f13.net

I do enjoy reading WoW Insider even though I don't play much WoW these days. This week's highlights included some discussions on a sister site (massively.com) about guild hopping.

Original Source Article (http://www.massively.com/2008/04/30/player-vs-everything-fixing-the-problem-of-guild-hopping/)

It relates to the issue of games requiring organized groups to progress far into the end/elder game, and then ditching a guild in favor of another one with higher progression ratings once they've gotten all their loot from the current guild.  After a game is established, many guilds put level, class, and gear pre-requisites on applications because they don't want to retrain/regear newbies all the time.

So somewhere along the food chain some guild gets used, abandoned, and upset over all the hard work they put in to get someone geared just to see them leave on a moment's notice.

So anyway, the article sorta comes up with this idea that you stick everything on a vendor for purchase. Then when people do raids everyone gets a set amount of badges or tokens that can be used towards purchasing gear. I have to admit that something like that would cut down on the drama and bitterness that goes on when you lose someone you spent a lot of time gearing up, but on the flip side this would sort of make raids pretty boring.

What do you guys think? If everything was a badge or token drop, what else could be put into a raid encounter to make it feel worthwhile? Or is the idea just shitty, and WoW's model should be the norm?

You mean like Badges of Justice?  As far as I know, what you describe IS how the high end WoW game works.

Yeah you can buy some gear that in the ballpark to what you can get on a high end raid now with badges, but there's some good stuff you can only get from a raid drop. I think this guy was recommending to put all loot on the badge vendors though, or recommending that future games do something like that.

Guild Ranks with meaningful rewards.
Guild Housing
Guild v Guild fighting.

None of these are new... except apparently to Blizzard. However, I don't expect them in WoW anytime soon either. They need to think there's a problem and I'm not sure they ever will.

And I say this as someone who's guild has been used as the stepping stone.

WoW's already experimenting with some half-way systems in Sunwell.

For those that haven't been keeping up, something called 'sun motes' drops in Sunwell Plateau.  They're the Generic Raid Crafting Mat of Sunwell.  However, you can also take certain pieces of gear and a sunmote and go trade it in at a vendor for a different piece of gear.  One example is a piece of balance druid gear that you can trade in for a piece of resto druid gear.  If you happen to have a boomkin in your raid, great, he just got a well-itemized piece of gear.  If you don't(You don't.), no sweat, just give it to a resto druid and he can turn it into a piece of gear he can use.  It's still random, but it's not randomness that sucks(Like that inexplicable +holy damage trash cloak in kara).

Purely tokenized systems like what he proposes have objective downsides.  Right now, a guild can drag a gimp along in their raid(For example, an alt of the main tank that ran out of upgrades weeks ago) and shower him with epics that no-one else wants and very quickly get them up to spec.  But if he has to grind the instance for 3 weeks to get one piece of gear, that's going to seem a lot less appealing to everyone involved.

If i were a cruel korean developer, i'd "solve" it by adding guild requirement on the gear. That is, the stuff looted while being member of certain guild could only be equipped while remaining member of said guild.

Of course, this would be just stepping stone to alternative RMT gear source, free of such limitation. Or maybe grindy quest to 'free' your gear. Or both.

Why would you even want to limit it in the first place? If you get a piece of gear its because you raided for it and you earned, why should you be beholden to the guild that you raided with?

Because the supposed problem is people "using" guilds to raid for personal gear and then moving to pastures new. So that "solution" removes this very incentive to join guild in the first place, as ditching them would also mean loss of that part of advancement they made possible.

Of course, it should've also be written in green but that's another story  :oh_i_see:

Solution to prevent guild hopping : Don't suck.

Better.

It really has nothing to do with being an asshole, it's more a matter of fact that the guild with phattest lootz will attract the best epichungry ones who aren't a part of cosa nostra. There are two types of guild members, those who will leave after wiping on Four Horsemen for two months and those who won't. Those who leave aren't worth shit anyway, a few epics drawback (except from MT) aren't anything so what can be done except keep moving forward ? Guild BoP sounds like those crazy husbands / boyfriends you hear about, who give wifes tons of gifts, but after failing at marriage due to being a nimrod and wife leaves, he wants his stuff back. Also viewing from another side, if a player has raided with the guild actively and looted tons of epics and went to greener pastures, didn't he deserve those ?

In the end only way to prevent guild hopping is to, instead of me saying stop sucking, is being a better guild at what you do.. From my years in MMOs there will always be guild hoppers and these are unavoidable and there ain't any mechanics that can be implemented to benefit the guild versus these guys.

EDIT : Oh yeah, there kinda is, someone already mentioned good guidelines :

But it's intrawebs. That's like going to congress and telling people there to stop being dicks.

The best way to prevent guild hopping is to fill your guild with solid, equitable players.   As soon as someone becomes a power hungry jerk or jealousy rears its ugly head, guilds die.  

If I wanted to be witty, I'd say the best way to prevent guild hopping would be to remove loot.  Loot seems to be the biggest reason people leave guilds.  Either it's a fight over loot, lack of groups to obtain loot, or poor quality groups unable to get loot.

Exactly. However avoiding the nimrods is impossible. Pre-TBC while raiding Naxx to get world firsts (I play on EU realms), I remember several guilds disbanding and reforming due to this. MTs lost, healers bounced, group of friends went to the guild who were two bosses ahead, shit like this is a part of any MMO and don't think it is preventable in an other manner than longterm bonds and guildmembers who go years back. MMORPG really means MMODrama when it comes to guilds.

