Guild lifecycle

My World of Warcraft guild is further falling apart, with lots of people leaving for bigger guilds. It's a bit sad, but not unexpected, it follows a classical guild lifecycle, which happens to most guilds in most games.

The basic problem is that in a guild you automatically get a feeling of being part of a special group, "us", to which all the other players out there, "them", don't belong. As soon as a guild has a reasonable size, sufficient for its purposes, it stops recruiting, or makes recruiting very difficult. Surf a couple of guild sites, and you'll find lots of nearly identical guild charts with complicated rules for letting in new members. Sometimes you even have total recruitment stops.

But when you don't keep recruiting all the time, especially recruiting low level players, the guild automatically becomes top-heavy with lots of high-level characters. And then suddenly everybody is just interested in organizing raids, leading to a lack of guild activities for lower level guild members, and even less interest in recruiting anybody with a lower level.

So for some time you have a high-level raiding guild, being more or less successful, depending on numbers and organization. But sooner or later the normal attrition occurs. Some people leave the game, some people fall out with the guild and leave the guild, all very natural. But as there is little or no replacement for the people who leave, the negative network effect kicks in, and the guild becomes less interesting for the people who love raids, because it is less and less able to organize raids. So more people leave for other, bigger raid guilds, and more people get frustrated because their friends left, and stop playing. In the end the guild either dissolves, or there remains just a small group of people who don't want to join a big raid guild.

The only way to keep a guild alive for a prolonged time is to create a living structure, where there is constant active recruitment of lower level players, and guild activities for all levels. You still lose about the same number of people due to natural attrition, but there is constant replacement. For every high level player who burns out and quits, there is a lower level player finally reaching the high level, and the numbers don't drop off.

World of Warcraft is a particularly viscous trap for guilds, as the gameplay changes so dramatically at level 60. As people usually can solo well enough from level 1 to 60, guilds don't feel the need to recruit lower level characters, and also don't feel the need to do much in the way of guild events for them. I call that a trap, because if you don't recruit people early, and help them along during their career, they won't feel much loyalty towards the guild. In WoW you got lots of guilds which are just based on the fact that for the high-end content of the game you need large groups of 40 level 60 players. The ties to the other players in such a guild are automatically much weaker, those are just the guys you need to visit Molten Core, not necessarily your friends.

I'm counting myself lucky that I started on the very first day of the Euro servers with a guild, and thus was able to level up together with the guild. I visited every dungeon in WoW with a guild group. Somebody starting the game now, would find it nearly impossible to do that, as there are no guilds offering lower level dungeon excursions on most servers. The best you could hope for would be a level 60 running you quickly through a lower level dungeon, allowing you to do all the quests there. But that is much less fun than beating the dungeon with friends of an appropriate level.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link