Posts with tag guilds

Conventional wisdom will tell you that you should generally keep your online gaming hobbies off your resume, unless perhaps you're going for a job in the gaming industry. However, Symantec COO Stephen Gillett tells a different story. For him, including his accomplishments in World of Warcraft was an important facet of his ability to get an executive position at Starbucks as Chief Information Officer, back in 2008. Gillett argues that his time as a guild master in WoW indicates leadership skills, recruitment abilities, and an understanding of the way people interact with electronic media--giving him tools to better guide companies into the digital age.

I feel that WoW can very much teach a person leadership skills, particularly those who take the plunge as guild masters and officers, or raid leaders. Coordinating a group of 10 or more people to complete a task is not easy to do.The ability to motivate and organize groups is something that you can take with you wherever you go, and it doesn't really matter where you learned how to do it. Perhaps most of us won't ever put "World of Warcraft Guild Master" on our job applications, but I would be very remiss if I didn't admit that my time in WoW has helped me in the professional world--it was a key factor in my landing this job, for example. For our readers, has WoW contributed to any of your professional successes, either directly or indirectly? Would you ever put your time in WoW down on a resume? Tell us about it in the comments!

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In a game as long-lived as World of Warcraft, virtual acquaintances come and go. Players stop playing, guilds break up (or simply grow inactive), and groups of friends move apart. Over the course of WoW's nearly ten-year lifespan, it's hard to blame anyone who's grown tired and walked away. But sometimes guilds stand a longer test of time, passing from leader to leader, maintaining an identity of sorts even though the game -- and the guild members -- may have changed.

And for some gamers, who you're gaming with is all that matters -- membership in an agreeable guild is crucial to fun gameplay. For others, tackling content matters more, and those gamers might jump from guild to find a group that best suits them. Today, we're asking whether you've stuck with your guild: do you game with the same group of players day after day, or do you come and go from guilds as your gameplay needs change?

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Guild leaders have been sending us a lot of questions in the Queue and elsewhere about how to keep their guild active during the down time between expansions. At this point many guilds have already cleared Orgrimmar and are either slowly working on heroic modes or stalled out entirely. It's not that anyone is doing anything wrong -- they're not -- it's just the nature of players. After things have been accomplished, why bother continuing on? This is totally a normal behavior and shouldn't be taken as anyone abandoning the guild or anything silly like that.*

So, life is slow on the forefront of raiding. What can you do? Change your game. Make the game not about killing pixels from this expansion, but about experiencing everything in a social atmosphere. I've had to make this transition a lot, and I've always found it works.

End current content raiding
Make an official end to the current tier of raiding and move to other activities. Allow for a small group to form that wants to keep pushing into harder heroics and what not, but don't make anyone feel like they have to go. And don't feel obligated yourself too -- it's okay in a guild leadership position to sit out and just facilitate.

My guild's unofficial motto is "definitely not an RP guild, nope," with the members' tongues firmly in their collective cheeks. While it's true that we're not really an RP guild, we feature an abundance of avid fanfiction writers, artists who draw their characters, and many of us work to provide an in-game or in-character reason why we joined the guild in the first place--it's "officially" a guild of cartographers, as our guild master periodically reminds us.

In real-life reality, of course, we raid on Fridays, made bad puns in guild chat, work on achievements, run dungeons, and kill lots of things on the Timeless Isle (fondly nicknamed "Murder Island") just like anyone else playing the game. But I do admit that the in-character, RP-like setting of "cartography guild dedicated to exploring and mapping the world" gives a flavor to logging in that I've come to cherish. What about you folks? Do you run an actual RP guild or has your guild evolved its own in-game personality over the years? Or not? Do you make goofy guild-themed Spotify playlists like we do? Please say yes, I don't want to feel alone.

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Dalaran remains one of the shining jewels of Azeroth. Many players make their homes in this glittering city in the sky. Horde and Alliance players alike have traditionally enjoyed the hospitality of the historically neutral Kirin Tor, who were content to cloister themselves to focus on matters of magic and learning.

