May 7
Why Guilds Need New Blood to Live
If you haven’t yet, make sure to check out the Warhammer Online video about Living Guilds; this is the kind of thing I’m talking about when I mention how pumped I am about WAR’s potential.
That said, I think every game has hurdles to overcome in the area of player groupings. Witness, if you will, a posting by Stargrace over at MMOQuests. She’s working on her endgame crafting works, and she needs a bunch of crafted content to complete the quest. So she works at getting in touch with some crafters, makes some headway, but it sounds like she’s a bit daunted. Then:
“I get a tell, from Omay, who says they have ALL the crafters, and can make every piece for me. I sat there stunned for a second, it sounded too good to be true. Not only do they make all of the pieces, they are a guild dedicated to crafting, and helping others craft … After they’d crafted every single piece for me, they played fire works and congratulated me, and on my way I went for the turn in … Here I’d thought there was no crafting community on Najena – the channels are practically always silent. Low and behold, an entire guild dedicated to it.”
One of the (many) features players really need in these games is the ability to know what their options are on the guild front. This guild that helped stargrace, “Wing and a Prayer”, sounds like a fantastic outfit. But because the playerbase is so scattered and segmented, she had no idea they were even out there. WAR’s keep-capturing elements are great, and I look forward to that a lot. At the very least, players who come across a captured keep will know *those* guilds exist. But we need more. We need something even more meaningful than that. You know what we need?
We need guild recruiting stations. I’m envisioning buildings that stand in the capital cities of every faction/race/whatever your game has. This building would be in a central location, one heavily trafficked by players. There, guilds of all stripes would be able to hang out their shingles and show off. To accomplish this, I think you’d need to offer a variety of recruitment methods.
- Leaderboard advertising: The inside walls of the place would be covered in guild banners, tapestries, and plaques. The top X number of guilds (let’s say 10) for a variety of different criteria, have their banner hanging in the guild recruitment center by default. There’s nothing to it – it just shows up there. There’d need to be a number of different criteria, to entice a number of different types of players. The EverQuest 2 players site offers numerous axis on which to compare yourself. I think, with four walls you should go along four axis. I’d pick “Top PvP kills per guild member, top quests completed per guild member, most crafted items per guild member, and fastest raiding progression.” Those seem like they cover some of the big player interests, and showing the names of these guilds off in-game would at least get a dialogue going. Stargrace would have known about “Wing and a Prayer” already, or would have known where to turn to find out about serious crafting guilds.
- Guild Barkers: Guilds who complete certain criteria would have the ability to place a guild barker in the recruitment center for a period of two weeks. These criteria would be achievement based; taking down an instance for the first time, getting an epic weapon, completing an amazing crafting quest. After the barker has been used, they can’t make use of a barker again for a period of two months. Barker slots are scarce (maybe 10 in the whole center), and you have to enter a queue to make use of them. The catch is, they’re really impressive. You can configure your barker to look like a PC or special NPC and shout out your message to the world. Messages must be chosen from a list of pre-made “types” and then filled in using dropdowns. Guilds could use them to do everything from recruit, to shout their latest achievements, to publicize player-run events.
- External Billboards: The outside of the center has a series of huge billboards, one to each side of the building. These billboards can be rented by guilds for in-game currency, and will prominently feature their guild emblem. The messages that can be put up on the billboards are similar in tone to the barker messages, but are even more restrictive. These would primarily be used for recruitment purposes. Unlike the locked-in barkers inside the center, I see these operating just like web adverts; you pay a premium per appearance of your ad. The more gold you pay, the more the ad shows up.
- Application NPCs: Throughout the recruitment center are NPcs that will allow you to search through every guild on the server. You can see if they’re recruiting, what their roster is like, raid progression, server standings, the works. You can also apply for any of these guilds, using an application template tweakable by the guild leaders. Guild leaders can reference applications, adverts, barkers, and guild standing from a web-facing site.
That’s the thing that always surprises me about sharded MMOs – on a microcosm level they’re small places. A single server is only going to support a few thousand people at peak, which is a relatively manageable community. As much as I love the idea of a serverless ecosystem, if we’re going to have a micro-world why not make use of it by bringing people together in a more directed fashion?
