Guilds

Boy, MJ's Misadventureland is really coming along! Hiring a few more hands sure has sped things up; you wouldn't even recognize the project now compared to even just one week ago. But isn't that the whole point of Choose My Adventure -- to watch the adventure that you're building develop and unfold? Well, that and to snicker at your Massively guinea pigs... we know.

Having gone into this particular adventure knowing that Darkfall Unholy Wars was not a game meant for the solo soul, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I found myself in a clan to experience more of the heart of the game, which just so happens to be clan warfare. And trust me, the clan wasted no time throwing me into the thick of things once you put me in one.

Although I do think starting off solo was important to get the real experience Darkfall any new player would (after all, most find a clan after first logging in), this week really has shown me a whole new game. I'd just scratched the surface before, the skin if you will, and now I've peered into the heart and seen the seedy underbelly as well.

Continue Reading

When I was a kid, I loved the Red Sox, but I was dying to get a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap. It's not that I was a fan of the team; I just loved the unusual look of the hat, with its pillbox shape, gold stripes, and most importantly, rows and rows of gold stars. Those stars were called Stargell stars and were the creative genius of Hall of Famer Willie Stargell.

It might seem strange to be talking baseball in a guild column, but those Stargell stars played a key role in the Pirates' success, and they serve as a great example of successful guild management. Can a little embroidered star really make a difference? Let's take a look in this week's Guild Counsel.

Continue Reading

Guilds are pretty much ubiquitous in MMOs -- they serve as a way to bind players together into a group. But the team behind TUG thinks that all too often guilds come about mostly so you can have a name and a chat channel all to yourself. Which is why the latest design post about the game explains that the designers want to remove that sense of artificially created communities. To strengthen that sense of forming player groups, guilds have to go.

As the post explains, too often guilds become things formed for the purpose of having a guild, placing an artificial limitation on what groups players belong to. Instead, the goal is to get players to form societies and groups organically, creating more freedom by removing arbitrary restrictions. It's an idea with a lot of promise, and as the game's Kickstarter continues you can decide if that promise is something you feel like supporting.

It's hard enough for any guild leader to enforce rules and take on problem players. But it's even harder for guild leaders who have stepped up to take over for one who has retired. Comparisons are made between how the old leader did things and how the new one is handling it, and some members might challenge a new leader's authority in order to "test" him.

This week's column is a reply to one Massively reader, who wrote,

My main commander has retired from the game, and I am struggling filling his role. Our biggest issue is dealing with discipline, either in Teamspeak or in following commands. I read your column on managing mistakes, but I am still finding it hard without being the bad guy. I know it's part of who I am; I am not an aggressive or "Bad Cop" guy. Is there a way I can develop discipline without having to totally change my personality and relationship with the guild?

This is a great topic because it's a situation that many new leaders find themselves in almost immediately after taking on the role. In this week's Guild Counsel, let's look at some ways to deal with the challenge.

Continue Reading

I have to admit, I read the recent article by Ramin Shokrizade on the pre-endgame economy of Guild Wars 2 and shrugged. He made a lot of great points, but the problems with GW2's economy are really not that unique. One of the biggest dilemmas is the fact that dropped items, like weapons and armor, really don't have any value prior to the endgame. As in many MMOs, the broker or auction house is flooded with pre-endgame armor and weapons and there's just no demand for it.

There are several design flaws that play a role in why dropped items, and virtual economies in general, feel stagnant. Let's look at a few common problems in MMOs today and see why broken economies actually hurt guilds as well.

Continue Reading

Guilds break up. Just like bands, it's a sad reality. Sometimes they just slowly drift apart because some people are leaving The Secret World and other members are developing differing interests, so the guild shuts down with no animosity. Other times the shutdown is accompanied by an explosion of drama so profound that you'd swear you were undergoing multiple simultaneous divorces instead of just dissolving a gathering of EverQuest II players. There is GM intervention, there are angry phone calls, in extreme cases there may even be bricks thrown through windows.

At the time, they're not fun to watch. But those horrible drama-filled guild demolitions do at least make for entertaining stories after the fact. So today we ask you: What was the worst guild meltdown you've ever seen? Were you involved in it or were you just an observer? In retrospect, was everyone blowing things out of proportion or blowing things far out of proportion?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Guild leadership is challenging, but as I've written before, sometimes guild leaders shoulder the burden of extraneous responsibilities and make the role harder than it should be. You'll often hear players referring to the leadership role as a job, meaning that it's work rather than fun.

But while running a guild can be tricky at times, it shouldn't be a job, and there are some important differences between the two that are helpful reminders for guild leaders. In this week's Guild Counsel, let's look why the role of guild leader should remain distinctly separate from that of an employer.

Continue Reading

One of the things that always makes me grumpy about MMOs is the number of game-imposed barriers to players doing things together. Levels, gear, skill points, group and raid caps, and prerequisites are just a handful of common game designs that make it hard to be social. MMOs are getting a little better at removing those hurdles, but one they can't address is the reality of conflicting playtimes. Everyone has real life responsibilities, and that means we sometimes can't be online when our friends are.

For some players, this is a constant challenge because their work, school, or family responsibilities allow them to log in only during off-peak playtimes. Last week, Massively reader Barachiel1976 brought up this very topic, and it's actually surprisingly common. So in this week's Guild Counsel, let's look at a few options for players who want to be part of a guild but can't play during peak playtimes.

