This first in a series of articles will focus on what a guild is, some of the core challenges to managing one in an MMORPG, and some features that would go a long way towards helping guilds succeed in today's gaming environment.

What is a Guild?

An online gaming guild is simply defined as:

An association of gamers in a particular game or gaming medium who come together to establish an organization whose members share common goals, objectives, and philosophy.

That is pretty much it when you cut right down to it. You want to game with people like you, who enjoy what you do, and who want to achieve the same goals. Sometimes you can do that with a collection of close buddies, and have fun without anything getting too serious. I tend to refer to that as a gaming CLAN rather than a guild.  To me a guild is a step up in the evolutionary gaming ladder, and is a much more professional type of organization. 

People establish guilds when they want to establish a formal presence in a gaming world.  Whether its a  PVE focus where you are known for "slaying the dragon", or a PVP focus where you are known for "PWN'ing your enemies", a guild is the pinnacle of a player gaming group. Good guilds are very organized with progression strategies for PVE, combat strategies for PVP, have good planning and coordinating capability, use voice chat, and have some type of recruitment screening process to weed out bad applicants. Bad guilds are full of drama, full of member turnover, have few standards, and are good for forum entertainment.

Good guilds have good members, and they rise to the top of the gaming community with their achievements. All guilds have strived for that, and any guild that doesn't shouldn't be a guild at all. A game that has a healthy guild community is able to retain players and build a good player community that people will want to stay involved with, but a game that doesn't will eventually get a bad reputation. So if guilds are so important, why are they being so poorly supported these days?

Core Issues With Guilds In Today's Games

Purples 4tw!
Back in 1993-1996 in the era of Old Neverwinter Nights and Darksun Online there were actual live events in the games.  Events required coordination, and guilds being formed were the eventual result. When guilds would do well in an event, it was publicized in the game and within the media outlets of the day. Being associated with a certain guild could carry prestige and respect within the player community as well as assist members with attaining rewards they couldn't normally obtain. While nice to have, these items were not so overpowering that they were "must have" type equipment.

Today we call that Epic or Raid level content, there's no live team, no real notoriety, and the gear that is obtained is light years ahead of what can be gotten through non epic/raid encounters. You get your spot in a raid depending on your class, your dps or healing, your gear.  Not only that but lots of time is invested, and rewards are few or only benefit a certain class. So a guild has to repeat this time investment over and over and over again for each piece of gear, for weapons, and for each character class in the guild.

It creates a sort of "quest fatigue" and burns people out, and creates a situation where guilds are so busy with progression that they can't focus on anything else. Many people join one guild simply because of where that guild is in the game's progression, get their purple, and then leave to go find the next guild further along so they can get their next piece of gear.

Casual vs Hardcore

Several game related articles have brought this up recently, and the fact is that most online gamers are casual players. But today's games are mostly geared towards the hardcore who have more hours to play in two days than most casuals have all week. In most of today's games, if a casual gamer falls behind in gear or progression they will spend weeks or months trying to catch up with their friends. In many instances they will even quit the game rather than be forced  to grind it out with nasty pickup groups (PUGS).

It is very hard for guilds to balance the needs of casual and hardcore gamers, and often creates divisions within a guild.  The casual isn't the right class, doesn't have the gear, dps, isn't the right level, etc. So while the rest of the guild is off slaying the dragon, the few casual players are off slaying the rats. A sad fact is that group of casuals may never see the dragon because the hardcores of the guild may have moved on to the next set of content, and that dragon is old news. So the casual is forced to PUG it out, find a new guild, or just quit the game. Usually they opt to quit if they can't game with their friends.

Games provide few or no incentives or ability for the hardcores to win things that could then be used to help the casuals close the gap. This has been the status quo since Everquest, and a big reason why I hate games that seperate content so drastically based on levels.

Guild Community/Benefits/Management

Many games simply feel that giving you the ability to create a tag, a cloak, have a officer chat channel, and a general guild chat is the extent of what you need. That line of thinking is why you have 1 man guilds in games, and why people don't feel too much loyalty to guilds anymore. It used to take some effort just to establish a guild, but now anyone can do it.  In City of Villains there were so many 1 man guilds running around that it wasn't funny. These guys would form 1 man guilds so they could design their guild emblems, etc and then sit around and beg for groups all day. Insert "your game here" and you would probably find the same thing.