11 comments11 Comments so far
I completely agree with the heart of your post, but it’s not what the title suggested. The post is about ways to get new people in, not why they are required. I’m not splitting hairs for the sake of it, I’m just curious as to whether you had something in mind for why guilds need new recruits coming in consistently or not?
As you say, servers actually can feel a bit confined when you’re dealing with hundreds of different guilds all competing for different players. One thing these suggestions you offered might bring about is more fierce competition when it comes to recruiting. Guilds will really have to work to get players in if it becomes all about bells and whistles. That said, it sounds like you’re trying to allow players to find the guild that fits their style (crafting, questing, raiding, etc.,) but there will always be more than one guild devoted to one or two aspects of the game. I’m not saying stronger recruiting competition would a bad thing, in fact it might be healthy and help to foster guild loyalty and teamwork, but on the other hand, could it create additional problems that aren’t necessarily worth dealing with?
The ideas you’re bringing up here aren’t necessarily new but it doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be players who wouldn’t like them. Does this mean I agree with all of your ideas here? Not at all.
Guild barkers: I don’t personally like it – at least not as its suggested here. Even with the queue concept, this will be another “rich get richer” system where the larger, more successful guilds will have the barkers up more often. Sure, you’ve got the 2 month “can’t use” cool down to try to even the playing field, but the idea of a queue system immediately puts newer guilds at an immediate disadvantage.
It also runs the risk of annoying the regular playerbase (even those looking for a guild). Let’s face it, no one likes to see guild recruiting spam in open channels – whether it comes from a PC or NPC won’t matter to most people. …especially since Michael introduces the concept that the barkers can be used to announce a variety of information (don’t you think top guilds would use this for general spam!?)
External Billboards: “The more gold you pay, the more the ad shows up.” Tell me who’s more likely to benefit from this system, established raid guilds with deep pockets or the average guild like “Wing and a Prayer” who refuses payment for their help. On my server in Everquest II, I can assure you that the top raiding guilds have tens of thousands of platinum …and the smaller guilds (the guilds who need the recruiting more) might have a collective pool of a couple hundred.
Leaderboard advertising: “Stargrace would have known about “Wing and a Prayer” already, or would have known where to turn to find out about serious crafting guilds.” Another idea that sounds good in theory, but would not work in actuality. “Wing and a Prayer” aren’t on any leaderboards right now (and those leaderboards for crafted items in EQ2 already exist, as Michael points out) – well, they are, but they’re number 87 in the game and number 30 on their server.
Who has more crafted items per member than they do? Super small “alt guilds” set up specifically for someone’s crafting characters (to take advantage of the shared banks). If you want to discuss total items crafted, then the large guilds and raid guilds have them beat once again.
Application NPC’s: This is an idea I do like. In fact, I’ve spoken on this a few times in the past.
The ideas here aren’t bad ideas per se. However, in the context of helping the guilds who need “new blood”, most of the the ideas won’t really work. The ideas outlined seem custom designed to help the most stable, successful, organized guilds – and really, aren’t they already stable, successful, and organized? If the goal is helping players learn about niche guilds (like Wing and a Prayer), then few of the ideas listed would really help.
I agree with the title of the article that guilds need new blood to live, and like Kanthalos, was excited to come see a discussion on that subject. Instead, I’m seeing more ways to prop up larger guilds like mine (don’t worry, we’d be happy to take your potential recruits) at the expense of smaller, more fragile guilds – the guilds who actually need that new blood the most.
I think you’ve got your heart in the right place, but I’d be dishonest with you if I said that a few of the ideas you’ve listed here would actually scare me away from a game I might otherwise want to play.
Correction: I think you’ve got your heart in the right place, but I’d be dishonest with you if I said that a few of the ideas you’ve listed here wouldn’t actually scare me away from a game I might otherwise want to play.
Actually, the whole “Living Guilds” thing isn’t new at all. It’s pretty much a rehash of EQ2’s guild system in a lot of ways. The banner and trophy thing is newer, but…EQ2 has heraldry, and admittedly, it’s not so PvP (RvR) motivated. But the whole guild leveling (ranks) system and “flag” (heraldry) isn’t new. That part is pretty much directly copied from EQ2. And, as in EQ2, everything you do, quests, etc., contributes to the guild rank increasing.
