Maynard

Hi :-). Essay inc!

I’ve seen this alluded to in a few posts, although I guess it’s a topic less often explored as many members of these forums are from fairly stable, top-end guilds on relatively old servers. This might be foreign to a lot of you but hopefully you’ll find it interesting – it’s basically my attempt at describing the development of seniority mentality in average guilds.

A little background; I’m a third-year psychology student (NB: This isn’t my thesis >_>) and in WoW, a certified guild hopper. I was class lead in the #3 most progressed Horde guild on Frostmourne (FM) which gradually collapsed after a GM quit and a few core players rerolled, and since then have been hopping between an assortment of “medium" level guilds and gradually developed ideas about the mentality of these “medium" guilds.

A little background on the server is necessary.

Frostmourne(US-AU) is the most progressed Australian raiding server, although there are more progressed guilds on Blackrock. It is for all intents and purposes an archetypal ideal server to describe the phenomenon I’m about to go through. I’ll focus on FM-Horde here, since I am a Horde player myself. Player turnover on Frostmourne has been significant due to server stability issues and a periodic addition of new Australian servers from time to time, causing reroll. Combined with this outflow is a strong inflow of geared & skilled transfers looking for ideal raid times. Throw in typical interpersonal dramas and you have a pretty rich and dynamic server environment.

As we all know, the guilds that benefit the most and suffer the least from the goings-on of the server are the well progressed guilds. On FM Horde, these guilds are: Rage (AQ Cleared/Most of Naxx) Collateral (AQ Cleared/Most of Naxx) and Carebears (On C’Thun/Early Naxx; although only at ~18hrs p/wk). Each has certainly had its trials and tribulations, but for the most part, lost players have been replaceable and making numbers for raids has not been a challenge. These guilds are always attractive options for players, so recruitment to make numbers is only a forum post away. Each is largely friendly and mature players, with strong leadership and infrastructure.

These guilds generally recruit players who stick around. The players they recruit have every reason to stay with the guild – each uses zero-sum DKP (I believe) and players can leap in and start collecting loot right away. Friendly communities and low turnover means that new members are both welcomed and exciting. These epic geared guilds take on and gear members up because the members essentially have no reason to leave. Players usually don’t leave these guilds to pursue better guilds.

Below these guilds are the medium-level guilds. These guilds are the recruitment pool that the top guilds draw on when they lose a member. Raids often struggle to form, and recruitment efforts struggle to bring up players of the appropriate gear and skill for most classes (I’ve even noticed this among hunters, which are often hard to find in good gear & with skill). They experience extremely high turnover.

Of course, all this is known but what I haven’t seen discussed is this: The “core" in these medium-level guilds. The fact is, not everyone disappears in a guild, and there are always a number of players of each class that stay through the difficulties of these medium-level guilds. They are the revered; the officers. They have a lot of respect and sway in the guild. Here is where I believe all problems fundamentally arise.

These guilds tend to develop a true in-group out-group mentality out of fear that the players they recruit will eventually leave for better guilds: as they have predictably done in the past. New players are treated tenaciously and may even have difficulty making ground socially (“eh, just another new guy� ) and so may not feel welcomed. It will be hard to find a place socially within the guild as long-term in-group friendships are firmly established.

Loot isn’t a whole lot better. Most “medium" guilds have heavily inflated DKP systems; due to giving turnup DKP to their failed runs, purposefully to favour senior players, or out of sheer laziness. Sometimes there will be social pressure to take, or pass on items. Loot is run pseudo-formally in these guilds, and DKP often ends up being irrelevant except for distinguishing between two members of similar age. Some guilds (including one I was in) may not even use DKP. If you ever need to see this manifested – run around orgrimmar and just inspect a few people within a “medium" guild. The gear disparity between top and bottom members is staggering. In a guild I recently left, the bottom hunter was 6/8 T1 w/rhok+lok, the top was 7/8 T2, Ash, Prestors, DFT, Swarmguard, Epic Rings, and had a 1200 DKP (6 weeks of no spending) head over the T1 hunter.