As mentioned in the Purples 4tw section, the only real benefit to being in an in game guild anymore seems to be that they are the means to an end (which is to get the purple). If content is going to be designed that requires organized groups, then most organized groups are going to be guilds. Why not develop some in game benefits to being in a guild? More on this later.

Guild management features are sorely lacking, and as a result the player community has taken it upon themselves to create game mods to help them be more effective.  The problem with mods is that you get a nasty reality check when the players quit making updates, and you are forced to deal with just the options you have in the core game. Managing and coordinating your guild should be easy, simple, and painless. Too often you're dealing with stupid slash commands, or joe blow member has to be "present" to get something done to him, you have a guild membership cap, etc.

There has also got to be a better way to handle guild recruitment than what's being offered now. Too many games rely on cluttered public recruitment forums where b1lli3'z newbie guild is too busy spamming everyone else out. Other games have people macro spamming recruitment announcements in a zone that's so bad you have to filter out public chat (who uses those announcement channels anyway eh?).  There really needs to be a way to have an interface where people can go see what guilds are recruiting, and then sort the guild lists by some criteria.

Guild Friendly Game Design

Ok my list above was very very broad, but the intent was to hit some highlights and then focus on some design concepts that would help to promote guilds.

Rewarding Guild Loyalty

Reward someone for being in a guild, and sticking with that guild over time. One way to do that is to provide an experience bonus, % chance to succeed on a crafting check, % chance increase to find some rare drop, and maybe a small bonus to resistance damage/hps/etc based on each month they've been with a guild. In order to prevent 1 man guilds from benefiting, each game should decide the minimum guild size they'd consider to be a real guild in their game. So something like Fred gets a bonus to something based on (check guild size, if its acceptable then apply a modifier by each month someone's been in that guild). This isn't perfect, but it provides a benefit for staying in.

Other benefits could include monthly certificates that provide temporary increases to exp from killing mobs, quest completion, etc that could be passed to other members. The more hardcore guys could pass these down to the casual players in the guild to help those guys close the gap with character development. Guild Halls could be upgraded to provide power-ups, or mabye NPC Henchmen (like guildwars) for members to use to help them progress when the main guild is tied up with other activities.

The key thing here is that there should be a benefit to belonging to a guild, and there should be things that guild members can obtain that can be used to benefit the rest of the membership. Lets get away from the "Purple 4tW" mentality where you just have a bunch of people sharing a guild tag, and not a real guild.

Character and Content Progression Tools

The City of Villains buddy system was a good first step in this direction. A higher level guy could allow a lower level guy to buddy up with him, and it would temporarily raise the lower level guy up to a high enough level to where he could kill things. The downfall of this was that the lower level guy didn't get any accelerated exp gain, and if he was level 10 then he only had access to level 10 powers. That's not very useful in a zone that's level 40-50, and the higher level guy can't go into lower level zones because the mobs don't give exp.

I don't see anything wrong with letting people assist their friends, and even powerlevel them. Again casual players have a hard enough time keeping up with their friends as it is, and MMORPG's have a history of forcing people to reroll to a new class due to a patch that gimps someone's previous character. Give guilds the ability to assist their casual and lower level characters, and then maybe some will start recruiting more newbie level players.  The opposite effect is that once a game is 6 months old or older, newbies are thrown to the wolves and no one wants to take the time to help them level up.

Guild Management

Lets make it easier to setup and run a guild. Let guild leaders make custom ranks/title and bestow permissions on those ranks/titles. Give us some automated tools to deal with inactivity, guild wide info alerts, conducting opinion polls.

Games should come out of the box supporting guild halls, guild vaults, and the ability of leadership to establish a guild tax to raise needed funds. Why have to still deal with mule accounts and manual gold/dues collections to maintain guild houses, vendors, etc? Its 2007, not 1997 and running the day to day stuff to keep a guild going shouldn't eat up all of the leaders time.

Conclusion

We've covered a lot of things, but this list is far from comprehensive. I plan to write more articles on guilds and gaming in the future. However guilds are the backbone of a game's player community, and few people get very far in a game without belonging to an organized guild. Therefore we need to put some things in that provide a benefit for being a member, a benefit for staying a member, make them easier to manage, and give them some rewards that can be used to benefit other guild members.

We are better than "Purple 4tw" in 2007, so lets ask developers to design smartly so that guilds can get back to the business of helping each other to succeed.