But Jaina Proudmoore's politics have pulled the Kirin Tor into alignment with the Alliance. The peaceful face of Dalaran is no more. The Kirin Tor have ejected the Sunreavers from its ranks and the city itself, throwing them into the Violet Hold or killing them outright (though some managed to escaped to Silvermoon).

Roleplaying behind this volatile facade is one of WoW's most unique concept guilds, Moon Guard's Magus Senate of Dalaran. Comprised almost entirely of mages and other magic users, the guild turns magic to reflect upon arcane politics and the fireworks of world battle.

The people you play with make up the heart and soul of your World of Warcraft experience. They'll make the game a delight you keep coming back to or a misery you can't escape soon enough. What this comes down to is that who you're guilded with makes or breaks your game experience. A bad guild or, worse, a good guild that's falling apart will make you rush offline to a good book or a favorite TV show rather than spending your idle time in Azeroth. Of course, it's not always straightforward to find the right guild for you -- it's all too easy to have mismatched goals or schedules that turn what may have seemed to be a great group of players into a guild nightmare.

When I'm in need of a guild, I tend to follow my friends around, which always seems like a good formula but doesn't always work out. But it's hardly the only way: all you have to do is be unguilded to get numerous (unsolicited) guild invitations and the guild recruitment forum is always brimming with new guilds LFM. So, just how do you go about picking that perfect guild?

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Last week, we tackled the topic of what World of Warcraft would be like without guilds. This was prompted by a comment by rayden54 suggesting that the community in general and PUGging in particular would be better without guilds, as they foster cliques as well as bad behavior toward non-guildmates.

My answer primarily dealt with the fact that guilds would happen regardless of whether Blizzard formally implemented guilds in the game, but that even without them, PUGs would be the same or worse since it's anonymity and lack of accountability that breeds bad behavior. Certainly there are guilds that have members who are rude outside of their guild, but all good guilds that I've belonged to have rules against giving the guild a bad name by being a funsucker. Guilds without those rules don't keep their non-funsuckers long.

In the comments of a recent Drama Mamas article about the etiquette of going AFK while grouping, rayden54 said:

... I think the best way to improve pugging (and the community in general) is to remove GUILDS.

All they really do is subdivide the community into a bunch of exclusive groups that only interact with outsiders when they have to and regard them as little more than nuisances.

Whoa. Having guilds is such a large part of playing an MMO to me, that I never even considered what it would be like not having them.

I think guilds are very important for making WoW a multiplayer experience, at least on the social level. Even if you play WoW as if it were a single-player RPG, you can still be chatting with fellow players as a group. That's all guilds used to be when I first started playing Everquest oh so many years ago, just a chat channel that you could only join if invited. And then there were games like Quake and Tribes where clans were formed outside of the game or you frequented particular servers that had the people that you liked to play with.

Most of us have been in more than one guild. With guilds falling apart over drama or absent guildies or whatever, we haven't been able to stay with the same guild we were in when we first started playing. It can't all be blamed on the guild; sometimes our tastes change or we move on to greener pastures.

Once you've been in a really good guild, it's hard to let go even when things go sour. This is a topic that comes up in Drama Mamas so often, we've written a guide as to how and when to leave your guild. A bad guild can be detrimental to your enjoyment of WoW, just as a great guild enhances your gameplay experience.

But what defines the perfect guild? I think there are three factors:

• Posted guild rules Whether they are in the in-game guild info or posted on a separate website, clear and easily accessible guidelines for guildie behavior are a must. So much drama can be avoided when everyone is clear about how to behave both in and out of guild.