Saying that guilds are tenacious about members leaving is, admittedly, an inference. Most guilds would sooner focus on how they respect their senior members, rather than treated their newer members badly. This is a “talk" I’ve received from more than one or two guild-masters officers when I’ve tried to raise DKP concerns. “It’s not that we don’t respect you; it’s that we treasure our older members." The keen eye will notice that as far as DKP is concerned, the two are one and the same ;)

I’m sure the irony here doesn’t need to be pointed out. In psychology it’s called a “self fulfilling prophecy": A belief influences the world, causing that belief to be proved true. In this case, treating new members tenaciously out of fear that they will leave actually causes members to leave. This is another thing I’ve tried to communicate to guild masters before; but the reply is usually that I’m the first person to express these concerns… which leads me to my next point.

Not everyone leaves. Some stay.

However, those that stay are by necessity mediocre players. They’re the few that are actually fortunate to be in a medium-level guild, because they either lack the gear, skill, consistency, or personal connections to ever have a hope of getting in to a top guild. In my last guild I found myself actually “becoming" this type of player as I purposefully avoided AQ40 and MC runs because, hell, the guild didn’t respect me – why should I respect it? DKP was trivial, so I was missing nothing there. It’s much simpler (and more profitable) to simply turn up to BWL and get hand-me-down loot: which is all that is available to me.

The medium-level guild mentality can retain players, but they tend to be mediocre players. They’ll hang around until they get good and geared, and join a better guild, or just continue to stay and be the average players that they are. They’re rarely encouraged to be better players because, hey – beggars can’t be choosers. Therein lies the cyclical nature of the medium guild – they remain there. They lack the player skill to ever become a good guild and, thus, retain their members.

So what we have here are reasonably high turnover guilds with mediocre players. What else? Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t end there for these guilds. The emphasis on “making numbers� and recruiting, sifting through recruits, and dealing with interpersonal issues unfortunately takes a lot of the emphasis off everything else. These guilds often end up unaware of the underlying issues, as well as related infrastructure problems. Nobody has the energy, or time, to solve these issues. The players who are officers, also, are often just long-term members rather than individuals actually capable of running a guild on a day-to-day basis. Leadership ends up being seniority-based, not skill-based. Average leadership, average guild.

An interesting aspect of this is that it can also occur faction-wide, too. If a particular faction suffers greater turnover problems, then among “medium" guilds they will often recruit each others players and each will in turn develop the mentality. Frostmourne, in particular, had new servers and transfers introduced when it was still fairly young – the already vulnerable guild climate eventually led to many “medium� guilds. You can end up with massive faction imbalances or even slow-progress servers by virtue of these events (or so I imagine).

My advice, to any guild master or player who can resonate with this – target the core issue and attack it. Don’t focus so much on tomorrow night’s raid or updating DKP for a change, or take a night off to chat with your members and officers. Find your weak players, trim them, and then market the guild as “the next top guild". Because – believe me – there are never as many good guilds as there are good players. There’s always good players in medium guilds that as just gagging for a chance to progress at a reasonable pace. Make your guild that chance.

P.S. – To clarify, medium isn’t necessarily medium in progression. There are many stable guilds in the medium range that are by all rights “top" guilds. On FM, one such example is a guild called Aspects who’ve had stunning success and low turnover (so far!)

P. P. S. – I know a lot of this is probably redundant, but I’m yet to see it all coherently put in to one post. So hopefully this was interesting to you all =)

P. P. P. S. – I left my medium guild this night and I’m taking a break until BC.

 

• Ren

I don't really have anything constructive to add. :) All I can say every point rings true from my experience on my server. Great post.

 

tau

Agreed. In my own case the biggest problem i faced was the fact that stupid people generally "lead" guilds simply because they were there from the start and think they know everything there is to know. I'm sure maynard remembers when the MT of my priest's guild stated sunder itself does damage and went nuts when i corrected him <_<

But yeah, seniority is hilarious at times. It seems the best way to be in a raiding guild is to be one of the "Core", else you get the scraps. Can be quite hard though. Especially sucks when the guild you were "Core" in goes to shit because of unfortunate circumstances.

