f13.net

I wanted to break this off to a new topic since the MMO & Budget thread kept having some good discussions about MMORPG's and guilds.


Actually Nick Yee did some good research on why guilds have problems in MMORPG's (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000468.php), and the strains of guild leadership (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001516.php) that are true to this day.

General Guild Related Issues


This is why I thought the Age of Conan player poll about Guild Leadership being able to see a person's previous guild affiliations was interesting.  You see players hopping guilds after they get a certain set of gear is prevalent, and its demoralizing to the people who busted their ass to help billybob get his purple gear.  When dealing with large populations you have a lot of these types of guys, and they cause drama in guilds ....possibly to the extent of killing off the guild if enough of them come and go during that guild's lifetime.



This is the two steps forward one step back approach that we always have to deal with, and its basically called membership churn.  As a game ages, more and more guilds put caps on the lowest level and lowest geared applicants they will accept.  For the new player this means that if they pickup the game a year after release, a lot of the better guilds won't accept them. So they have to slosh through a lot of bad guilds and hope they can hang around long enough to meet certain prerequisites for the better guilds.

While I personally dislike to set level and gear prerequisites, we have to do it because:

1.
Games do not let us effectively level with newbies to help them out

2.
Gear cannot be passed down usually due to level restrictions

3.
It takes too much time to catch a newbie up and get them to the current meta game


I think it was Mythic or someone that was talking about allowing guilds to "Level".  Honestly if guilds are supposed to be the ideal group for people to progress through the end game, then guilds need to be able to constantly replace old players who leave with newer players who come to the game. To do that, guilds need to be able to assist new players without the new player being too much of a burden.  I would recommend:

1.
Guilds be able to earn "Shadow EXP" sort of like how the old AC allegiance system did. I think the old allegiance system put around 15% of exp earned aside for your patron.  What I would do here is put that 15% aside into a general pool that could then be allocated to other members by guild officers.  So as long as the guild is earning exp, they are building a pool that can be used towards rerolls or new players.  15% isn't a lot but it can help, and it does mean leaders would have to allocate exp judiciously.

2.
A good sidekick system.  Basically an expanded COH/COV sidekick system where a higher level person can mentor a lower level person.  The lower level person could be teleported to the higher level mentor to save travel time, and teleported back if they break group. The lower level guy would be the temporary equivalent of his mentor's level, and gain access to temporary powers as if he were that level. For exp gain the lower level guy would gain double the exp for his level until he was within 3 levels of his mentor, then 1.5 times the exp until he was within 1 level of his mentor.

This system would solve one of the problem issues I mentioned with the current COH system, which was the exp gain was bad and the lower level guy didn't bring anything worthwhile to the group so sidekicking lost popularity there.



This is true. Would it be possible to begin developing a DKP type system into guild management interfaces? Let the GM or an officer schedule an event, let members sign up for it, and take care of this stuff in a more automated way?  The time we deal with making DKP systems on websites is awful, and many guilds fall apart when their DKP managers quit due to the burnout here.  Maybe if games started building a system in that was easier to schedule and use, it would help with loot assigning.



Some of this stems from the fact that raids require an exact number of people and an exact number of classes or they are nearly impossible to pull off. You've got to get to the end of the encounter to get your reward, and that takes hours.  The crux of the issue here is twofold.  First most guilds are small (0-25 members) so the average raid takes nearly everyone having to be present.  Second you've got to have the time to do the raid in the first place.

I think WoW did a good job by reducing the number of people required for raids, but you still pretty much have to get to the end for the big reward as well as to unlock further game content.  Does anyone have additional ideas on these problems or ways to mitigate them?



In this instance the will of the guild is negated by one inactive leader.  There needs to be a mechanism in more games to ditch inactive leaders, and keep the guild moving forward. Instead the guild usually dies out and people move on to other guilds where they meet the prerequisites to get into them.  The bad part of about this is that when guilds disband too much it creates a negative perception of guilds from the player community.



Lastly the guild loyalty thing is important for guild stability.  Again guilds need stability to survive, and games require an organized group (or guild) to basically play today's end game (Raids, RvR, etc).

What types of loyalty rewards could people get for staying with a guild over time, but not be game unbalancing?  A few extra HP? A slight damage or defense bonus? A slight loot or gold bonus?

I'm not entirely sure, but I think there does need to be a tangible reward that the average guild member can see other than just waiting in a DKP line for his loot number to drop.


Guild Leadership Issues


That's a good statement that sums up how many current or former guild leaders feel. Playing the game requires enough hours as it is, but when you add a guild leadership position into the mix then the game becomes a second full time job.  In a game that requires organized groups or clans to successfully play the end game, its a big deal when more and more people don't want to have the headache of leading a guild in new games they play.  Without good leaders then the guild community ends up being a mass of drama filled disasters waiting to happen, and it makes more players not want to have to deal with organized groups or clans in future games.


In a nutshell this boils down to:


1. Coordinating leveling activities
2. Dealing with loot drops / DKP
3. Issues related to recruitment/retention and what that does to PVE/PVP progress


To me the best way to mitigate this is to have a good system where higher and lower level people can efficiently group together, and where the lower level guy can actually assist the group (temp power suggestion).  Otherwise the guild leadership has to end up scheduling activities for both the Hardcore and the Casual members.  Unfortunately that rarely works out, and the guild has to either become Hardcore or Casual.  Casual guilds die off a lot quicker because they move so slow that people feel the guild is hardly getting anywhere, so they leave to go look for a "more active" casual guild.


This reinforces the need for guild leadership to be able to see people's previous affiliations.

Minimum:
1. What guilds they were in
2. How long they were in those guilds
3. Previous GM names so we can contact them for a reference


Make sure the officer levels in the game are designed so that they can easily be given a wide range of permissions to help manage the guild. Such things could be:

1. Adding/removing - pretty standard
2. Managing guild resources - not so standard
3. Scheduling events via in-game calendar - not so standard
4. Managing in game DKP tools
5. Setting/removing titles - somewhat standard
6. Allocating guild based rewards

etc.



And when the GM burns out in many cases the guild goes boom, members are displaced, they feel all their investment is wasted, and they start to dislike games that seem to require an organized group or guild to get anywhere. The bottom line here is that the in game tools need to be sufficient to where the GM isn't required to do virtually everything, and the officers have to have enough in game permissions to help manage the guild.

Another thing is games that still have a lot of /slash commands for guild management. That is terribly time consuming in and of itself, and needs to go as fast as humanly possible.


Again the reinforcement here is to try to look at the external tools the guilds are having to develop on websites to manage their guilds, and see if there are ways to incorporate that into the games. The biggest things I see here are things like DKP systems, rosters, activity management, scheduling and attendance monitoring, and recruitment.

Speaking of recruitment, too many games still rely on guilds to have to recruit externally via forums.  Please consider allowing stations in each major zone where someone can go look up guilds who are recruiting, and then allow guilds to set recruiting criteria so they can be matched with the types of people they are seeking.

Concluding Remarks

So anyway, lets hear your ideas.

We need to move beyond just considering a guild is a "cloak, tag, and chat channel", and realize that guilds are the primary vehicle that groups use to play the end game (and quite possibly to advance to the end game in many situations), and discuss what could be done to help both guilds and MMORPG's adapt to today's meta game.

Long post is loooooonnnnnggg. Replying to your points in random order!  :drill:

Adding DKP tools to the guild window should've happened years ago. Even something as simple as a "Raid Points" value for each character that you can type an arbitrary number into would be a step in the right direction. Adding several of the myriad DKP systems available would be nice (flat cost, bid, 0 sum, etc).

Players should have the option to have their guild history visible or not. This way guild leaders can ask players to show it, but still allows some player privacy. And if leaders dont like it, don't invite people who aren't showing their past.

CoH mentor/sk system is fine. No need to expand it further with temp powers, or there's no incentive to level. "Shit guys we need a druid. Someone go make one and we'll SK him up to max real quick." Granted, gear would be an issue, but still. Massive XP increases are also not needed, especially early in a game's life cycle.

Guild XP pool...interesting, never heard of this until now. I wouldn't have any problem with this, provided it was always detracting from the player grinding it. That is, some cost to players at max level instead of them just earning free xp for the guild whenever questing/raiding/faction grinding/whatever.