Just wanted to point that ONE part out. I admit, they’re taken it a bit further than EQ2 did, but the base idea, wasn’t a new one.
I find it interesting that I’ve struck a nerve here.
The thing that I most desire from systems like this is visibility; regardless of how it’s done, I think it’s criminal that guilds are such a background element. Unless you’re willing to go trolling the forums, a casual player might not even know who the major players on the server are. In-game, or at the very least web/game integrated, systems like these would go a long way towards making players on a given server better-informed about their guild options.
I like you ideas and agree that Guilds need to play a more predominate role in our MMORPGs. After all, the whole point of these games is to play with other players. I see far too many examples of these game becoming solo adventures where you merely cross paths with other players, especially in WoW lately. The next generations of MMORPGs need to have a much large social aspect and focusing more on Guilds is an easy and effective way to do it.
When it comes to guild functions and recruiting, you’ll always strike an easy nerve with me, Michael.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for more visibility with guilds. I live and breathe guilds. However, I don’t think your solutions actually address the issues you’re actually raising here.
Does that mean I think the idea of a large, central Guild recruiting market pr a central application repository is a bad idea? No, and in fact, I’ve suggested just such a things several times myself. But ideas like guild barkers and billboards, especially in the way you’re suggesting them here, would almost certainly only serve the largest, most organized guilds – who are already doing a fine job of self-advertisement.
Here’s a few questions that I often ask would-be developers, when given the chance:
-Does your game concept handle the concept of player guilds proactively in your tutorial?
-How prominantly do you display/advertise the creation system for guilds in your game concept?
-How easy is it for players to find guilds in your game concept?
Everquest II has, by far, one of the most advanced suite of guild functionality in any MMO on the market right now that I’ve spent any significant time in. In fact, most of the announced features of EA Mythic’s “living guild” system already exist in some form within Everquest II. It just doesn’t go far enough.
Ideally, games should have a strong “Looking for Guild” tool. Most games are keen to create strong group building tools in their feature set, but I almost never see a similar effort put into building such a tool to help players find guilds (or vice versa). Everquest II has a guild recruiting tool which lists out guilds for players, but even this isn’t quite what I mean.
I want a method by which a player, such as yourself, can open a UI window and check off boxes to indicate your preferred guild features. Maybe you’re not quite interested in raiding, so you leave that box unchecked. You are interested in regular groups, so you check that. You’re interested in questing, but not tradeskilling, so you make sure to note that. In the appropriate areas, you point out that you’re looking for a guild with a more open guildchat (as opposed to strictly family friendly), that roleplaying isn’t necessarily important to you, and that you’re based in the GMT-5 time zone. The game automatically notes that you’re a level 60 rogue.
When you click the “find a guild” button, the system automatically filters through the heavy roleplay guilds, the heavy raiding guilds, the guilds which have minimum level requirements you don’t meet, and the guilds which aren’t looking for rogues. It sorts out the remaining selections in order of relevance for you, and let’s you look through some relevant stats that include everything from total guild size, average nightly activity levels, most active nights, least active nights, rosters, leaderboards – you name it.
From a guild standpoint, guild leaders have set up similar filters on their end to help weed through potential applicants who might be looking for a guild in the first place. Generally speaking, the system is set up in such a way to allow players looking for guilds and guilds open to new players a way to find each other in the first place. From there, an actual application window might open up (which has its own system/criteria backing it).
How would players know about such a system? Because they’re exposed to it during the game’s tutorial…as well as being exposed to how to create a guild, the benefits (and some common pitfalls) of guilding, and any specific features of this particular game that revolve around guilding (guild halls, keeps, etc.)
As the guildmaster of a moderately sized guild (60+ average members) which has existed in multiple MMO’s for the past 10 years (we were founded in 1998), I can tell you that the features I just listed would be pretty much everything I could hope and dream for within an MMO. In-game billboards and guild barkers just seem like unnecessary gimmicks that still won’t address the issues I’ve seen regarding guild recruiting/applications.
All we really need are simple, elegant methods to put players in touch with the guilds that want them, and more in-game education on how/why to do that in the first place.
I think what Kendricke calls “gimmicks,” Michael may call “immersion” or something similar.
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Late to the party here, but just wanted to say that Kendricke’s “finding a guild like finding a restaurant on Citysearch” approach sounds fantastic.
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