Guilds in WoW

Since the point of this blog is to talk about my experience outside of a guild, I suppose it makes sense to discuss why I've made that choice. So, here we go.

There are a couple of reasons for the existence of guilds:

- Social contact: meeting new people, coordinating communication among people you know, providing a limited chat channel for people you, presumably, want to talk to.

- Ease of grouping: in theory, a guild would provide a group of people that you could team up with. More on this in WoW specifically later.

- Help with individual tasks: Grouping to level/and or powerleveling.

- Accomplishing goals too big or long-term for pickup groups: in WoW, this means raiding. I've seen people advertising Molten Core pickup groups, but they're not the norm.

I might be missing some aspects, but it seems to me that the above cover most of the possibilities. Now, for me half don't apply - first, I'm an antisocial bastard, and second, I'm not max level (or even close, since Burning Crusade) and so raiding is pretty much out of the question. (It might be possible to start raiding in the mid-high 50s in a few months, but right now everybody's exploring the BC content, it seems.)

Now, the other two just seem... problematic. In a level-based game like this, at any given point there is a "band" of content that's productive to you to experience. You can try stuff a bit harder, or a bit easier, but you won't actually progress running Deadmines at 50 or exploring the Plaguelands at 14. So at any given point, there are likewise a "band" of players in the right level ranges that are interested in running the same content.

There are a couple of ways guilds can help players in this kind of setup - they can be very large, and try to have plenty of players at all bands, so that the guild is basically a microcosm of the player population as a whole. This is only really helpful when these players are selected with some care - otherwise, you may as well just group with people at random. The problem is that selecting people with care implies a selection process, and that implies someone overseeing it - leadership, of some description. Now, it is certainly possible to have a dedicated staff of officers committed to making the guild membership friendly, helpful, etc... but most of the large general guilds I've seen are also the ones that recruit pretty much at random, and unless they have a REALLY cool tabard, that just doesn't seem worth it to me.

The other way to do it is to basically pick a "band" and grow the guild together - for example, getting 10-20 level 20ish folks, running instances and quests together, and getting the average level of the guild up as you go. The problem here, for me, is commitment - in order for this to work, you have to play pretty much exactly as much as your fellows. I can't commit to that - I'll play 40 hours in a week, then not play for a month, then give up sleep for three days, etc. So... I solo, and do pickup groups for instances, and it works ok. Maraudon was agony finding groups for, but I got through it, and got three blues from it.

It'd be different if there was a sidekick/exemplar system like City of... has - I'd cheerfully run Deadmines weekly to help out lowbies, and take lowbies with me on high level runs - but getting a system like that to work in an item-based game is vastly different than getting it to work in a game that has, functionally, no items at all. You'd have to make explicit the "meta-level" concept that Tobold talks about, and adjust the sidekicking to work relative to that.

From everything I've read, the "banding" happens even at max level, except it's extended to gear or "meta-levels" as well, and raid groups have the same problems - either be efficient, but struggle with keeping everyone on the same band, or be huge and hard to manage. The added quirk that "meta-levels" are gained by gear improvements, which are awarded by chance, fiat, or arcane DKP systems rather than automatically and fairly by playing the game, like xp is, makes it that much harder to keep people together.