CoH has a system where if a guild leader doesn't log on in X days (set in guild options) he is demoted. This would work well, while adding sort of vote between the active senior officers to see who gets lead.

Guild loyalty rewards...I like it in theory, but don't like any of your suggestions. I suggest more meta guild rewards: hearthing to your guild hall on a seperate timer than normal, accessing guild bank remotely, etc. Special titles would also be cool (Loyalist, Fanatic, Rookie) based on time in guild. Things that are fun but don't affect game balance.

Finally, I hate your use of Elder game. Call it endgame. Without a capital E. That is all.

Edit: Thanks for finally posting your ideas, was just about to call you out again in the other thread  :grin:

I do like the COH sidekick mechanic, but there's a few problems with it.

1. You're level 20 with only level 20 powers in a level 50 group

In some games the mobs scale up in difficulty as you add party members. So a level 20 sidekick who's effective level is say ..49 is great. But the rest of the team might not be able to handle the mobs with that guy unless he's got some better powers.  Right now in COH a sidekick is best used to scale the difficulty of a farm mission, but otherwise people really don't want them because they don't help the group.

2.
Then there's the problem of getting the sidekick to the group without them being killed, taking up lots of time to maneuver, etc. Make it simple and just teleport them to the group if they aren't already with it.


As far as the guild rewards go, its pretty much like real life. You want to get something on a regular reinforcement cycle for being part of your group. That's like saying in real life that you love your job but the pay sucks, and so you move on to find a job with better pay even though the job itself might not be as enjoyable. As i said in the initial post, I'm not talking about massive guild rewards here....but I was trying to stir thought one some cool bonuses or features that would reward guild loyalty.  I like your suggestions, but I think the rewards need to be a little more tangible.

Yeah.  Sorry, I'll post something more constructive here when I have more time, as you've busted out a pretty nice post with a lot of ideas, but... endgame is, like, a word.  In the dictionary.  Why do we have to make a new, geekier word to describe the same thing.  With a capitalized "Elder," no less.

LOL ok I'll go back and edit Elder out in an hour when I get back from lunch:>

Well I don't like the idea of mobs scaling up to begin with.

Forgot to touch on teleportation. Things like WoW meeting stones outside of major dungeons really help mitigate this. I don't like something as blatant as your suggestion though, its way to exploitable.

WoW standing stones are a good concept to use in lieu of outright teleports.  Its been a year since I played WoW so I forgot about those.

Personally, I think providers need a bigger distance from guilds/interest-groups.  There's too much collusion, even when it's unintentional.  See Eve.  When you start worrying about guilds you lose potentially the design concern of the single player, and I don't agree that a "guild" is a good representation of "massive numbers of players" that is an MMO is by definition.  Otherwise, guilds are important temporary associations and what you propose for tracking is good. 

Great writeup. Most of this stuff we've been having to deal with over the years as well. We don't really blame the games though, since we've had no problem just integrating extra-game tools to fill in the holes. Everything from calendars to DKP is supported in some form.

Sure most guildies don't visit guild forums. But then, it only really matters that those with a vested interest do so. Those people would be:

• Leaders
• Officers
• Raid attendes

People who want to come and go as they please all the time either quickly get fed-up with PUG Raids, or never bother raiding, instead go with farming honor or Arena points in small groups (or grind/farm/solo/alt, as they would in any other DIKU).

The other element, where devs "should" talk to guild leaders, I'm ambivalent about it. Some MMOs have come out just fine without over-communicating with the playerbase. Others were all fubar'd for doing so.

UO had runestones. Absolutely the best way to handle players grouping up, in a game that, at the time I played, didn't even havea global chat channel. Only need to do two things to make them work in any DIKU where Devs want players progressing through all of the content, public and instanced:

• Players can only make their own runestones (non tradeable), and first by visiting the spot
• They can only be used in public-space environments (no instances, though just outside would be fine).

So what if the world gets smaller thereafter? The size of it only gets in the way of those alt'ing their way up to the cap anyway, becomes a nuisance.

MMOGs these days are all about producing static content.   Many of your ideas involve bypassing content.

Not familiar with UO; could you describe how they work?

Short form
Certain players could buy blank runes, go to somewhere in the world, cast a spell to mark that location of the world on that stone, and then use another spell to click on that stone to return to that spot themselves and/or with friends.

Long form
UO was a skills-based game. Imagine WoW without levels, where your entire effectiveness was entirely about how well trained your skills were (like the difference between 0 in Daggers and 375 in Daggers). Now, imagine that instead of getting those skills based on your Class choice, you chose different skills to train up entirely on your own. Then imagine that those skills supported each other in some way (like, say, that WoW Daggers skill also came with another skill that helped crit more often, instead of that crit being a stat on the weapon you were using).

One such skill players could get was Magery. With enough rank in Magery, players could bind a runestone to a location in the world, Recall to that location, or Gate to that location (opened a gate to that spot).

Worked for UO, but not good for DIKU:
These stones could be traded, and they could be added to books that were catalogs of many stones. And they could be placed in your house (or other houses) and anyone who could cast Recall could use them. And until the second expansion came out, you could just about make a rune for anywhere in the game. Imagine being able to make a rune for Rags in MC, or Opera in Kara.

This is the reason I qualified their use in a DIKU. In a DIKU they shouldn't be allowed to be traded, so you have to visit a location in the world yourself. Which means you needed to get there. Now, a Warlock could summon you there, but that can already happen, so there's no net loss anyway.

Mmm, thx for the explanation. Not sure how their application helps the "get my lowbie friend here faster" though, so much as just generally reducing timesinks. (Not that I'm not a fan of the idea, just not sure how it applies here. I thought the idea was that it was DIFFICULT and not time consuming for the lowbie SK'd up to get to the higher level zones.)

It's a fix for alts. Content is expensive, and methods that get anyone around it on their first character are going to be very hard sells to developers. Instead, for first-timers, make the path through the content fast, mostly soloable, and just interesting enough to keep them coming back for more. Like WoW.

If you're making a DIKU, that is :-)

Also remember though what I said about guild recruitment as a game ages. Without efficient ways to help new players, many veteran guilds just don't accept them.  So many times they end up in crappy fly by night guilds full of drama and strife. Then they hate the very guilds that they need to compete in the end game, and quit when they can't advance on their own anymore. 

Lots of guilds would be more open to recruiting new players to the game if it were less burdensome to get them to the current meta where the guild is playing.

Or as the game ages new players can keep hearing themselves talking in chat with few to no responses, get frustrated, and eventually quit. So you get less new players in who stay beyond their free game time, and eventually guilds have a shrinking recruitment pool that could force them to leave the game entirely.

With that in mind, I'd have no problem with this being implemented, say, a year after a game launches. It'd fit well into EQ2 or WoW, but launching a game with all sorts of ways to bypass content is just going to cause faster burnout. Remember, 1-69 is a game too. Getting everyone out of it as fast as possible is only a good thing when theres plenty of stuff to do at 70.

Edit: with that said, I'd just like to ask waylander if your thoughts are ADDING these features to an existing game (if so, which one?) or for a new game. Things that are gamebreaking at launch are good fixes for a game where the lower level content is empty.

A lot of your ideas are great, but they focus on powerlevelling newbies. If players want to bypass the newbie content, there should just be a big red button at character creation that says "Start At Max Level." (I have yet to find a compelling argument against that.)

Otherwise, I think a lot of strides could be made if newbies could be more helpful just by being newbies. Make it desirable to not only be Level 1, but also make Level 1 characters useful in a guild. Even further, give benefits to Level 1 characters that are lost at Level 2; resource gathering, for example, or content that chains upwards (defeat the L1 kobolds in one instance, and the L70 instance has no trash mobs that get in the way).

Without efficient ways for people of multiple levels to game together then as a game ages you have these two scenarios:

1. Newbie Zones

Generally unfriendly, and guilds not willing to go out of their way to group with non-guild people or deal with dumb newb questions. Pretty much status quo in many games today.  Newbie gets frustrated and quits when his 30 free days expire because the game doesn't have a friendly community to help him.

