Posts with tag differentiation

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

One of the most important things you can do when you start a new guild is to differentiate your community from other guilds on the server. When you offer a different experience or a different set of expectations from the typical guild, no matter how slight, you increase your chances of garnering attention and, thus, recruiting players who are attracted to those differences. It's a concept I've mentioned in a number of columns over the years.

But is there such a thing as differentiating too much? One guild leader wants to know:

Hello,

I'm Emir Ergenç from Turkey, i read your wowinsider column for a long time. And i really enjoy your writings.

Me and my girlfriend found a new guild named "Efsane" (meaning Legend in English) in our realm (Wildhammer-EU), i'm telling this to you for checking us :). Our website is efsane.guildomatic.com (although its Turkish). My characters are Alhara, Faelha, Eladia on guild. My girlfriend is guild leader and Shehrazad.

Together we wanted to form a Turkish speaking Rated Battleground guild. Our aim is to have about 14-20 members (we do not aim to be a big guild, but time will tell) and get high ratings (read: hardcore) in rated battlegrounds as Turkish people.

This is a very specific aim, thats where i started having some issues.

Larisa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn has been posting some really interesting things about psychology and the World of Warcraft lately. The other week she wrapped up a little survey (along with the folks at Dreambound) about personalities of players and how they correspond to the roles they play in game, and this week she's got a little analysis up about something called the Jante Law, developed by a Norwegian author for a novel back in the 1930s. You can read the whole idea on her page or over on Wikipedia, but basically it all boils down to one "rule" for overseeing each individual member of a community: "Don't think that you are more special than us."

She applies the law to the WoW community at large, and says that without knowing it, comment trolls and those who attack people who differentiate themselves on the forums (including the folks who caused Ghostcrawler to rethink his role there) are following this law, and attacking those who stick their neck out as different. Personally, I don't know that the "haters" in the community give it that much thought -- most of the time when they do attack others, they do it to try and build themselves up rather than enforce any community standard ("You've won 1,000 AV matches? Big deal, I win in there all the time.").