 

• frmorrison

Good observations, I was slightly surprised to see the same things on my server.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

◊ Quigon

The core is often a group of friends who have played together over a year and such. If they're more accepting of newbies you can probably expect that core to expand.

If not, the guild is destined for doom as the core is wittled away by real life and time, and its members not refreshed.

Part of making a guild work long term at any level is making sure people feel welcome and enjoy their time there.

These are guilds, not clans or cults - people log in to enjoy themselves, and sometimes to talk w/friends.

 

henaki

Fuck! That's what we've been doing wrong!
We have a puppet guild leader, does that count? No one hates him and the three officers (me being one of them) do all the work for him. Essentially we're his cabinet and hes the vote grabber.

Gur - Level 64 Undead Warlock on Hellfire

 

OzX

I'm a newer member in exactly the type of mid-level guild that your describe but I don't see any of the negatives you're talking about. You just impress me as someone who has a problem seeing the game from anything but your own perspective and respecting play choices different from your own.

 

◊ Praetorian

Is the name of the guild "N/A"?

 

Nurru

You observations mirrored the decline of Tichondrius's horde guild population.

A bit of backstory: Near release I merged into a horde guild named <The Dark Souls> (TDS). It eventually became a quiet #2 guild on the server through MC and BWL and was around #2 for most of AQ. The kicker was that when Tichondrius had our first transfers open nearly all our officers and our GM left the guild and transferred servers. The GM and a few Officers were all roommates and left so they could quit and focus on school (4th year Univ students, crunch time). When that happened a new GM was selected out of necessity and some new officers were drafted from the veterans (myself being one of them). I'll outright admit I'm not a good officer when it comes to managing 40 people. I was able to be a class leader fine, small group dynamics I'm good with. But leading a raid? Not my thing at all. Eventually we reached a point where our core was so geared that every time we lost a member due to burnout, quitting the game, school, etc it meant we couldn't replace them because Tichondrius didn't have a lot of geared applicants to look at. This happened for a few months until the GM went MIA due to work and eventually the remaining core couldn't sustain the undergeared applicants in AQ (even BWL became difficult to cleanly clear). As most of our friends had left, a friend and I rerolled to Alliance to join a guild where I had other friends. Since then Tichondrius has fallen into the slump you mentioned on Horde where there is essentially 1 Progression guild with its pick of members, then a bunch of medium guilds with extremely high turnover.

As for my current situation, this friend and I are now in one of the aforementioned Well Progressed guilds. We barely ever lose members to discontent, we never have to remove people, we have a large geared core and there aren't any notable in guild cliches to speak of. When we open recruitment for a person or two we receive a good number of well geared applicants willing to leave their medium status guilds. I couldn't be happier in that respect, the points are interesting to think about in respect to my own server.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

OzX

No, it's not. When I filled out my profile I wasn't guilded with anyone. However, since you've gone to the trouble to point it out I'll fill it in.

 

• Navaash

You can't have "N/A" in your name field. Fix that too.

 

◊ Praetorian

The profile rule is not arbitrary. This isn't the WoW forums -- no "level one alts." If you aren't willing to stick a verifiable character name and guild, if applicable, next to your posts, then you probably don't need to be posting. And if you don't play WoW at all, then fine, but people can also take that into account when evaluating the content of your posts.

 

probiscus

Very good post. For a minute there I felt like sharing my story as it fits so well with yours, but there's really nothing I can add to this without sounding like a wet blanket.

 

Pand

Our server has had the same situations occur, especially around the mid-level range of the guilds on our server. Two of the bigger guilds died recently, all absorbed into the higher tiered guilds. I guess that's the turnover in wow basically.

 

Elfan

Maynard, I haven't played WoW in almost a year but its something I put a lot of my life into so I still stop by in forums now and again. It's posts like yours that make that worth it.

Two points to add:
1) Medium guilds aren't necessary going to churn forever, sometimes if they do improve progression a little it leads to the more 'hard core' players carving out a new '1337' guild. This is bad for the original guild obviously, and bad for the new guild because 1337ness is a dumb thing to spend your time on. My personal experience has been a lot more high drama moves like this then a steady bleed.
2) Its not enough to trim fat and market your guild, being an uber guild will attract a lot more fat. Your guild will have to sit down and figure out how it wants to do recruitment (What qualities do we want? What proxies can we use for stuff like maturity? How can we best integrate new members? What role will this have for the overall culture of our guild?). If you let in assholes without even an elementary level understanding of mathematics or their native language in the long run I don't see anything else saving the guild.