2. Veteran Players (End Game)

Guilds consolidate due to collapses because not enough newbies are sticking with the game long enough to become veterans. Or the newbies don't have the right prerequisites "Level+Gear" when they apply.  Its too time consuming to stop guild progress for that guy, so you pass and wish him luck on his guild search.  So the overall recruitment pool dries up and guilds collapse, or the veteran without the right gear just quits when he can't get into the better guilds (ala what happens in WoW these days).


No need to make a list but without effective ways for newbies and vets to be integrated into a guild (if they desire) then you have a community that degenerates to these two basic states. AC, EQ, DAOC, Shadowbane, CoV, and slowly....WoW just to name a few.

That's because you're not looking, like, at all. It's like a giant pink elephant in the room.

The last thing any game needs is a bunch of total newbs who have no clue how to play the games. It's disruptive to the community and the designers of the game.

Really though, I'm more concerned about soloers and the casual gamer than the hardcore uberguild guy who's views of the game are never EVER in line with the majority.

Edit: Just to weigh in on the actual topics, while I agree with some, it seems like you want some sort of cultist indoctrination set of mechanics put into place to expand guilds and engulf more users into guilds. Because really, the major points you bring up are to keep people from twinking and exploiting game content. But I like the spin. "Help newbies." That's clever.

I'd personally like to see more inroads made into societal benefits rather than guild ones btw. Guild mechanics are largely standardized, or at least, any logical schmo what is and isn't needed for a guild to operate as a guild though.

Casual gamers are the majority of players, and roughly half of them join some form of guild.  They have massive issues with being out leveled by friends due to RL commitments or not being able to participate in the multi hour (3-5+) raid end game in today's games that require several hours of continuous play.

The guild leadership stuff I posted about in here isn't relevant to the casual gamer who's not a guild leader.  The stuff I posted about ineffective grouping between higher and lower leveled characters is relevant whether someone is in a guild or not. The ones who never join a guild are going to quit the game when they can't solo regardless, and the ones who do join a guild will quit the game when they can no longer keep up with their friends.

Organized group of friends playing a game have some of the same issues that a guild has playing a game.

Yes, sure they do. But those issues come from playing in a genre where everything is based on level. Once you get rid of that, you get rid of that issue. Until then, the entire thing is just an argument for shortcuts.

I agree on the level stuff. I wish we could just play the dam games, but unfortunately they don't make them like that. I don't mind the content barriers so much as I mind the barriers that prevent people from gaming together effectively, and today's games simply use levels as a way to do that.

I don't expect anything to chance, but I think Nick Yee's research is still relevant to gaming guilds or small groups of organized players.  Its not like people are going to quit playing overnight if these things aren't addressed, but I think it does play a factor in why the player community (guild or not) really isn't as helpful anymore.  They are either barred by game mechanics, or already overloaded with what's on their collective plate.

I don't think it would be much worse than it already is. How many players of single-player games skip tutorials and immediately jump to the hardest difficulty setting?

First without a specific game in mind and havving led guilds in AO, EQ, WoW, AC and AC2 and becoming one of those 30 somethings who loved to game but now has rigorous time constraints I can probably shed some light into what I wish game designers would do to help management.

Integration between online and offline management would be primary on my list of things.  What does this mean?  Well that the formation and running of a guild should have real benefits.  I'm sure if you had metrics your churn numbers greatly diminish between people who "solo" in your virtual world versus those that build bonds.

So:
   Dedicated forums tied in with game accounts hosted by xyz gamijng company(with standard home page stuff)
   Dedicated voice server based on guild (with the standard subchannels and so on)
   Direct tie in between say MOTD and the like manageable by web interface
   Guild roster manageable by web interface.
   Chat logging and ability to view off line
   "Off line" ability to chat (AO did a nice IRC plugging for this)
   Historical data on characters (create dates, join dates, even play times and amounts - this would be for snooping parents)
   Integrated looting system (this should be ala carte really ranging from suicide kings style to DKP and it's variants)
   True guild management tools (viewable banks + logging of activity)
      ability to set ranks / titles and associate them with rights
      ability to set "taxes" for games that require upkeep on things (guild halls etal)
      ability to set alliances and grant limited access to your resources to sister guilds
  Crafting compendium for games that have that in them and ability for guild members to place orders against each other.

These could be ala carte and I would even go as far as say they are premium services.  So definitely chargeable.  You figure most guilds pay $20 for voice and probably another $20/$30 for image / forums/ home page / dkp web hosting.  Let your guilds decide if this is a single person carrying cost or if it can be shared.  Alter the monthly subs accordingly.  This of course needs a big warnign type system ingame with the "this guild expects you to pay for premium services based on it's current size your subscription will be altered by x amount per month.

All of these tools should be accesible ingame and offline.

From my experience I found that if a new member was brought in, if they talked in guild chat their retention went up.  If they posted on the forums, again another knotch, if they used vent yet another and if they actively spoke you pretty much had a full fledge member.  Each really signified a mental commitment to a virtual community.  Although I'm not sure as a gaming company if you offered these premium services for free what sort of return on your investment you'd get (ie longer subscription lengths to attracting the ever growing online community types).  Chances are your game design needs to be solid and fun.  I'd address the helping of newbies and the like but I think that's such a fundamental design flaw of most of todays diku variants I wouldn't spend the time providing tools to alleviate that but would just redesign the game play so that would not be an issue.  I guess it depends on the games fundamental design (progression via dings aint going away) but I would say trending towards a henchman type concept (ie making MMOs play like single player where as you meet people you replace your NPCs with person Y).

Any ways too much babbling from me, must be the new years hang over.

That list sounds like what one could get if they purchased all of the micro-services offered on Station Players (http://stationplayers.station.sony.com/), except I think the VoIP support. You get charged for them, but if you took all the services, I think it comes out to $11.96 a month. If you only played EQ2, then that might be worth it. But I prefer to decouple the metagame stuff from any specific game. We'll eventually leave a game, but the tools we always need.

You'll be happy to know a lot of the ideas about guild management via web interface are discussed and solutions offered in the game design book / textbook Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2by Thor Alexander. Whether they get put into games is another question though.

I definitely echo the points made about knowing what guilds someone has been previously. This would aid guilds in making decisions. Someone could toggle it on or off, but if they wont let you see it then you know they're a bit sketch.

One of the ideas I had about guild loyalty had to do with integrating a raid / group command system. The idea centered around having a Savage / Battlefield system where raid leaders could set waypoints and objective commands. Group leaders could also use such a system. The twist was that the more you actually followed these commands, the more you'd get loyalty points. Officers could see how much a player followed orders and use that to decide if they should rise the ranks. Also such points might allow players to use/buy items from the guild armory bought with said points.  Heck you could even use the points on guild member's vendors if you wanted to.

The DKP idea is quite good too. Give guilds 2 or 3 stock systems to choose from...or an interface with choices to make their own. Guild-wide voting systems that pop-up on log in are also important.

In random order:

 * It's called elder game (the terminology I try to use as well) because (a) endgame implies the game ends and (b) "elder game" is correctly descriptive, it's the part of the game played by people who are, well, elders in game terms (length of time on character may or may not play a part here).

 * Sidekicking systems are a requirement and it amazes me when MMOs do not have them (I'm looking at you WOW)

 * EQ2 has a very intricate guild levelling system - in fact I really recommend in general people take a look at what they've done with guild support. I especially like what they've done with guild advertising/recruiting.

 * I think AoC guild leaders being able to see the guild history of past members is a bad idea. Anything which impinges on a character's anonymity is bad. Reputation should be player driven, it should not be controlled and gamed by the game system. There's enough ways for players to be junior high school girls to each other without the game helping. If it's character based, it's both intrusive and useless (reroll a new character when you want to escape your reputation). If it's account based, It is even more wildly intrusive and also eliminates espionage which is a pretty big part of hardcore PvP MMOs.

 * Guild requirements set too high - I don't think there's a lot you can do to address this honestly. It's human nature to want to go onward and upward, especially for achiever guilds. (Ironically in the book I wrote that 3 people bought I had a whole chapter on guild taxonomy. Only it wasn't called that because, well, the book was MMOs for Dummies.) Achiever guilds aren't going to want to nurture new members because they see that as a waste of time, even if apprenticeship XP and sidekicking is available (and apprenticeship XP is pretty easy to exploit - see XP chaining in AC1). Some guilds will nurture newbies (whether friends in RL, alts, or the guild is a casual guild that takes newbies) and the game should allow encourage and reward that. Other guilds will only want THE BEST OF THE BEST and there's not much the game can - or should - do about that.