I always said good riddance to the guild hoppers. If they hop guilds they were jerks anyway and now they are at least somebody elses problem!

Guilds on the cusp of the next largest raid size/progression level usually end up in the feeder role.  They need to recruit unreliable_nobody_035 to fill out their raid and have a chance at epics, but then when unreliable_nobody_035 gets his drop and qualifies to apply to Guild_With_More_Guys_And_Greater_Progression_003 and jumps ship the rest of the people in Feeder_Guild_01 feel just a little more bitter about their lot in WoW and get all angsty.  If you've got 8 guys who know what they are doing you can raid 25 man instances, but only if you've got 17 other guys who can not stand in fire and soak damage while your core gets the work done (Ablative Raiding).  Guilds in this situation can easily fall into a feeder state because that's the way the game is designed.  It is easier to be ablative and pick up your phat loots than it is to be in the core carrying the rest of the raid (in an ideal world everyone is core, but people/classes aren't built like that).  So the guy who is along for the ride gets more epics per unit pain, and has no qualms about jumping to the next new thing because he didn't actually work very hard for the guild he's a part of now.  No buy in and no loyalty in the current situation and a greener pasture up ahead; jumping guilds is a no brainer.  Those of us who do not jump are just doing it wrong.

I like solutions where the Guild levels up and the Guild pays some opportunity cost to add a member.  Right now the only drawback for adding members in most games is the risk of additional drama, if you are already accepting anyone who happens to have today's shiny list of epics you probably aren't concerned about (additional) drama overmuch and there is no incentive to have anything but all the people you possibly can.  If it were a GvG game and Guilds were matched up based on the size of their rosters then you'd see guilds turning down competent applicants which would put pressure on all the floaters.




I love the token drops and think everything should go that way.  Even the Tier drops with 3 classes on them were frequently crap for all three classes.  Who needs 3 pairs of tier gloves with different enchants anyway, or to kill Gruul 300 times so everyone can get their DST?  I just don't think being a slave to the rng is a great way to game.  Tokens alleviate some loot distribution drama, which is a good thing, but it also makes guild hopping even easier to do since the floater hasn't taken many 'rare' resources from the guild and will feel even less guilt (I got the drop, but they all got tokens!).

Wouldn't the obvious solution just be to remove the retarded-ass grind requiring you to run the same content scores of time before you move on to the next set of content?  :ye_gods:

Seriously, I only join friends and family guilds now precisely for this reason (or BAT guilds, which tend to be pleasantly drama free).

This cockblock is blocking my cock!  We need solutions now!

Yeah but then when you have people able to complete and loot dry any set of content in under a week, they're instead bitching the next sets of content just ain't coming fast enough to keep them interested.

I'm willing to bet that once a game waves *goodbye* to the hardcore, that their gains in casuals will offset the losses.  Though I guess a subset of harcore players always at the cap has some purpose as a marketing tool.  i.e. "Look at the neat stuff we have and you don't" 

That.

Instead of trying to fix the symptom, (guild hopping) fix the root problem.

When i said being able to complete set of content in under a week, i was thinking of casual players. Catasses would likely burn through it in under 24-48 hours once the current RNG loot cockblocks and such are removed.

Example could be the latest LotRO update. Took them well over a month to deliver, took the players about week-two to get bored off. And that's probably one of the most casual friendly games (and casual player base) with one of fastest update rates on the block.

The fundamental problem with these games is that linear content takes a long time to develop.  Tool-based sandbox games seem like a better alternative for removing the grind, but those haven't demonstrated anywhere near the success of more scripted, linear games.  For me, DAoC was a nice middle ground.  You could create your own content in RvR by varying the type of play each and every evening (solo, small group, 8v8, castle seiges, and relic takes) but even that gets old after a while. 

I find a "Employment History" like Eve has at least deters it a little. You are taking responsibility the minute you join.

Don't recruit jerks to your guild and they won't cause drama and/or leave.

Guilds who recruit people based on their race/class/gear level to fill a raid slot without a thought about the person behind the keyboard get what they deserve when that person leaves.

If you are pissed that someone left your guild because it means you are now that much further from your full set of epic raid gear, then guess who the lootwhore is.

This whole thing is a human issue not a technology or game design issue.

Why would you want to stop someone hopping out of your guild if they don't want to be there?

The problems here are....

1) That you are playing a game where the process of grinding is not fun to you. You need to stop that.

2) You are performing unfun activity for other people who do not want to be in your guild in the first place. This doesn't stop being a problem just because they are trapped in your guild afterwards.

3) You're inviting people who don't want to be in your guild. This is the biggest problem of all. Guild leading is a player-skill activity, guild recruiting is another. I know when I've led guilds back in the day, I was shit at recruiting, so I just worked out who wasn't shit at it and got them to handle it.

Anyway, employment history is a good solution. But it didn't happen in WoW, so I don't expect to see it anywhere else anytime soon.

Of course it is a social issue.

What drives the social interaction in the first place?  What tool limitations exist?  What in game motivations are provided to the social units (guilds) that exist in the game?  Yes, people are broken, but that doesn't mean the game design doesn't also have something to answer for.

