What I'm wondering is just how seriously you or your guild takes the membership process? My guild have gone with a few simple questions about a player's intentions and why they want to join our guild. That won't be the case for all guilds, and I'm sure 'hardcore', serious raiders will raise the bar higher than most, and that's perfectly understandable. If you're aiming to burn through content at a rate of knots, you want to make sure you're taking on people who can hack the pace, who are geared enough to keep up, and knowledgeable enough to not have to be baby-sat through boss fights. Making friends can be serious business, and running a good guild can be akin to running a real-life company. A fractious, barely-solvent, badly-insured company staffed by borderline-schizoid personalities, but a company nevertheless.
While a bad guild can be like a punishment from God, a good guild can be quite the opposite. Some people will tell you that guilds, good or bad, don't last forever. There's some logic in there, I'll grant that, but I don't agree 100%. The relationships and friendships that you can form in a good guild can last a lifetime, and more than one guild has started out in one game, only to migrate to another, en-masse. More than one survey over at The Daedalus Project shows that plenty of people play with people they know in real-life, including romantic partners. It would be fascinating to see how many of those relationships developed from meeting someone in a guild.
So, as I said before; How seriously do you take guild membership? When you're looking to join a guild, what kind of research do you do up front, and how much? Do you do any, or do you settle for the first guild that sounds halfway decent? Odd as it may seem, I'd imagine 'casual' players would take more time over this – if you're logging on to relax and take it easy, you probably want to make sure you'll be doing so with some like-minded people. Am I right in thinking that 'hardcore' raid-inclined players are more likely to just go for a guild with a good history of raid progression and maybe low levels of loot-related drama?
Maybe I'm falling back on the classic stereotypes by thinking that raiders couldn't care less about making friends or getting along with their guildies and are just out to get loot while non-raiders are concerned solely with getting a place in a touchy-feely left-wing love-fest kind of guild.
Maybe it's neither, and I'm missing something really obvious. As a great man may or may not have once said, hit the comments below and tear me a new one if you think I'm being an idiot.