* Coding DKP support - I'm leery about this because DKP is something that guilds need total control over. Anything the game codes in will be wrong for someone. The framework for DKP? Sure. Plugging in eqDKP, Suicide Kings, or whatever? Nope, the casuals won't use it because it's confusing and the hardcore won't use it because they found a better version they have total control over. Still if you have a raiding game support for loot distribution and attendance tracking is helpful/required. My fear is just that any time developing in-game DKP will be wasted.

* Raiding sizes vs guild sizes: WoW is instructive here. When 40-man raids were the norm smaller achiever guilds disintegrated or were absorbed by larger guilds. When Burning Crusade moved the focus to 25-man raids the largest guilds complained because it made less room for error in raid size makeup, but raids became doable for smaller guilds. It's important to note that very, very few effective achiever guilds can muster 40 ready raiders on a given night, but 25 is a more doable number (and for casual guilds one- or two-group 'raids' are optimal).

* Guild loyalty - from the developer standpoint, metrics show that once a player is integrated into a guild, they won't leave the game as long as the guild remains, effectively (they tend to remain subscribed *far* longer than guildless players). So, yeah, from a purely mercenary standpoint, we love guild loyalty! :) (which is also why I chuckle when I read "mmo devs don't care about guilds". Oh you are so so wrong.)

I disagree that anonymity is so important in this medium that anything which impinges it is bad. How often have we wished for greater accountability? We're not talking about releasing billing addresses here. It's just the history of a character at a time when everyone accepts WoW's Armory. This is factual information about a fictional avatar.

I don't assume you believe this, but I'm using this quote to air a greivance.

What is it with some devs who think large group gathering that require knowledge of strategy and adaptable tactics are spur-of-the-moment things? Jeezus, 40 people, 25, 15, anything over 6 and you're geometrically increasing the probability that the participants scheduled something.

Yea, there were complaints when raid sizes went from 40 to 25. Everyone adapted. That didn't suddenly make it viable for PUG raids to clear an entire instance, so the very same reason guilds form and people manage calendars still exists.

In edition to sidekicking that should become standard, ingame manageable privilege-based Calendars should be too!

As an aside, I agree with the use the "elder" though think endgame as it has been used for so many years is pretty much accepted as saying the same thing, regardless of what it may sound like.

I can understand from a developer stand point why you'd want to give players anonymity.  I guess a few "whoops I screwed up and was an asshat", if it stayed with the player their choices would be reroll, new account.  Which would probably lead to cancelled subscription.  Similar to any game not having the ability to respec a character without a full reroll.  Not knowing any metrics but chances are those respecs keep player retention up.

From the flip side of the coin, I know most of the "community builders" that I associate with want accountability.  Meaning they might have their kids in guild and want to keep their recruiting standards high.  Most likely not so much for min/maxing guilds where content consumption is the motivator but for the more social experience guilds.

On the DKP / loot system issue.  I think you want that as a feature set.  Again not for the full achiever guilds chances are they are off siting all their stuff but more directed at the casual "hey we got enough to go raid one night a week" type guilds.  For them it would be a drama reducing tool if you build in, loot management.  Which leads me to something slightly off topic but the mechanic of repeatable content being repeated because of bad RNG issues is was probably the biggest "I'm bored and done with this game" issue I ever saw managing guilds.  Both from dragging people no longer interested in repeating the same content for the 100 time (I'm looking at you WoW).  Obviously you want to stretch this out to cover for content creation cycles but not to the point of being punitive.

As to what method I would say would be out of the box viable so that casual raids have built in tools?  I can think of a few systems out there that are pretty idiot proof and instinctual.  Now you could just ditch the RNG loot concept all together and go with a nice little bar (CoD4 style...hey 100 headshots here is your silencer!) and just attribute it to number of times killed or what have you here is your token.  This is probably a bit too visually "grindy" for people though but the RNG issue is something I saw more and more in WoW (before I stopped playing).

Yeah, I'm not talking about pickup raids - good lord those are exercises in futility - but of a guild just to be able to schedule a night 40 - or even 25 - people can be on at once. (The guild I'm in right now can't do 25. Maybe we could do 10 on a good day. Hurray for Karazhan!)


Looks like Warhammer Online is adding exactly that: http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/media/beta/calendar_tab.jpg


Well, it's for a number of reasons. As a developer anything you create as an exit point is bad (exit point being "ok, I'm done with this game now, k thx bai") as you alluded to. As a player I don't see the need to cede my privacy to J. Random Asshat just because they think I should. There was a long thread about the way WoW Armory rolled privacy expectations back here earlier. Suffice to say that just because Blizzard runs their game a certain way does not mean I believe it's the correct way to do it.


I can see that as a good idea but with social tools like that, you have to get them right the first time or you've wasted your time. To pick on WoW again, look at how they've gone through several LFG systems. The players ignored them because the first iterations frankly sucked, and now that they have a workable LFG system no one ever uses it because the players are trained that LFG tools in WoW don't work. Given the amount of work in an MMO that has to be done, wasted development isn't a good idea.

I can't help but think this has more to do with the fact that you don't need groups in WOW. Seriously why would anyone even look for a group in the first place?

Surely you jest.

Have you ever played it?  I realize you're more about the Ballsmasher 6000 FFXI, but not forcing grouping doesn't mean it won't be popular.

I feel vindicated! I thought that elder game was the correct term, but I can see where people get it mixed up.


I agree completely.  Having something such as a sidekick feature makes me more eager to try out a game because I know we have a way to help people level who can't play 5 days per week.


Is there a short version of what they've done in the public domain?


I see your point here and respect that position. What if there was something like a guild notoriety system them? Where a person has a guild rep score, and only a GM or guild officers could assign positive or negative points?

The reason that this is important to us is due to the issue I mentioned in the original post, and that's to help us identify habitual guild hoppers who just come in to mooch some loot.  Because guilds have to constantly recruit, enough moochers that you don't have a good way to screen can affect overall guild morale.  It will make veterans not want to show up for raids to help new people out because they keep being burned by people who quit once they get their purples for a certain level.


True, but even achiever guilds have to continuously recruit if they expect to survive in a game beyond 1 year. Guilds will take in people who aren't perfect if they don't have to spend a huge amount of time catching them up.  Sidekicking is a way to do that.


What about a basic tool that allows a guild to schedule an event, takes attendance, and assigns loot awards based on basic points. I know the advanced guilds are going to run their own thing, but it sure would help the less Hardcore avoid fights over loot.  I don't think extreme casual guilds would use it, but a regular casual guild (1-2 raids a week) probably would.


Considering that an average MMO guild is somewhere between 25-50 members, even 25 man raids are troublesome when you've got a lot of 25-35 year olds in your guild.  I like the 10-15 man raid scenario better because its more doable by normal sized guilds with the age bracket of players that are gaming.  A guild of 50 with 30 people online (if they are lucky) would then run 1-3 raids at the same time. 


I didn't say devs don't care about guilds (I think).  What I meant is that in these revolutionary games that you all keep designing, the guild unit keeps getting stuck with essentially the same tools we had years ago.  Guilds today need to be more organized, managed more efficiently, need help attracting and screening members, and then need a way to help newer players get caught up to the guild's average play level as the game ages.

I think Nick's research and some of the other suggestions here have reinforced that we don't expect dev's to think of everything, but there are some areas where we could use some help if developers want quality guilds to survive and thrive year after year in their games.

Watch WoW over the next year as they integrate more of the stuff for guilds EQ2 has :wink:

Oh, yea, I thought you were talking coordinating schedules, not size. I prefer Kara as well, though we did have a larger alliance for the pre-BC days when we needed 40. Trouble is now we still have that alliance but not enough experienced/gear people to field two 25-man'ers. We have six different Kara IDs though :-)

As to the Calendar, yes!. :NDA:

I blame timing. Alpha players train Beta players train Live players. LFG systems that are thrown into a game after launch do not survive the traditions already in place by that very late point. You need to really have that in place early. And it needs to include name, level range, classes sought, zone(s) and the specific event being sought.