Players can coast and pick up loot, then coast along into some other guild and pick up more loot.  All it takes is a lack of pride and unwillingness to lay down roots and you can squirm you way into any guild, pick up your shinny, and then repeat the operation elsewhere.  When game design requires a minimum raiding roster to experience content but provides no incentive to dance with the one who brought ya we're back to selfishly shafting our neighbors until we get bored and try the same thing in another game.

WoW, for instance, requires (or rewards strongly) certain classes/talent/and gear loadouts and punishes duplication of others (how many Doomkin does a raid really need?).  At some point the player isn't as important as what he's playing - but the game puts impediments on getting your good people into useful characters (why don't we have a spec swap?  Why don't we have a /level once we've already done the whole level to N thing?  Why is gear >> everything else once a minimum competence is attained?).

Not recruiting jerks into your guild is a great way to end up running 5 man raids once a week.  Attrition happens.  Guilds, like games, must bring new players into their ranks and most of the available (relevant) players on any server are the floater-jerks hopping from one guild to another.  Guilds that want to progress are incentivised to pick up players they probably shouldn't, because without them they cannot reach the rewards in front of them.   To combat attrition Guilds take risks on new guys, to reach new content they take risks on new guys.  New Guys aren't risking anything more than a raid lockout timer when they sign on with a guild, however, they can (and do) just bail without looking back.

This really wasn't any different in Shadowbane either.  When a guild lost their city they quit the game (losing a city was often a Drama-Inspired event in and of itself).  Guilds that didn't recruit new blood died-out through attrition, guilds that did risked more drama and city loss (which was actually encouraged via the game design).  The end of every design path was a guild leaving the game, as the path in WoW is to jump through progressively progressed feeder guilds until you get to the endgame raiding you desire.

Issues:
  Concurrency.  Players need to be on-line together to accomplish their objectives.
  Loyalty.  There is no reward for loyalty aside from that created within any subset of the player culture.
  Identity.  Anonymity on the interwebs and the ease to circumvent In Game controls and information flow / socially game other players.
  Manpower.  Pieces of the game world require N players to gain entry to the fun (doesn't matter that the fun is just like all the other fun elsewhere in the world). 
  etc.

Combine Concurrency and Manpower and you've got to manage a wait-list (Drama ahoy) in order to ensure that the players who do happen to log in today can have fun by going on the rides instead of waiting in line for the last guy to show up.  The extras still need something to do so they stay around on-line, in case one of those on the ride have to leave or disconnect or need to be replaced for performance issues.  It isn't a trivial problem (sure it isn't rocket surgery either) but there are frequently no tools built into the game design to help alleviate any of this.  That points to design deficiency, in that the successful enjoyment of your game is predicated on 3rd party tools, effort, and good will.  Why put the long term success of your enterprise in the hands of outsiders?

Guild hopping doesn't seem to affect my guild, because we have a reputation for being ruthlessly well-led and organised, requiring commitment, with great success in a few games (EQ1, DAoC and currently EQ2). In other games our branches have failed, but the ones that worked brought us a solid reputation. Former players return to us in new games, bringing friends or people who have heard of us. When we fail, it's because people leave the game (SWG, WoW), not because they went to another guild. Our message board, which has been going since 2002, has become a community in itself (not on the FoH scale, just our own community).

I think we try to avoid mass incoming guild hopping, because it has caused culture clashes. Recruitment is usually kept closed, which actually means we'll accept a trickle of incoming players (usually people we know).

Our time zone probably helps: GMT+10 (east coast Australia). We are mostly Australians, New Zealanders, a few from Japan, Hong Kong, Guam, etc. And some North American shift workers. In EQ1 we did get the occasional person who left to join a North American uberguild, but it was really frowned on. Our progress was behind those guilds, but we offered the same path in a more playable time zone.

So I think to prevent guild hopping, you need a target recruiting pool who will have something in common, set up some clear goals to work towards, and deliver. Then you have a brand.

Is this a discussion on how to stop people from guild hopping in WoW, is it a discussion on creating binding community systems in future games or is it a cry for help from a frustrated guildleader who wants to keep his players in random_current_MMO_#3?

I don't have anything to say about the first as I have never played WoW. For the third, the basics have been covered already: invite solid people, have a resonably stringent recruitment process that will at least flag up and at best weed out potential drama and make the guild a fun and rewarding place to be.

For the second, then I'd suggest the following:
Give anyone who joins a guild a way to contribute effectively no matter what they like to do.
Don't split your game up into arbitrarily sized lumps of content (large fixed size raids) that necessarily create insular and hierarchical social systems.
Make all your content accessible by anybody, no matter how casual. Sure the hardcore will get there first but the guys who play <10 hours a week are paying the same monthly sub and they might like to see it eventually too.
Don't encourage players to be dicks. Enough of them can manage it without dev help, there's no reason to turn the waverers into flap-scrobblers as well.

This would, in fact, be a fantastic tool in ALL games.   EQ on Tribunal had something like this based on player logs.  It was a website you could go to, type in a player's name and POOF there's their guild history. You could tell a guild hopper right away and avoid them.  It died with the implementation of the "pay to change your characters name/ server" revenue stream, though. 

Hell, even today there's known "guild hoppers" on my WoW server who can't get into 'decent' guilds.  People like to say WoW doesn't have a server social structure, but it does.  It's just large enough that you can get lost a lot more easily than you could in the old games.