 

Kasi

I agree mostly with the spirit of the post. But some things like the top guild always do zero dkp and are egalitarian and the medium ones dkp inflation heavy and such seem to be overgeneralizations. I've seen plenty of top guilds on the servers with the core = great mentality that favored them over new recruits. Having DKP leads that are almost insurmountable for anyone new to overcome. As well some medium guilds might have a hardcore philosophy but only a limited time in which to do their raiding, which will inhibit their ability to be the top guild on the server. So yeah you have some good points, but I think you generalize a bit too much in where the split between medium and top guilds are. There are so many other factors such as random luck, drama, time invested, health of your server (especially if horde) and so on.

 

Nurru

Kasi touches on something I forgot to mention. Of the top 3 Alliance guilds on Tichondrius 2 of them use Loot Council and the other uses a flat DKP system with no differentiation between class/hybrid.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Kasi

Yeah, of the top guilds I've seen on the servers I've been on there hasn't really been any concencus in dkp systems. I find as often as not the top guilds tend to be a bit more caring about their core. Afterall they're at the top of the heap. Where else are you going to go? (although server xfers has messed up that dynamic, with one server's top guild being another server's feeder guild). The medium guilds are often very appreciative of new members they can get in. Often yes like Maynard said they are very afraid of losing players to guilds higher up the food chain, so I believe that feeling leaves them to try to get people in. I'm sure there are a good number of the good old boys guilds though that are like Maynard said, but from my experiences I'm not sure that's the majority or anything. There are many guilds like mine for example working on starting raiding on our own with a mindset like the top guild profile, but it's an uphills battle when you're not established yet.

 

Copernicus

Tichondrius is a bit unique in that a large number of the second-level guilds blew up on Twin Emps/Huhu a few months ago. It's pretty easy to find people in Tier 2 or better who are casual raiders and unguilded and waiting around for the expansion.

 

probiscus

If by unique you mean "also everywhere else, including lots on kilrogg", then yeah. ;)

The last guild I was in blew up b/c our GM/MT neglected to show up for a few months... and didn't bother to tell anyone. Then we had 4 rogues leave, a few druids, a couple priests, the rest of our tanking crew, etc etc. I'm pretty sure more than a few of those accounts are just sitting around not doing anything. So basically half went to one guild that had their shit more together than ours, while the other half just went AFK. What remains of the original guild is working on Garr. This *was* the 4th or 5th nef killing guild on Kilrogg.

 

Dwargue

i imagine part of the attrition is due to the "standard" 2 year burnout period for a new game. something about that magical mark tends to make people suddenly realize what they've been spending their time doing, and re-evaluate their priorities.

this was what happened to me. there were things in game which wasn't to my liking, but if it was a few months ago, i would have gotten over it and moved on, but continue playing (which i did).

more than guild troubles, progression frustration, etc, the thing that i hear most from people who were once "core players" who are now quitting, or playing at a drastically reduced play time, is that they're simply tired of the game.

 

Daerlan

Maynard, as someone who used to be a guild master of a guild with problems similar what you've described, much of what you've said strongly (and yet strangely) rings true for my experiences.

The complicating factor with my (now-) old server is that the top guilds of the server had severe leadership problems themselves. In fact, since the beginning of the previous summer, every Nefarian-killing guild on my old server has disbanded, or at least had enough of a shake down that the guild name was changed, sans one. The one guild that has survived thus far did so, because its leadership took a militaristicly hardcore view of guild management (note: I could elaborate, but I'm really trying to keep this as short as possible). Even then, from what I've heard from that guild's own members, things have been very rough and continue to be. By my assessment, this "medium guild" mentality that you've described has been so ingrained into every single raider on that server that the server itself can barely support raiding guilds.