Exactly, if grouping is a major component there's no reason not to have a useful LFG system ready to go as soon as the ability to form a group is working.  It's not rocket science and five minutes spent reviewing LFG spam (or just cut and paste the last sentence of Darniaq's) in any game out there will provide the info for the requirements doc.

Just want to toss this in. While side-kicking is cool, and works, Mentoring, i feel, is also a Must as standard all moos need to employ. (See EQ2) Its really nice when your over level friend can "De-level" down to your level and adventure with you.


Or, stop making games use levels. This would be a better idea altogether.

I really want to be an AXE wielding Leather wearing MAGE that can melt face and ride a motorcycle.

And I'm all out of motorcycle /roddypiper

 :rimshot:

Otherwise, yes. UO 2.0. Plz.

Lol, Got any bubble gum?

Am I the only person that thinks that guilds (and catering to them) aren't the end all be all important thing to MMOs as everyone makes them out to be?

Make it easy to form a guild.
Make it easy to invite or kick guild members.

Done?

Custom guild rank titles and guild history and the like seems like superfluous fluff that development resources would be better off used elsewhere.  And who really worries about "If you don't do this, I'm taking my 200 (15) man guild and going to <whatever game>!!!111!!" anyway?  It's like trying to make sure the hardcore catasses don't outpace your content.  Is there even a handful of guilds that even remotely deserve that sort of attention?  I mean, if anyone seriously listens to FoH or their like deserves to have their game crash and burn (i.e. Brad).  Casualites would be scared off from the FoH website (and others like it) anyway.

If you're truly worried about inviting some uberdick that stole his/her old guild's bank and caused extreme amounts of douchebaggery, then do a little research on them.  Don't try and make YOUR (social) job of making sure someone is a cool cat the devs responsibility.

SC, I only see the issues as relavent because MMOs are structured in a way that requires a guild to advance at the endgame. If you're going to force me to do something, I want it to be as painless as possible.

Brandon Reinhart's blog has a good writeup (http://www.extropica.com/?p=16) including screenshots.


I guess my concern here is that this turns into a broken eBay rep system. If you drop below 0 in your rep score, you'll never get into a guild, and if you're a bad apple you'll reroll a new char/account and if you've been victimized by a psycho guild officer you'll simply cancel instead because it's too much trouble.

Why does your guild need to constantly recruit? Game system requirements (more troops = more wins)? Why not keep new recruits at a "we don't trust you farther than we can throw you" level and cause new recruits to earn (real life) rep to get promoted to a level where they can have access? In our WoW guild new recruits have to get an officer to mail them anything valuable out of the guild bank and we're an extremely casual guild. I'd think for a larger guild that'd be a requirement.

I am VERY leery of social tags that follow characters because I have seen similar systems used for abuse in the wider Internet and in an MMO the motivation for grief is increased hundredfold. I will admit to being somewhat hardcore about this opinion (and anonymity requirements in general) and I'm usually the outlier in internal discussions on this.


Yeah, something like that is probably a requirement going forward.


Underestimating the value of social connections in MMOs is kind of foolish considering that's the primary difference between an MMO and a single player game.

The whole reason the raid cockblock exists is to be a pain that slows down the players from burning through the content.

That would be my prefered situation. Levels just make so many damn problems...

Couple things:

1)  They aren't forcing you to anything.  It's a choice as to whether or not you partake in the 'endgame', which incidentally, is different for everyone.
2)  It's awfully difficult to make /invite and /kick any easier than it already is/should be.  Though I'm sure someone has or will do it.

Questions to anyone: 
What percentage of players actually care about raiding? 
What percentage of players actually stick around long enough for it to become an option?

I saw a dev blog or something with percentages of players/guilds that had completed "X" raid in WoW, and the numbers were staggeringly low single digit percentages.


I'm not sure how making it easier to form a guild and inviting/kicking guildmates is underestimating the social connection of an MMO.  If anything, it reinforces it.

Like minded players will find each other, either through forums, PUGs, or other.  Don't take it that I'm against some sort of simple matchmaking thing, it just seems to me that he best way to foster social connections isn't necessarily through guild tools but more towards game mechanics (i.e. player interdependency via class/professions, crafting, etc).

Just as an aside opinion directed at noone in particular:  If people are joining guilds for the simple fact that they can raid/endgame, they're joining guilds for the wrong reason.

Raids should exist to accommodate Guilds.
Guild shouldn't exist to accommodate Raids.

Your bias is showing, because of the slant of the discussion here, SC.  However, even non-raiding guilds have social structures and things they'd LIKE to do, but can't in-game because they don't have the tools.  Many of these have already been listed, from event scheduling (for rp fests, gnome-football, OR raids) to distribution of guild resources.

You join a guild for the social network and connections.  You join a PARTICULAR guild because its goals are in-line with your own. ('engame' content or bsdm play)

I see no reason not to ask for these to be included, other than 'omg the dev's lives just got harder.'


As to the DKP/ Item Scoring stuff that was mentioned, including it would be fantastic.  It would even mesh well with move among the WoW PVE players to do-away with random loot alltogether.

They'd rather see ALL 'boss' mobs drop a similar item to the 'badge of justice' and put ALL classes on the same 'armor token' (to limit cases where a guild gets 10 'druid/priest/paladin' tokens in a row, when they only have a sum of 4 people playing all those classes alltogether.  Grats DE!)  It stems from seeing the arena folks able to pick-and-choose their loot and always being  happy, as opposed to living with the BS of 'random loot generator' that doens't appear to be quite so random.

  If there were an in-game DKP system, and tokens, there'd only be one or two values to set and track per person, instead of the way DKPs work currently. (A different value for every item, a different token for every 3 classes, and different sums for everyone there.)

#1, the endgame is not really different for everyone. It's shades. You are advancing your character during the endgame through gear upgrades, just as you were from 1-cap. Raids get you the better gear, because you need that for the next tier of raiding beyond. And it's long since been proven that scheduled raids work much better than a bunch of soloers who join a PUG because they realize they've hit a wall.

#2, agreed. But guild management is more than that once you get beyond the personal-friends size. Who's managing the newbies? Who's managing the guild bank (usually someone's alt unless the game has it)? Who handles invites, interviews and recommends drops/retains? Who's scheduling anything, from guild swaps to raids? Who's running the raids? Who's coordinating with the other guilds in the alliance? And so on.

All of this stuff goes on in everything from the most contrived DIKU to the most open virtual worldy game, and it is not specific to just endgame raiders. This is for any organized body that has an identity, charter and purpose. They are intrinsic parts of the genre now. And yet there's still very inconsistent support from various devs. That seems attributable mostly to devs not thinking these are as important as raw content.

Going by the numbers, they are right to emphasize the content first. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 10% of WoW players Raid, and tha number only goes down as travel backwards through other games. But these are also the people in the game the most. You can't ignore that while focusing on content for someone who logs in maybe 3 hours a week.

Social tools have to be in and complete as soon as you let a large number of players into the game, i.e. during beta. People have to get used to them and once alternative systems have been firmly established, even if it's just spamming global chat, then it's hard to establish social tools. The same happened with DAoC's pretty sophisticated LFG tool. It came way too late and was never really adopted universally, not even in Albion, the one realm where people were still doing traditonal tank/dps/cc/heal groups instead of PBAOE idiocy back in SI days.

MMOs are supposed to be social games and I don't understand why many devs seem to consider social tools a low priority. Has there even been one game other than FFXI that bothered to implement an LFG tool comparable to what DAoC had years ago? In WoW they gave us the Retard Rocks no one uses, after having removed even the basic /lfg flag for some reason. Most games still are still released with social tools that are often little more than glorified /who searches and friends lists.

It's been more than 10 years since UO and almost 9 years since EQ. By now every MMORPG should have

- FLG/LFM tools that allow you to specify not only what kind of class/group you're looking for but also content. A comment function would be great, too ("Doing Buttking Breechloader. No retards and DPS Paladins, please.")
- A friends list with IM fuctionality
- A sophisticated guild management tool with ranks and privileges, guild bank management, scheduling/calender tool, attendance statistics and a way for guild leaders to send information to all guild members other than setting a MOTD. Integrated DKP systems should at least be taken into consideration.
- sidekick/mentor systems

One thing I'll throw out here as I saw it as a trend in my last few MMOs is the guild coalition concept.  Meaning the more casual guilds tended to stay small (below raid size) but made conglamorates to raid and the like.  Pretty similar to standard social circles where the "cliques" are just identified by guild tags.  These conglomorates usually ran multiple raids with time slots and were interchangeable.  Think of it as a trusted LFG system.