Devs by and large don't pay attention to these social structures, though. Guilds are seen as an afterthought to be dealt with as just another chat channel.  Kind of sad.

I don't know that the third one is practical or desireable in a general way.  In Shadowbane some of the content was related to designing and building a city, while some of the other content was related to funding and supporting a city / national economy.  When necessary resources are shared across participants it just doesn't work to let every one put their hand on the rudder.  It is on the guild to provide stability and access to these sorts of resources to the general membership of the guild (as a benifit and reason for remaining with that guild) but in order to do that they must limit access to those particular tools / types of content.  I think some content should only be available to guilds (and then within that class some content only available to guild leadership) in games that practically require guild structures to form (Viva Pinata has no buisiness with guild only content, SB was all about guild only content).  I suppose at this point I'm just clarifying an edge case that your statement never really applied to.

The other three should be no brainers.  I'd add "... and when they like to do it." to the first point just to emphasize the pain concurrency demands place on a guild structure.

I don't think Guildhopping can be stopped in WoW, it is by design behavior. 

The Warcraft Realms census bot records character guild (http://www.warcraftrealms.com/charhistory.php).  It's not great, but it's there.

As a former raiding guild leader in WoW, I'll also say that do not accept large mergers. (I believe Tale said this as well). That shit never ends well. Cliques and drama a plenty from there.

Basically, some people say all the right things ... so you aren't 'inviting assholes'. There are always moments when you will see someone's true colors, when you do act then and do not wait.

I like the idea of the Employment history. When we do applications for new games we want to know previous guilds that someone has been with, and then we do a little research on each applicant. But if I could view "Billybob's" application in more detail and see that he'd been in 5 guilds over the past 8 months, then it would certainly help with the screening because its not like the "Billybob;s" are going to tell you that when they apply. Instead you find out when Billybob suddenly /gquits and is running around with some other tag.

There's been some decent responses, and then there's some people that seem to think that guilds sit around with an HR department ready to do a full security background check on each person. Well its not like that, and in most cases you've got to take a chance on someone based on what they said on their forum application.

Fortunately for us our screening weeds out a majority of the tards, but no system is perfect whether its in game or out of game.  Like Tale our guild attracts former members back into the fold when we change games, and our member evaluation weeds out most of the bad apples the first 3 months. When we've had to leave a game it was because we "won" and there was nothing left to prove, or due to poor game design/boredom/etc there was not much of a quality pool left from which we could recruit.

I doubt WoW can do much to change the current system, but I wish it would open up more developer's eyes to the need for better guild screening tools.  People dick off now because they are rarely held accountable on these huge servers, but even something as simple as being able to see someone's past guild affiliations (including join/leave dates) would be invaluable to guild leaderships.  Then maybe players who need guilds would care more about their reputation if they knew that some form of guild history followed them.

Hah, found a guild hopper on my server that left my current guild to raid higher content.. been in 5 guilds since then.  Funny enough, there's another rogue with a similar path out of our guild and around the staple mid tier guilds before attempting to reapply.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/charsheet/70395150


It's interesting to look at that link Liet posted and check out your ex-members.  You see a lot are no longer with the grand opportunities they left for.

Our guild recently had a major upheaval.  We had a friend of a bunch of guildmates form a 25 man raiding guild.  That drew off a large section of our more dedicated raiders, who wanted to be more progress oriented.  A couple people gave bullshit reasons for going, but no one really faulted anyone for leaving for an environment that suited their aspirations better.   Another large section broke off to reform a guild that had merged with the guild I'm in a while back.  During the 3 months or so they were with the guild, they always kept that identity of their former guild in their actions and words.  It was no shock and no blow when they left.  However, they will likely never be welcomed back (their guild leader is a big jerk).

Now we're back to the same content we were when this all started but with a group that's more satisfied, happy, and excited about where they are at.

In any MMO with tiered progress, you're going to have guild hopping. There's no use hard coding against this, it's the job of the guild to attempt to recruit members that fit in with their guild culture.  You can usually spot someone that's just using you a JV training team.   Their focus upon joining isn't going to be fitting in and helping the guild, their focus is going to be where you are at and where you are going and when are the raids.  People jumping off makes your guild strength weaker but your culture stronger (unless it leads to morale problems) and in most cases is preferred to having a malcontent hanging around. It can sting a little, however, knowing you've been used.  I think lower tier and more casual guilds can feel this a little more because their main focus is on helping other guild members and this often takes the form of free mats, gems, and services.  Jumpers take strong advantage of this (have solid guild bank policies). 

Espeicially not large mergers where the other guild doesn't speak the same language.

I mean shit, that looks so stupid when I type it that you don't even need to hear the story...

Not so stupid from where I'm standing.  The guild we run Gruuls/Mags with is composed of Spanish speaking players.  When they're not around us, I don't ever see them type in English.  I could see someone having the hairbrained idea of merging.  Vent is always interesting though... "Uhh, could you repeat that?"

It's amazing how efficient tards can be at weeding themselves out. Server message boards can assist.

During a guild group in WoW, I was messaged by a guy asking to join us to complete a quest. We had room, so I got him an invite. Looting rules were loose because we were a guild group, and he immediately took advantage of it and ninja-looted some stupid green item.

So I got him kicked out, and he messaged me about how our guild sucked and would never amount to anything compared with the guild he had just joined. I said "you won't last there", he said "wanna bet?", and I said yes. So I found his guild message board and posted a screenshot of the conversation, asking "do you really want this guy?".

