems have limitations, especially when the system in question is over 5 years old.I don't think this is a simple change-a-variable-or-two solution, this is a stability issue arising from somewhere deep within WoW's bowels, and the time and effort needed to fix it is best spent elsewhere, where it will benefit all 12 000 000 players, rather than a percentage of them.
obarthelemy Oct 9th 2010 7:04AM
Implementing very nice new features for 100% of the players, at the cost of preventing 0.1% of guilds, not of existing, not of benefiting from those new features, but of recuiting even more, seems like a very smart tradeoff to me.
You, on the other hand, sound like an entitled whiner, bordering on troll.