Anyn one thinking of doing a scheduling tool for an MMO should just rip this WoW mod off.

Screeny: http://media6.curse-gaming.com/images/previews/7407/guildeventmanager-list-of-subscribers-and-leader-functions.jpg

Called guild event manager you can probably still grab a version from curse.

Now I'm not sure how big this trend is (small guilds getting together for content) but having the ability to decouple "raid tools" into logical raids would also be something which would help out this segment.

Back when I was still playing WoW (pre-BC) such a "raid alliance" was the most successful raiding group on my server. When my guild was doing MC back then, we were lacking certain classes, so we invited people from smaller guilds to participate. They'd get DKP like everyone else but weren't required to join our guild.

In EVE Online, alliances are built into the game, i.e. it's three-tiered (player/corporation/alliance). Some people are even advocating the idea of adding another tier - coalitions between alliances, since these exist in the game inofficially and are forming huge power blocs.

GEM is a nice mod for smaller guilds, but from what I've seen it lacks the functionality of a 3rd party tool like Raidspace.  With RS you can have alliances sign-up and you see who everyone is, what class they are and then who was/ wasn't needed for the raid.  (If 15 dps warriors and 4 healers were the first to sign-up you're not killing anything.)

Apparently it IS rocket science, as at least 2-3 games have made various attempts that mostly sucked.  The probability of being able to pin the blame on one or two worthless developers or designers seems pretty low.

The ultimate outcome in WoW has been a mostly usable tool, but it would benefit from a few other enhancements:
 - ability to specify what role you're looking for (tank, healer, dps, cc) in some other format than free text. 
 - Being able to look for group and specify what role you fit (for example a resto druid as opposed to feral) would be good on the flipside
 - have an auto join that gives you a profile of the group and a yes/no choice, so you can auto join but not have to say "oh sorry it's FredRetard in this group, I'm not grouping with him" and drop group.

There are probably others, but the tool as it exists now is pretty usable.  That said, the ever popular spamming the trade channel seems to still be at least as popular a method.

I'm not familiar with the FFXI or (current) DAOC tools, or what EQ2 uses.  But it doesn't appear to be an easy problem judging from the number of attempts that failed.

I agree with some of what's been said here:

- being a guild leader is a pain and you barely have the time to play the game anymore
- players will remain in the game only as long as their guild exists
- the difficulty with keeping a guild together is a social one and the issues are pretty much the same across all MMOG's

So, make the guild leader's job as painless as possible.  I'm all for calendars, loot distribution tools, some sort of rating system for PVE / raids attended, switching the loot to tokens, etc etc. 

I think that a PVE rating system combined with tokens-for-loot could completely eliminate DKP.  Master looter could auto-send the tokens to the guild NPC vendor, and then members can go buy said tokens from the NPC by spending their rating or honor or whatever.  Automated system, and if the GM could set the NPC Vendor's prices, or if the NPC Vendor is some sort of auctioneer...  that's all that would be needed.  All you'd have to do to gear new recruits would be to take a vet team through Kara every so often to stock the vendor with Kara loot badges, and then give each recruit a bunch of free honor so they can go buy the shit, and voila.

As far as calendars and organizers, it's about time that they integrate with existing Internet comms technology.  I understand that there are security issues with inbound communication (letting internet users control in-game stuff), but I would love to see more outbound communication (where, for example, if an event is set up in the in-game calendar, the data is also sent to the guild's registered website, notification emails are sent to all registered members (registering your email is voluntary of course), and also text / IM are sent to pagers, phones, IM addresses, etc etc. (registering these is also voluntary).

The biggest frustration I hear right now from my current guild officers is people signing up and then forgetting to show up.  Officers could page them, but that's just extra work and it could be automated.

Anyway, yes please.

What tools do you really need that you can't don't already?  edit:  Holy shnikies I have no idea what I was saying, but I think this is it:

What tools do you really need that you don't already have? 

Do you really need tools to decide guild officers?  Or who has more pull than the next?  True guild leaders tend to rise to the top automatically.  Self-appointed (or even elected) guild leaders tend to fail in epic fashion.  People are going to follow and give proper respect to whatever leader naturally climbs the ladder.  Does guild email not work for event scheduling, or raids, or gnome bowling?

To me, all these fancy dancy guild tools are the equivalent of ingame VOIP.  There's already means for VOIP (TS and Vent), and they do a better job of it.


1)  But not everyone raids for their engame.  Unless you count PvP as raiding (arguable, I suppose).  Some craft.  Some aspire to climb the social ladder to be the social king or queen.  Or being an altaholic. 

2)  Why do you need tools beyond guild mail privileges to decide who is managing newbies?  Or scheduling/running raids?  Or PR for guild alliances?  Generally, the most effective people at such tasks rise to that position naturally, and all that is really needed to such is guildwide email privileges.  I'll concede the guild bank is important to a certain degree, but can be worked around with an alt just as effectively, and more securely.

I just don't see the point of trying to reinvent the wheel here.

Adding on to what Snakecharmer said, I think it's also important to figure out what belongs in code and what parts of running a large guild are just hard and never will be easy, no matter what sorts of in-game doodads you have.

Dealing with drama, taking tells from irate people who encountered your problem child, recruiting, scheduling raids, running raids, designating class leads, and other general leadership stuff doesn't have a software solution.  I agree with a fair amount of what has been said here, but a fair bit of it won't help the underlying problem, which will always be HARD.

There may be a better 3rd party tool out there in the world.  The issue is that the game requires tools it does not provide to participate and endure as a guild.  When guilds become work, players quit.  When addons are required to participate that is just another barrier built into the world, another opportunity to split groups apart or just quit the game entirely.  Since current models place limited resources only available to end-game guilds into the game, entire communities lose out when guilds quit.

Just look at the WoW example for a second.  Even if you aren't interested in raiding at all, there are crafting recipes and resources only available in the end game raids.  If your server has no end-game capable guilds you are at a disadvantage against players; for instance from other servers in your battlegroup in PvP.  If the end game capable guilds on your server fold up shop these resources become unavailable until some other guild can pull it all together.  With an established guild they are more likely to carry over an account of a player with these rare resources even if that player quits playing the game.  In the context of the game, these are important elements and resources, placing the important bits of your game in the hands of 3rd party support isn't a very sound design move.


Because these tasks you describe require real-time interaction when tools do not exist.  Real-time interaction basically requires each guild to supply 24-7 customer service to their membership or risk drama spiraling out of control.  That kind of coverage will burn out guild leadership.  A chat channel does not a guild make, the guild leadership is responsible for the ability of the guild's membership to enjoy their time in game - otherwise their guild will fail.  Even if they've ensured that their players can have fun there is no guarantee their hard work will pay off with a long lived guild.

Tools often help portray equity and fairness when dealing with other anonymous people on the internet.  That's really the advantage they provide to the guild leadership as the perception of favoritism is easier to accidentally create than the perception of fairness.  MMORPGs often schedule events, e.g. you need 20 people to kill Nefarion, or 40 to kill Naxx.  Coordinating the schedules of that many people without a built in scheduling system is just punishment for playing an incomplete game.  Once players have to start making real-world scheduling decisions based on in game events the game must provide some ability to coordinate that scheduled event across time zones and players.  In outlook I can send a meeting invite, and even check to see when people are available before I schedule my meeting.  In MMOGs the guild leadership picks a night out of the hat and if the right mix of characters is not on-line that event can still fail even if the required number of characters is in attendance.  

Is a request for better guild tools reinventing the wheel?  Given that many guild systems are just a chat channel I think not.  Integrating the lead provided by 3rd party tools is a good start, but certainly not sufficient to support what is an important cog in the customer retention plan for most MMOGs.  


Lum asked a question:

WoW is in the steady state and has been for a long time.  Player Churn is a non-trivial factor and due to end-game requirements it can make the loss of certain characters much more important than others (even discounting leadership churn).