Turned out they were unaware he was leaving them for an uberguild, so they posted my screenshot on the server board, and both guilds kicked him out. Then others started saying "oh that's the guy we kicked out months ago". He spent a couple of months joining new guilds until they found the thread, and was ultimately hounded off the server.

Just look at all these cool contents that I never get to beat. I paid the same sub but I can never get there cause I apparently don't work hard enough in my games. Yes, maybe because I'm anti social, I only have 4-5 friends who want to play with me; so I should be locked out of the content I already paid for due to my lack of effort.

They don't want your money.  I'd say most MMOG makers save me $15 a month by maintaining this cockblock.  I play until I can't do anything new with 2-3 friends and then quit. 

They're doing both of us a favor.


Edit: Yes, I know it was green text, but I agree with the sentiment in your sarcasm and felt the need to comment.

Maybe a better question is there a way to be a GOOD Guild Hopper?


Is there an acceptable way to petition to join a guild, with the clear intent that you'll work within their loot system to achieve your maximum possible gains and likely move on if/when the progression fails to achieve your personal goals?


Something like an office temp? Or a Contract worker? A Rent-A-Player?

Why bother joining the guild then? The purpose of guilds is to have a common link based on trust: trust that you'll follow the rules while you help people achieve their ends while they help you achieve yours. Anything short of that is just a momentary group, entirely opportunistic.

Players created the need for trust to be part of the bigger group content. And it's those same players that shouldn't be designed around just because there's a few ninja-looting asshats out there. The problem only strikes an established guild a few times before they institute some regimented loot allocation scheme and some stricter policies for recruitment and banning.

I can understand the desire for a system designed to prevent the human factor, because it means people no longer hafta climb that all-important social ladder just to achieve at the late game. But I suspect that would end in such other shallow-wishes like permadeath (only for other players) and item stealing (only against other players). In other words, the actual result is likely to either suck, piss of players en masse, or be way so contrived as to be unfun.

I'd rather see either the game not requiring such dedicated single-minded large groups at that endgame, or just implement the afforementioned meta-goals that don't require a single large body to achieve (Guild Ranks, for example).

Eve-like employment history should be as much a staple of these games as the damned hotkey bar. Eve needs to break a million subs. Someone go make that happen!

I disagree on player made the guild important etcetera.

The fact is if there's no high end raid content with heavy emphasis on top dps, heal and tank party setup there will be less tension over loot since it's so hard to achieve with barely average players (casuals and those who only invest 1-2 hour)

I tried so hard after my friends quit to get into top end content but only made it to Karazhan before I got tired of it. I didn't want the loot, I only wanted to see what's it got, but I couldn't get a raid spot unless I have top-end loot. Before KZ, I farmed thousands of clefthoof to skill up LW for my Epic Elemental Shaman Set everytime I login. Then I farmed gold till I could max enchant, and did whatever 5 mans that could get me my Primal Nethers. I've done all the 5 man. A kind guild took me in and let me ride along Karazhan but by then I was burned out. There was little carrot to be had here after wading through the sticks. If you still think player made guild a necessity then you are wrong, it is the game content that forces guild to be filled with tensions.

I don't agree with these assumptions.  Players didn't decide it would be awesome to get 100 people in the same room to poke a dragon in the ankle.  Some crappy game design where challenge == bigger numbers did that.  Guilds don't form in games like WoW for the purpose of trust, they form out of the necessity to group with the evil you know week in and week out in order to tackle the next absurd challenge.  There is no necessity of trust in the WoW game model, or really any game model.  Even Eve's employment history doesn't let you know who has an alt account in a rival organization - it just weeds out the incompetent assholes and not the truly dangerous ones.  Blame the players for playing an unfun game if you like, it doesn't change the poor design and lack of tools under the hood.

Most game designs do not limit player vs. player interactions.  There is no division based classification system, no hard limit on how many guys you can bring (and even when there are, players can just form a 'new' team and circumvent them), the only win is a total steamroll where the other side loses the desire to continue playing.  Under these rules the correct guild size is "arbitrary," because the rules of fair play haven't been defined.  In WoW PvE the target point for guild size falls between "not enough guys, no one can participate" and "too many guys, only a few can participate."  That's a pretty crappy design since the number of participants is fixed and once a character has participated in this timespan that character cannot participate until the next timespan (forcibly leaving out those who didn't get in on the run, or the 'good' run).  Those who sit out have incentive to hop, those who are on the cusp of not having enough guys have incentive to accept the hoppers so their membership in good faith actually gets to raid today. 

A Mercenary - Reputation system would be great here, but that never worked in PvP as people take a mercenaries participation personally and PvE because there is no one willing to devote their day to standing around waiting for someone else to call them into the game - these raids just aren't that fun.  Pulling in across all servers would be cool, but again you never know what you are going to get... and how do you divide the loot?  Stupid loot.

My guild maintains kill to wipe ratios for characters to help players understand why certain people are preferred over others in progression content.  There are many limits to these data (the progression team wipes when we're learning new content, the second wave never have the learning issue) but that's the sort of data you can't have prior to inviting an outsider to your guild or raid before you've raided with them.  All you have is their gear and spec and no context as to how they came by them.  Since each progression raid needs incrementally more ridiculous gear it quickly gets to the point where the guild/progression level you want isn't available at your gear level and you are forced to hop your way to the top.