As for my old guild, painfully high turnover rates and painfully low guildwide motivation, plus the increase in difficulty from BWL->AQ40, finally led to a consensus to disband. I ended up transferring servers and have been amazed at the fundamental difference in attitudes among at least most of the raiding guilds on my new server. Personally, I wonder whether the "medium guild" mentality is destined to set in in at least some degree, given the guild structures and raiding environment given by Blizzard.

Maynard, your advice seems to take for granted that SOME guilds will be medium guilds. After all, if your advice works, you will essentially be cannibalizing members from other medium guilds. It'd be interesting to know what others think about this -- Are some guilds per server destined to fall into the "medium guild" trap, or are guilds' successes and failures essentially independent from one another?

 

Fellwraith

Couple things I'd add since I'm in a "medium" guild that is on the Twin Emps and making our first runs at Nax.

Previous to joining the guild I'm in now, I was one of the founders of The Fallen on Mal'ganis, and we got to the raiding game late (we downed Rag in about 2-3 months of raiding one night a week last fall). Most guilds were starting BWL or just finishing up Core when we finally had the critical mass to kill Luci and Mag with just our guild. Building up to a raid guild from 20 or so members is hard, especially if you're only trying to recruit a fun group of people who are also good players. That combination is pretty uncommon, which I'd argue is also part of the reason highly progressed guilds are pretty uncommon.

There is a fairly substantial advantage to having been a first mover in the raiding game. The fundamentals of a solid marketing strategy are just as relevant for guild recruitment as they are for selling the latest and greatest widget. I don't disagree that you can play catch-up, but most of the guilds you hear about downing BWL in greens have considerable player experience in the zone and include several guys who re-rolled. These guys didn't just pick up the game, read a strategy site and know what to do - those reactions were learned elsewhere.

You look at who is on top on Mal'ganis and which guilds are the most stable, it's pretty much the same guilds that were in Core and BWL first. Granted, one or two of them have imploded since then, but most of them are still quite strong. They've had their pick of some of the best guys from the late-mover guilds to replace their people who take time off. If you're in one of those smaller guilds you may have just lost a main priest, it's going to take you at least 3-4 weeks to replace that guy's gear/skill from a very limited population pool. That kills your progression and causes a flight risk for the other guys in your guild. They very well may like everyone that's in your smaller guild, and may have a blast playing with you, but at some point people start to get bored and want to move forward. It's human nature.

DKP bias will always favor the veterans anytime you don't use a zone-capped 0 sum system. Zone-capping is the key there. All guilds have some form of attrition and if you earn points from the old guy and the replacement, it's going to cause the guys who are there longest to have the most points. However, I've also heard the argument (especially from smaller guilds) that they need to keep the incentive there for the geared guys to keep coming so they can get the new guys equipped. You could say "well they should do it just because it helps them in the long run". I'd argue that not every person thinks or behaves that way. As long as players have the option to cut and run, it's fair to raise the counterargument that it may not be to their longterm benefit. Because these instances are on timers, there is a speed limit to how quickly anyone can get geared up - regardless of skill or dedication.

It seems to me that lots of people put up with some pretty crappy guild cultures or subpar guild leadership because their guild is ahead of everyone else. I don't fully understand why a pretty new sword is worth having some 19 year old yell over vent everytime something bad happens, but I do know that it's not for me. I get plenty of stuff done at work on a daily basis with my staff, and I never have to raise my voice in order for them to do it right the first time.

It's interesting to hear what people want from a guild leadership sometimes. Be more authoritative with the underperformers, treat *me* special, recruit better players from xx class, etc. Leading a guild "fairly" is extremely hard, and sometimes the younger players don't always fully appreciate that (I'm in my late 20's).

One other thing I've noticed is that new-new and splinter "up and coming" guilds don't last long. Generally they consist of strong personalities to go with those strong playing skills and gear. People who are good "cogs" in the raiding team's machine are generally not the people who would jump ship to the new new thing. You need good teamwork and coordination as much as you need gear and individual player skill.

 

Judia

The best players to recruit are those who are not available for recruiting... unless a guild completely implodes.
Discuss ?

 

Nurru

The best players often are already guilded, so this is generally true.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?