• Because the main tank discovers Boobs >> WoW.
• Because the players have put in their 3-6 months and need something new.
• Because your guild can't get them the things they so desperately need.
• Because a real job is required.
• Because the Healers have discovered that DPS is less responsibility and more fun.
• Because they always have to sit out of the N character content.

In order to participate in the end-game certain numbers are required.  These are often concurrent numbers, which means if you have short no one gets to do anything and if you have extra you have to find a way to keep the extras logging on so that you'll never run short.  In many PvP oriented games raw numbers provide turn-batteries and ablative manpower.  In limited raids one needs particular characters, group compositions, farmed resources etc.  This means a guild is always on the lookout for newbies or newbies to the circle of trust. Routing resources and trust management through a person makes real-time demands on that person and creates a mountain of paperwork - paperwork that can be challenged by other players building that perception of favoritism.  LotRO has an option in the AH to provide the auction to guild members only, this should be a default option for any guild-banking system.  Anything to streamline loot/resource distribution in a transparent, fair, and hands-off way is a good thing for the guild.  Making these auctions expire is painful for the guild, but probably a concession to the implementation details of the auction system.

Vetting recruits is also a painful process.  There isn't a good way to judge new recruits outside of a dangerous situation, and dangerous situations cost the guild money and resources to screw up.  Requiring a real email address and screenshots of character screens was common in Shadowbane, but easily spoofed (it was really only an idiot trap).  Trust is boolean according to the guild systems in many games, which makes shared resources in a high churn environment a particular burden.

bbcode is hard

First I'll put in a caviat, if the game in question does not suck then these are value adds to most guild leaders.  Anything that reduces the amount of time maintaining and increases the enjoyment factor of those I consider the glue of a guild should increase their subscription time.

From Lums statements it seems people will subscribe when guilded for the life of a guild.  Most guilds usually tend to be cults of personality with a few shouldering the "work" load.  When they get to the point of thinking of it as work it's when guilds usually crumble.  So if game developers can assist (even if it's as simple as hey I don't have to cntrl-v cntrl-c dkp stuff) in reducing the overhead for people who actually maintain these social structures it should in theory ensure that these guilds have a longer life span.  Extrapulating it should mean longer subscriptions.

Does any game need it?  Nope but it sure would be nice to have.  I know established guilds don't want the wheel reinvented but as you get new generation gamers why not just hand them the wheel as opposed to asking them to build their own?

I do see the counter argument that most established guilds wouldn't use these tools because they are already either multi-game or have custom solutions that work for them.  But in reality most are using sites like guild portal to host their stuff and voip integration is simple enough specially if you can truely integrated into your UI (huge value add I would say).

From a business stand point making it difficult for a guild who becomes reliant on your tools to leave your game because the next game doesn't have this stuff I think is also a big bonus to retention.  As to should these be premium services which a game could charge for?  Well I think you could probably do a cost analysis and see benefits relatively easily.

My self as a consumer, once any game maker put them out in good or decent fasion, I'd expect all next gem games to have them by default.  Much like a good UI, once you play a game with a good modable UI, playing a game which has a shitty UI just makes you wonder (I'm looking at you Turbine).

Basically, you just sort of proved that what is the best solution is often the easiest.  

If you have to hold your fellow guildies hands, then you've got the wrong guildies.  They don't need 24/7 guild customer service - they aren't your customers.  What you're describing is essentially micromanagement that reeks of this guy (http://www.watchtheguild.com/toondeets.php?id=vork).  Drama is going to happen with or without guild tools because you can't manage people with tools.

And further, you want to talk burnout?  If I, as a guild leader, have to wade through all these toolsets and UI and options, I'm going to say screw this and just solo it.

A guild that plans to stay in a game longer than 4 months and wants to retain a certain amount of actively playing gamers pretty much has to recruit and replace its membership every 6-7 months.  25-30% is pretty common, but there are times when masses of people quit very closely together and a guild has to basically rebuild. When that happens you could end up needing to replace 40-60% of your membership.

In LotD we may slow recruitment at times, but we almost never cease it.  Once you cease recruitment efforts, you tend to lose people, more often than not, who applied and got put on a waiting list.  A guild that ceases to recruit, IMHO, is simply a guild that will usually exit the game when they can't muster the manpower to play rather than rebuild.

Like you, I wouldn't want a system that would be abused and screw people from being able to join a build.  But on the flip side, it is very damaging to keep pulling in people and then seeing them drop after they got purples from "Raid A" and then go to another guild for stuff from "Raid B".  It makes the vets of both guilds not want to go out of their way to help new guildmembers because they figure they'll bolt anyway.  If the new member doesn't get much help from his guild, he'll leave anyway and everyone had their time wasted regardless.

That's why I suggested limiting a rep score assignment to the GM of the guild and maybe the senior most officers.  If they go around tanking people's scores, then they will create a bad perception of their guild.

On the player side maybe their rep could be a total score based on the GM point assignment + longeivity in the guild. I'd probably just keep it simple so that the player ended up with a A, B, C, D, or F rating.  Maybe the rating could gradually reset over time too so the player isn't permanently scarred.  But hopping from guild to guild to guild is a real problem, and there is virtually no way to screen for it.

I don't think either the system for getting to see one's past guilds or the rep system are bad at all. If you're not the sum of your experiences then who are you?
In the end, the tool is only as bad or as good as the person making the decision. If you apply to a guild and they wont join you just based on your history, are those the kind of people you want to play with anyway?  It's a tool that can be misused, but that doesnt mean the tool itself is bad. Used correctly it would be just one criteria or point of information for induction.

And what's our hierarchy of needs here anyway? I'd put guild needs over individual player ias regards some issues - this is one. If stability and longevity are really as important as they're made out to be in this thread, why let a few individuals who get unfairly treated outweigh the greater good for the entire population?

You know what will happen...getting a bad rep will be one of those things that turns into a badge of honor. The Rolling30s or C$O's of the world WONT let people in unless they have a bad rep.

Yeah there's not a lot of player privacy anymore. Many reputable guilds require applicants to submit a screenshot of their character screens that show all their characters.  In some games you can see right there if someone has a different guild affiliation.

As other said, you can't build tools to substitute for people skills. If you don't have them, then you shouldn't be running a guild or be surprised if if fails in an epic cloud of drama.

But we can all see the external tools guilds are having to design on their own to manage their organization for a particular game so just giving us a cloak, a tag, and a chat channel doesn't cut it anymore. There have been a lot of good suggestions and comments thus far.  I'm glad Lum decided to participate in the discussion, but find it odd that none of the other regular devs that haunt F13 have said anything considering guilds are big parts of their games.

The problem with your rep system waylander is that it's easily exploitable. Creating a guild is free and easy in most games. So if someone trashes your rep because you're a ninjalooting guild hopper, just make a few guilds real quick and bump your own rep up.

Ok, so require that it has to be upped by someone other than you, that the guild has to be X days old as well. Heck, even make it so that the same officer cant give you more than X rep points within so many days. There are ways to fix that exploit.

Yeah you're right. I forgot its easy to make 2 man guilds in a lot of games these days.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Not worry so much about a person's previous reputation that may or may not be deserved.  Generally, I think, that if someone really is a thieving, cantankerous twat their reputation will procede them and you'll know what you're getting into ahead of time.

Outside of that, put them on a probationary status within the guild for x days, etc etc etc.

You must travel in smaller circles than I do. Often you have to put in a lot of time to know how your guildmates act if you're joining a new guild. Conversely if someone new is joining you you'd have to run into them and their friends many times and drama would have to occur. Oddly, its usually your friends that you can call on their bullshit...not your acquaintances.

I wonder how long it would take for someone to set up a pay service to rehabilitate a person's rep?

How much you got?

Cuse ill say what ever you want me to if the price is right, shit, ill do it if the price is wrong, as long as there is a price.

If you set up controls, they couldn't. As I said previously...set it so that the guild has to be X days old to give reputation changes. Set it so that a particular officer can only give a person a rep change once a week, once a month, etc. I'm sure someone more intelligent could think up even more than that ;)

It would be a nice sideline for RMT folks, have your farmers  join the guilds you create and start charging.  Farmer guilds would find cycling people through officer slots to give rewards a heck of a lot easier than the real guilds would.  I'm sure that given time and resources the devs would come up with a system that was hard to game but all that would do is raise the price and while they are fixing the holes in the rep system they aren't fixing other bugs.