It comes from the design, or lack thereof.

Couple of things:

• Most games DO limit player v player interactions. They need to. It's just that how each game does it is more dependent on genre than on any sort of industry-wide rule. RTS games limit player participant count, and actions through map layout. FPS is similar though more loose, until you get to the more dedicated circuits in which players created more rules. Sports games are even more controlling. In fact, I'm struggling to figure out what games don't limit interactions, unless I'm misreading your point. WoW just wears their contrivances on their metaphorical sleeves, pretty much telling players exactly how they designed their content by letting players figure out what classes, templates and gear to bring to it.
  
• Designers designed the content but it's players that decided to partake. That they have over the years has resulted in changes. 75 players in an EQ1 raid vs 24 in a modern WoW one, that sorta thing.
• Guilds don't form because of trust. My point was that they form on the basis of trust. You trust your members to follow the rules, which are usually intended to spread the joy and achievement. I don't equate "trust" with "enjoy being with" or "like" though. This is just about the mutual trust of co-action for a common achievement.
  
• No ingame tool is going to automagically prevent players from being themselves. That's basically been my point. Players cannot be designed around. Even Eve's had it's share of scandals, both the subversive player-emptying-Corp-bank and the involves-CCP type.

Then what are you striving for? Even if most players don't Raid, the loot from this endgame activity has long since been proven to be a powerful draw, at least to the level cap.

I guess I must be stupid to want to explore and see things without wanting the shiny loot  

I always thought you could solve the problems with the op by making loot bound to a guild.  If a dude leaves for another guild then his PvE loot goes to a guild bank somehow - or the guild gets issuable tokens redeemable for equal loot.  He, of course, is leaving for a better guild who has offered him some stuff from their guild bank, and thus doesn't care about losing the stuff he earned with his former guild.  But the guild he's leaving doesn't get fucked out of the investment they made in him.  Simple.  Of course you'd have to fine tune it.  Like guilds shouldn't have the ability to take loot away once it's been granted.  But if a player leaves, why shouldn't the guild be able to recover?

I don't understand. If I'm in a guild and I've gotten all the loot I can from that guild, and a new guild can give me better loot, why the hell wouldn't I leave?

People are confusing two entirely separate concepts:

Guilds as a bunch of friends who socialize.
Guilds as a bunch of people who team up because the game design forces them to.

Most people join guilds in order to accomplish things. So why be surprised when they leave and join a new guild for the same reason?

yes i'm sure they said that on their pre-invite interview.

This.

A mile long employment history is a big warning sign for would-be recruiters. No other server to hop off to also helps.

The argument is that you could have only gotten all that loot by getting help from the very folks who are hoping you'll help them in return. This is important because for everyone who got loot during a session, someone else was not.

This isn't about joining a guild at the end of all content so they can run you through the lowbie raid zones on easymodee (ie, Karazhan in post-BC WoW). It's about expected reciprocity in an organization that wants homogeny. And it wants that homogeny because that's the most efficient way to play the raid game. We could blame the designers for that, but there it is.

That does lead to the next problem which will eventually come up in this thread anyway, so I'll bring it up now:

For how long does a guild hold themselves back from evolving to later content by continually bringing newer guild members through the lowbie raid zones?

As we all know, endgame zones are progressive such that you're using the early tiers to gear up for the later tiers. But as I'm sure we've all also experienced, guilds can get stuck on those early tiers by continually having to bring newbies through them (or get kicked back down to those tiers by the departure of critical people).

Nobody wants to be the farm league. But then nobody wants to be stuck perpetually in the minors either.

How about a system that offers everyone a quest before entering a raid zone? The quest dialog gives the raider hints about what can drop in the zone that is relevant to his/her class.  The raider then picks the item they are hoping to get and then that item is guaranteed to drop from some mob in the zone.

Example:

NPC outside the raid zone: "So, gonna try and defeat Xuta Vux? Good luck to you! I have heard stories of a magnificent dagger and splendid pieces of armor that a [fighter] like you could use. What are you hoping to find?

a: new weapon
b: new leggings
c: new BP
d: new gauntlets"?

PC then picks one.

Now, I cannot deny there is excitement when a raid mob drops and people wait for the chest to open, but more often than not at least 7/8ths of the raid goes home empty-handed and some item goes unwanted.

Or have raid mobs drop tokens that can be handed in for one of a list of items. Skinner box seems to be the rule of the day, though.

I think the WoW Badge of Justices and other such turn-in based reward systems are the best bet. Everyone wins something by contributing. But I don't see that the other system of also winning stuff that drops needs to be removed altogether. Just strike a better balance, ala the later content in WoW.

You're stuck with us, sorry.

I'll just pop in and point out that I never really see this problem in UO, because there is no raiding.  Guilds are basically just groups of players who feel like hanging out together.  And since guildmates in UO can attack/loot/pickpocket each other even in Trammel, recruiting has to be at least somewhat selective.  Hell, members can even vote out the guild leader, so you really can't afford to just randomly recruit every retard in sight.

So yeah, diku raiding sucks, film at 11.

In addition to raiding though, I've seen the problem in shadowbane. In a pvp game like that, people are bound to hop around either for "political" or just general fuckhead reasons.