There are lots of reasons to join a guild: it makes it easy to find groups and raids, you have guaranteed company while you're playing, and most importantly, guild perks. In case you've been living under a rock, guild perks give you great bonuses for guild membership based on your guild's level. Perks can boost the amount of experience, reputation, and honor you gain, make your hearthstone cooldown shorter, and even make flight paths go faster. So, really, the question seems to be why not join a guild?

The question's been asked on Reddit and it got me wondering why my own alt of choice (for the moment) is currently unguilded. It couldn't take much more than a polite request to jump on the guild bandwagon and get my hands on those yummy, yummy perks. It would stop the regular requests I get to join guilds (even if you've turned off guild requests, you do frequently get whispers) and it's not as though I'm in a demanding guild at the moment. And yet when I don't feel like doing much (or dealing with others), I hop on to my alt to solo for a while.

And what about you, fellow players? Are you guilded or unguilded?

Joining a guild has always been a core aspect of World of Warcraft. How to choose the right style of guild can be an especially large hurdle to overcome for new players, but it's something we learn along the way. Players currently have a few resources at their disposal, whether it be the Blizzard Guild Recruitment forums, GuildOx, WoWProgress, or other tools. But there's an oft-forgotten in-game tool that was released back in patch 4.1. What about the in-game Guild Finder?

The options are a bit limited, and the listings depend on the effort put in by guild masters. Let's just say it's a neglected feature on a few fronts. I've used the Guild Finder before, when searching for a casual leveling guild on a new server. Outside of that, I stick to other tools when recruiting or looking for a new guild.

What about you -- do you ever use the in-game Guild Finder? What's your preferred resource for guild recruitment and discovery?

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First off, this isn't one of those posts where I'm a detached observer with no first person experience with the problems of guild leadership. I'm an officer in a raiding 25 man guild, and recently I was the victim of a shakeup. Our Anne Stickney wrote about it for the site, so I won't dredge up the same material. Instead, what I will do is talk about what someone else experienced tonight, and what it has me thinking about: namely, that perhaps it's time that alternatives to the classic GM/officers style of guild leadership were made part of the game's set up. Sure, you can run your guild like a council, or even an anarcho-syndicalist commune if you would like, but said commune would still be a monarchy by the way Blizzard has designed the guild formation process.

The reason I bring this up is because of a tweet from Emberdione, who comments here frequently as well as writes on her own blog. It was a very familiar story - her GM had decided he was tired of WoW, and so instead of handing the guild over like a sane person he kicked everyone out. Since it was so familiar to my own recent story, it got me thinking. Why do we still have this one person at the top pyramid structure as the only option for guilds?

You know your adults-only guild has built up a serious steamhead of history when you begin seeing an entirely new generation of applicants from within your own ranks. That's right, WoW players, you really are that old. This month marks the 17th anniversary of The Syndicate, the current Guinness world record holders for the longest continuously operating online gaming community.

"As our move into our 18th year as a community, internally we are starting to see the children of our members applying to join," writes Sean "Dragons" Stalzer, president and CEO of The Syndicate. "Said a different way, that means people who have only known MMORPGs similar to WoW or EQ or UO or Rift are heading off to college."

When we interviewed Dragons three years ago, we examined the group's massive size across multiple games, its unrivaled retention rate (an average loss of one to two people per year, for a 99.92% retention rate), and its own studio that turns out strategy guides for casual players and handles game and hardware consulting and testing for various game companies. That's a heady bouquet of achievements for a hardworking guild. Still, the group's anniversary this month makes waves in a much larger context -- a new era for MMO designers and fans alike.

"It matters because the MMOs of the past 17 years were created, in large part, by a community of developers who knew the world of BBS gaming via a modem... who played MUDs and MOOs... who, in the more senior levels, knew gaming before there were computers," Dragons writes. "We are just now reaching the point where the future programmers, designers, producers etc.. are heading off to college having never known a world without MMORPGS. Some of the core mechanics and concepts that shaped what 'success' is in the MMORPG world are things they have never experienced, and that isn't a bad thing. It means there is change coming to the MMO space."