You're absolutely right in that guild drama is going to happen with or without tools (or because people are being tools). This isn't an attempt to solve personality issues. It's just to make the officer's jobs easier.

People do rise to these positions naturally, but they don't stay there forever. How long they stay depends on many factors, including the tools afforded them. But it's not just about people management. It's also about activity coordination. The more activities beyond solo grinding kill/collect quests, the more people can do their own thing and feel like they're contributing. And the better the tools the officers have inform and coordinate, the more likely they'll do so. It doesn't stop with GEM and Guild Banks. It starts there.

All of this happens already, through extra-game tools. That's messy for gamers. But that's not a good enough reason by itself for developers and publishers.

So how about the lost revenue opportunities?

Extra-game tools are eyeballs not on the game nor likely on the game publisher's websites. It's why SOE has tried so hard to internalize everything the player might want to do in a game into their system of games and web portals. More eyeballs for more stickiness for more ads and upsale opportunity. Otherwise it's other people leaching from your success (ie, Thott, Allakhazam, etc).

Doesn't matter to 40%-margin Blizzard (could they spent maybe 3% of that for patch hosting?!). But it's also something someone else is using as an advantage (EQ2 and :NDA: come to mind).

The way I'm reading you is that you see more of your AAA developers and publishers becoming (essentially) a Wal Mart of themselves? 

Basically, the sales pitch would be:
Your own guild forum server hosting?  You got it!
Need VOIP server hosting?  You got it!!
Every MMO under our roof available via one launcher?  You got it!!!

Sign up today for Station.com and get all of the above, plus exclusive podcasts, interviews, and more!!!!

Station.com....We've got your game!!!!!


As for the rest (guild tools)?  I don't know.  I just think it's fluff.  I'd rather devs spent more time coming up with cool game mechanics, interesting storylines, and whatnot than that.  Right now, the standard guild tools are fine.  Sure I'll admit - all of the above Wal Mart stuff are effectively cleverly disguised guild tools: get your guild on your SOE sponsored forums, using SOE sponsored VOIP, and having your guild automatically built into every MMO available via the station.com launchpad.

This isn't about shifting focus away from content. Awesome guild tools in a game nobody plays is not a win :-) But when you are successful and can buy a new car every 20 minutes for every one of your employees, well, yea, then you start looking at what can be improved.

Yes, I see more AAA developers and publishers pumping out microtrans features. There's this idea that people who make MMOs at a company and people who make web pages for that MMO at that company should be separated. That's old-school thinking.

Every single metagame site and addon out there proves there is a good percentage of players who do take the game beyond the game session itself. None of them would be needed if the current guild tools were "fine". Could you imagine any viable guild existing even without, say, forums? Or email? Or IM? Or (in some cases) VoIP? WoWWebstats? What about EQAtlas of old? These are all out of game tools, filling the need the game does not. That has advanced to services that make money from offering such things, so there's money to be made.

Yea, some of the stuff listed here is a nice-to-have rather than a requirement. But again, it's only nice-to-have because we already have it, in some other form, from someone else.

The real risk here is that someone more intelligent would think up a way around anything you come up with :)

Show me a game without exploits and I'll show you ...wait, find one first.

That's my point.   You said "If you did X, they couldn't Y".  That sentence has been said many times before, and the result is always woe.

Generally that just starts the discussion though. You don't not progress down a path because of how it may eventually be exploited. You understand it'll happen and either make the experiene better because of the exploitation, or find ways to keep it from happening.

There has been a lot said here, too much for me to comment on in a worthwhile way.  So, I'll just add my own emphasis on what is important.

Guilds are what give players reason to keep subscriptions long after the "charm' has gone away.  MMO's have a limited amount of their own content.  When that is gone, it is the people that keep you around.  I've only quit MMOs because either I never grew attached to anyone (2 months or less -->AO, SWG, EQ, GW, DDO, LoTRO) or the guild I was in crumbled (UO, SB.)  I'm currently in WoW since launch and the only thing that has kept me is the guild I'm in.  I played UO for 7 years only because of the guild I led.  SB only got 6 months from me, but it was only due to the guild I was in, which happened to be the same people from UO.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have made it past 1 month.

Think back as a player.  When have you ever played a MMO and thought to yourself, "I could play this solo without a guild for a year."  You can play them for a few months like that, but a year?  Years?

By far, guilds are what devs should be looking at to keep their player churn low and steady.  Anything they can do to make guilds work better is worth their time.  Spending all of your time on mechanics, art, story, etc. is well and good, but if you ignore guild tools/development all that will be wasted on the players within a few months.

One idea I would like to comment on:  Anything you provide outside of the game will only help a select few in the guild.  I've found that getting players to participate in website, forums, voice servers, etc. are fought tooth and nail.  Players, in general, want to spend their free time in-game, not on websites and servers.  They will pour all the time they have in the game, and anything outside of that is taboo.

Make the voice and forum features in the game.  The forums can be link directly to their UI's.  If they want to know the topic of the day/week and discussions surrounding it, just go there while waiting on the boat or in-flight to that next destination.  All guild information/rules/etc. can be posted and read.

I am all for a guild metagame/endgame/extra coding/extra feature investment.  Balance it with solo content and feature.

Ex : mercenary contract, head hunting, stealing, mapping.

That way you please the Socializer, the Killer and the Explorer. :dead_horse:

Yeah I think Dren provided a good short summary of why a lot of people hang around in games and its because of their guild.  The easier the guild is to run, manage, and help its members the longer it stays in a game.

I guess the question is why more development isn't going into making the guild unit more viable in today's games.

Because it's still hard enough to make good content that retains individual players. Case in point is EQ2, which as mentioned in this thread has fantastic guild tools and a guild metagame. But that did not make up for the other nonsense that was in the game at launch. And at this point it doesn't make it different enough from WoW to jump ship to yet another DIKU.

So if you're deciding between spending time on content and stability or good guild management tools, you go the former, knowing that the viable guilds already do their own management through extra-game tools anyway.

As I've said you still HAVE to have the base game solid before even thinking about the guild aspect or everything is moot.  However, guild tools and enhancements CAN be patched in.  Basic gameplay and polish CANNOT.

The game has to first capture and attract players.  The guild functionality is there to retain. 

The emphasis on guild systems during original development should at least be enough to be functional, but built in a way that allows expansion and enhancement on good ideas at a later date.  Also, as others have noted, it could be put into the game in the form of buy-up features too.

If maintaining the higher end tools is more costly, then pass the cost along to the customer with some additional profit.  Tons of people would do it if it added to their pleasure of the game.  That also helps with the opinion that the tools aren't necessary.  If you feel that way, then don't upgrade.  Use the standard offering.

I'm always a proponent of making any tools/automations optional.  Allow the game to be as simple as your LCD, yet allow for the game to be as complex as your most rapid fanboi wants to be.  By the very least, make the game dynamics tranparent and available to all (see DKP idea below.)  There is a balance that has to be maintained between transparency and character anonymity, but I think it can be reached.  Seriously, a player gives up some of their privacy concerns when joining a guild.  There has to be a fundemental trust built while in a guild and it has to be built quickly.  Allowing a glimpse into what a character is about helps in that process.


**More mental masturbation below***
Take the DKP ideas for example.  Sure put some of those ideas in, but make them completely optional.  My feeling is that just allowing players to access data about characters and their contriubtions/rewards from each instance is enough.  I mean, if I could look up my character and see that I spent X hours in Karazhan and have received "Big Gun," "Big Sword","Shiny Helm," ect. that would be enough for my guild.  Maybe make it even easier by designating a point system to each item based its item level so it can all be added up.  Then you'd have a reward/effort ratio that could be quickly understood as above or below what you'd expect.  You'd be able to quickly see who rushed in and got their rewards and now are sitting and sniping at chances rather than helping the group as a whole progress.

All of this can be used as a spur of the moment decision on awards during the raid, or used during guild leadership meetings on participation during raids.  Since everyone can access this information, there would be no cries of "unfair," or bias.  Open and honest has always been my motto concerning guilds, build a system with that in mind.