Pfft, everyone knows Moonkins are in HUGE demand these days!  :awesome_for_real:

Isn't the entire basis of all those DKP system to prevent/ensure everyone pulls their respective weight?

Yes. But not everyone uses a distributed loot system. And that was conceived in the first place as basically a trust metric anyway (that wasn't the reason given for DKP, but it's the root).

No.  I'm a LOTRO player and most of us are still happily working through the content.  It took the leet hardcore players two weeks to be bored.  But they are always whining on the forums in every game I play and I generally ignore them.

I actually am enjoying LOTRO immensely, because I get to play with about half a dozen RL friends (God I wish I could convince them to play EvE).  We have our own guild and we can accomplish almost anything in the game  together (except for raids, where we could team up or join pugs if interested).

LOTRO has found a nice little niche market and they are riding that pony.  I came back after I spent a month or so in launch and was shocked about the level of improvements/customization.   In my opiion, as DIKUs go, it is about an order of magnitude more fun from both a community and play standpoint than WoW.  It is great example because it is a DIU that really doesn't have a guild-hopping problem.

Agree.

People are not confusing these; they are related to each other in the guild leadership/administration.  I noticed throughout this discussion so far that we're saying "guilds do this" and "guilds should do that", but the people who put in most of the work to keep the guild together and "attractive and fun" are a lot into the socializing part of the equation, and get rewards for all the hard work from praise and socialization.  So you may join and leave because game design forces you to, but they are the ones who feel used, not "the guild". 

And there's few enough competent guild leaders that more tools to make their job easier are definitely warranted, and "easier job" includes preventing guild hops if possible.

Well, i'm looking at it from the perspective of Ettenmoors population -- pre-book 13 it's full of the "easy mode epics" crowd day in and day out. Come book 13, it's tumbleweeds and everyone out in new zone. Less than a week since the update and it's back to the old numbers. The people in question aren't actually some hardcore PvP crowd, but exactly this kind of casual player that can't be bothered to get group for "raiding" so they'd rather come to place where they can /follow someone in zerg ball for few days and then barter teal gear from the vendor for few stones. Not unlike the WoW battlegrounds population, i gather.

...or they are just the PvP oriented population who are going back to what they enjoy, PvP.  Especially since they made PvP upgrades this patch (the Defiler) and lot of folk are eager to try them out.  I spend a decent amount of time in the Moors even though I have other PvE content waiting for me.  Have you worked through all of the content in the new patch already?  I play pretty often for a casual (a few hours online every night) and I still have quite a bit of content to work through.

The issue as I stated in my original response is not the guild hopping.  It's the suck-ass mechanic that demands a virtual work schedule to acquire in-game loot.  Folks always want to maximize their fun time playing a game because it is supposed to be a leisure time activity, not a quest for virtual self-actualization.  Add to that that anonymity of the intertubes and the fact that large raiding guilds require a roster of folk so large that it is difficult to develop a meaningful e-relationship with any of them, it is not suprising you get guild hopping. 

You are trying to put in safeguards to prevent human nature.  Good luck with that.

Nah, people who like the PvP stand out in that crowd because you see them there fighting for longer than few days... weeks and months often. The crowd i'm talking about is these who show up, run around for couple days until they soak in enough 'renown' to gain rank to equip their gear and disappear never to be seen again. The bulk of population that appeared after the 'PvP gear' was put in.

I wouldn't say these people "worked through all of the new content" already, they simply went through the bits of it they found interesting and that was it. Expecting the players to go slavishly through everything you add in patch can be rather silly, especially when say, the new content is aimed at people below max level while large part of the player base is levelled all way up

Preventing  of Guild Hopping is an odd way to put it.  If I happen to be in a guild that dies due to it's leadership flaking out and disappearing for... well, forever, and eventually I leave (this happened in DAOC).  I'd rather there not be mechanics in place that could be misused in a situation like that - there were 4 people left in the guild when I left, it was dead, but they didn't like the alternative guild and were a bit peevish with me for leaving.

I know it's just semantics, but I'd much rather that the subject had been: "encouraging guild loyalty" or "rewarding guild membership".  If you are in a guild, and the leadership turns out to be asshats on an ego trip, that type of personality has no problem using a negative mechanism to punish those that don't feed the ego.  I'd rather game systems stayed away from exploitable systems.

Better to have guilds generate cash flow (or renown, or some metric that can be used for benefit) based upon numbers of guild members.  Better to have raid drops that went right to the guild, and were bound to the guild, in addition to the normal loot that dropped that would remain in the hands of the players.  And allow options for how that raid loot dropped either per raid, or as part of the published  guild configuration - e.g. a guild could take an "all for one, one for all" approach, and have most of the loot drop as guild loot.  The more mercenary players would see this configuration and know to go elsewhere (course, you'd probably get fewer players joining because it also is a configuration that is abuseable by the guild).

At the same time, those people who are the 'center' of the guild, often also become the 'elite' of the guild. It's nearly as often that a player feels like the guild is using him, as much as the 'guild' feels like the player is using it.

Wasn't too long ago I read a recruitment post by a guild asking for a Paladin tank. The Job description in a nut shell (what an odd saying) was "You can tank Hyjal trash for us, but we'll swap you out for someone else during the boss fights, for "raid efficiency" or some shit". The only saving grace was the fact they said so upfront, even if in a subtle and bullshit type way. But that type of situation is very much a similar problem to guild hopping. Someone feels 'betrayed'. If you sign up with a guild in good faith, with the understanding of your role in the guild, then get the run around... /shrug?