Continue Reading

It's a classic scenario that's all too common: A guild builds up a solid roster, with enthusiastic members, and decides to make the leap from casual to hardcore. But that leap can sometimes become a free-fall spiral and a potential guild-breaker.

How does a guild shift gears and go from easygoing to endgame? Let's look at a few ways to make it work and avoid the growing pains in the process.

Continue Reading

Do you think that your guild is the best group of people anywhere? Age of Wushu encourages that line of thinking, because you're going to need to stand together if you want to defend yourself from all of the other guilds thinking the exact same thing. The latest development blog on the game explains how guilds can control territories as well as how they can lose those lands if they fail to defend against their enemies.

Guild territories are attached to existing zones seamlessly without a loading screen, although you have to speak to an NPC to teleport there. Structures on controlled territories can be upgraded for various benefits, but those upgrades can be lost if a rival guild assaults the territory. Check out a video of guild warfare in action just past the break, and get ready for the game's official launch this Wednesday by getting ready to pick your enemies and burn all they own to the ground.

Continue Reading

This week I was looking forward to writing about all of the wonderful stuff coming out about the coming this May in the Legacy of Romulus expansion in Star Trek Online. Unfortunately for me, that subject has been swept under the rug while I write about what happened to my fleet during this past week and expose our failures in order to provide valuable lessons to others.

This week my fleet was "stolen." Everything that we have worked so hard in building over the past 14 months was taken away by one person, a person none of us knows, and we were forced to begin anew. The lessons here are hard, bitter, and frankly embarrassing to discuss, but they are important to learn from, and I hope others use the advice to avoid our fate, regardless of whether you're in a fleet in Star Trek Online or a guild in some other game.

Continue Reading

With its exploration-focused Odyssey expansion on the way, EVE Online is about to be hit with a deluge of players (new and old) venturing into the unknown. The expansion will introduce the yet-to-be-revealed Discovery Scanner and will add a ton of new exploration content all across New Eden. Odyssey aims to follow the lead of 2009's Apocrypha expansion, which saw hundreds of corporations lead lucrative expeditions into uncharted wormhole systems. We don't yet know whether the expansion will open new systems for exploration, but when Odyssey goes live, the race will be on to find and lay claim to all the goodies hidden in deep space.

With no stations to dock at in wormhole space, corps currently have to store everything in destructible starbases that aren't really up to the task. Player-owned starbases were released in 2004 as sandbox-style tools for tech 2 industry and alliance territorial warfare. They were never intended to be the sole base of operations for an entire corporation, so they suffer from some pretty severe security and usability flaws as a result. Theft from ship and item hangars in wormhole space is commonplace, setting up corp roles for them is a nightmare, and living exclusively in a starbase provides a daily dose of frustration players could seriously do without. CCP has been planning to completely overhaul player-owned starbases for years, but some of today's issues can't afford to wait any longer.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the chronic problems faced by starbase-dwelling explorers and how CCP plans to temporarily fix some of them for Odyssey.

Continue Reading

Despite what some folks say, running a multi-party event (raiding, PvPing, dynamic events) is hard. There are the logistical issues of trying to coordinate many players who are scattered all around the world and rely on only voice chat and typed text to communicate. There's the need to instantly react to changes during the course of battle, and the larger the party, the slower the reaction time. And there are even nuances in how individuals approach various situations, which has a ripple effect on the others. Tank Bob might prefer to pull a boss to a different spot than Tank Susie. Or Sniper Sally might be used to peeling away and taking up a position in a tree while Captain Pete prefers to charge in as one force.

Suffice it to say, there are plenty of mistakes that happen any time large numbers of players get together, and it's often difficult to sort out which ones warrant a player's removal from the force and which ones don't. Let's take a look at how to handle mistakes in this week's Guild Counsel.

Continue Reading

Massively's sister site WoW Insider recently ran a poll asking its readers about the use of World of Warcraft's looking-for-guild tools. Approximately 56.9% of the respondents said they'd never used the tool, but a whopping 17.5% said they had. That 17.5% seems a staggering number to me, but then, I know my experience is abnormal; I've been in basically the same guild with the same core group of people for my entire MMO career. I just can't imagine treating a guild the same way I'd treat a group or a raid -- opening up a looking-for-guild panel and ticking all the right boxes until the tool found me a guild that at least on paper met my specifications. It just seems artificial and ephemeral to me. But clearly, it's been of value to almost a fifth of WoW Insider's readership, and since finding a good guild these days is apparently a pain in the rear, I'm calling that a good thing.

So now I'd like to pose the same question to the broader MMO community. Have you guys ever used a looking-for-guild tool in any of the MMOs you play? If not, do you stick to traditional methods like ads on forums or chatting up people you meet in person? And if so, has the guild-finder ever led you to a permanent home?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

"Does anyone have any suggestions?"

If there's one question that a guild leader should never ask, it's that one. Don't get me wrong; I believe feedback is an essential part of running a successful guild. But there's a right and a wrong way to solicit it, and having the equivalent of a "suggestion box" is not the best way to get the feedback you need.

In today's Guild Counsel, let's look at how the concept of a suggestion box (or holding open-ended discussions for player feedback) can make guild leadership difficult. And we'll look at some ways to get the suggestions you need to keep things running smoothly in guild.

Continue Reading