A good portion of the posts in raid forums are players asking "Am I being screwed?"


An artificial system of ensuring 'guild loyalty' would cause just as much harm, as it would intend to fix.

Even saying guild loyalty makes me cringe. What is this, the freaking mob? Or worse, the party?  :oh_i_see:

If you're playing at the level where you're reading jobs postings, which is an apt description, then it's very much not a mob. I mean really, people already schedule their lives around raids, know when to show up, know their role (responsibility), know what their accountable for (if in addition to their actual role as a character), know their recompense, and know the cycle for repeating it. It's not a huge cognitive leap from their to an actual job.

And heck, there's no leap at all if there's any real money transaction in there (like paying for a slot, for example). But that's the way-low percentage of activity I'm sure.

That has been fixed in my guild. We were originally officers and raid leaders of an open membership guild in EverQuest. Some of our number had a regular successful group going which ploughed through content, and some other members started calling that group "the clique".

There was never elitism involved - it was entirely about friendships that formed, and game mechanics (groups limited to six members). But others had more trouble getting a group, so they became jealous. Meanwhile, the people in the "clique" were also organising raids and making loot decisions. They all had the guild's interests at heart and made very fair decisions, but at the same time they were also better equipped from their high-performance nightly group.

The bickering got too much and most of our high level members split off to form a pure raiding guild - the one that still exists today, several games later. Nowadays, in games like WoW where you can assign titles to different ranks within the guild, our title for senior members is "Clique" :)

I nerver saw this as much of a problem in PvP based games/servers.  You always have your zerg guilds.  These guys can't do anyting without 12903812 guys and most will take any hopper who wants on the band wagon, and who cares?  They all suck.

Then you've got the more serious PvP guilds, and I've noticed a common cycle in them.

1. Guild starts with a very tight knit core group that is or builds up to becoming elite
2. Various brothers, cousins, friends, etc of guildmembers are allowed in
3. Guild quality drops and the guild essentially becomes a new zerg
4. Some original core members and the newcomers they happen to like splinter off to form another small, elite guild
5. Rinse, repeat

I remember a time when I had been playing AC1 a bit when it came out and then returned to UO.  I looked in irc and didn't recognize 3/4 the names.  I was like, wtf???  When I started acting like the authority figure I was, these guys I didn't know were like, "WTF, who are you?"  I knew it was time to break things up then.

In the short time I played DAOC I was in a guild, and would look in guild chat with about 150 people, and I knew 2 or 3 of them.  How lame is that?

My father, still enjoying the game, started a guild for players between level 13 and 39. It's all about running the instances and getting help and quest information for those specific levels. Some place for folks who've never played these games before, or who are new to this game in particular, can get on their feet. The gang keeps the guild bank stuffed with crafted items they would otherwise vendor because they can't be sold to normal players, and when people hit 40... they are asked to leave.

Ideally they find another guild before that.

"Why 13 and 39?" I asked.

Thirteen is the level at which you are allowed to use the meeting stone at Ragefire Chasm. At 40 every guild my father has ever been part of has turned into a bunch of people whining for money for their mounts... and he didn't want that to happen.

Once again, your Father rocks.

That's the most awesome thing I've ever heard about for a guild in an MMO.. Very very cool.

Is your dad the guy who walked everywhere for a long, long time because he didn't know about the "run" toggle?

I like how your dad plays.

He knew about the run toggle, but he couldn't target things and keep track of where he was at full speed. He'd -never played a modern video game before-. That gives him a unique perspective on how confusing this game can be to the total newbie, and has helped him provide assistance and understanding to his guild members. It's weird watching him interact with them, though. He can't touch-type, so he's adopted the sort of speech patterns familiar to 13-year-old AIMfiends. "
NE1 ready 2 wear [Sanguine Sandles]?"   "RU making SFK group?"

Honestly this is the sort of guild DIKUs should encourage. If level is going to be critical to one's ability to experience content, and the goal is to have people actually EXPERIENCE said content rather than be run through it by higher level folks, guilds are well served to limit themselves to particular level brackets. It may not necessarily assist the social bonds, but it absolutely improves gameplay experience.

Plus having an upper limit on guild goals makes for fewer disappointed players. They KNOW anybody who wants more will be leaving the guild, and so does the guild. That can even be arranged as a right-of-passage... which parting gifts and whatnot.

My first guild in Everquest was that way. It was Barbarian only and everybody knew once they wanted to raid they would have to leave (Can't do anything with just Warriors, Shaman and Rogues). So it was a low level thing, but the friendships forged there lasted to even keep us on friendly talking terms with each other while our respective guilds flamed each other for raid targets and such.

It was an almost roleplaylike "We were Barbarians first and Raidguild members second" feeling.

Balatedly:

You can beat the WarcraftRealms guild history when you change character names on server swapping.

But I don't think these things are really needed. Most MMOs have a community of sorts where people become known to others once they've been around for a while. In the Australian WoW community there tends to be communication not only between the various guilds on a faction, but on the server generally, and even across server. If someone has been playing for a while and been in various guilds people get to know of them. The same goes for the PvP community.

I also don't think there's anything inherently in people changing guilds, makes the game an interesting place with the rise, fall, change, or stability of these guilds. It's the where the sense of 'world' is built.