Join The Club

Belghast alerted me to an interesting post at Digital Initiative, which was also a new blog to me. I added it to the blog-roll. Then I read the post. It breaks down the typical guild membership by type and Tamrielo, the author, clearly speaks from experience.

It's been a long time since I was in an active guild that had more people in it than just Mrs Bhagpuss, myself and one or two others but I instantly recognized just about all of the personalities listed. I could put names to most of them - if I could only remember the names. Actually, I could go "Oh, that sounds just like that guy, remember him, oh what was his name? Always wore green and used to sit in Plane of Knowledge all day moaning nothing was as good as the old days..."

Reading through the list was a little disturbing. I felt like I was auditioning for the lead in one of those T.V. movies about multiple personality disorder - that's me, and that's me and, oh, wait, that's really me!

I would lay claim to being any guild's lead Things Explainer - one of the "good" ones, I'd like to think, although other opinions are no doubt available. I literally left a guild over a stand-up argument with the Raid Leader because my You Need Yours position was so unwavering. I could make a strong case for being labeled Side Projects and I have certainly played the Chill AF role to the hilt on occasion.

The sumptuous and largely forgotten interior of the Guild Initiative Office.

There's probably a smattering of several others in there from time to time. I was certainly The Positivity Canon for a while in Vanguard, when I was having the best time of my MMORPG life while all around me people were just praying they could get the game not to crash for five minutes in a row.  I've been the Backpack to Mrs Bhagpuss's Hiker in a few guilds, too.

There are a few categories I am pretty certain no-one could ever accuse me of representing. I do talk a lot in guilds but apart from that I'm no Socialite. Come to think of it, one category that's glaring in it's absence here is The Chatterbox. /em raises hand.

I'd like to think I've never been The Downer or The Griefer but sadly neither have I ever been The Ninja or Silent But Competent. (Noisy But Incompetent - now you're talking...or more likely I am, while we're wiping).

Not sure if this is decoration or fly-posting.

Although all of this seems very familiar from the increasingly distant past, I wonder how accurate it is in terms of current guild practice and experience? Do guilds even work this way any more?

My view may be colored by five and a half years in Guild Wars 2, where guild membership is a very malleable affair. Apart from my own guild, where I spend most of my time, and a bunch of "Bank Guilds" I made for storage, I'm in two fairly large guilds each numbering somewhere in the hundreds of active members. Neither of them seems remotely like any guild I was ever in outside GW2.

They seem to be relatively structureless for a start. There's a nominal hierarchy with names for the ranks but no-one seems to refer to it. If we have "officers" I have no idea who they are (and I've been in both guilds for several years now). Events, when they occur, seem to be ad hoc and while someone got us a guild hall and did a bang-up job decorating it I have no idea who that might have been or when it happened.

Despite my apparent disconnection, I remain a member in good standing and if it all seems fairly anonymous and impersonal then that's because it is. In GW2 you join guilds by your Account rather than by your character and each account can be in up to five guilds simultaneously. Since it's common to have more than one account (I have four) the number of guilds you can be in at the same time is potentially quite large.

It used to be that you had to "Represent" a guild (which means specify it as your active guild) and you could only speak in the Guild Chat of that guild. Guilds were also server-specific. Over time all that has gone. Now you can speak in the chat channel of any of your guilds and you can join guilds on any server.

The even more sumptuous interior of the even less-frequented Arena in the Windswept Haven Guild Hall.

I wonder if that dilutes the intensity, indeed the cabin fever, that used to characterize the clubhouse mentality of many guilds in the past? It must be much harder to develop and maintain the kind of obvious idiosyncratic character traits listed by Tamrielo in an environment where guild membership is so much more tangential and fractured.

Finally, a reason to visit!

It also removes that whole "I quit" drama that made guilds so enervating in the past. If you get fed up, or someone's annoying you, you can just start chatting in another guild and go play with them instead, then come back to the first when The Drill Sergeant or Ready To Go has logged out.

I certainly have never seen anything in the two large guilds I'm in that comes anywhere close to the kind of emotional hothousing that so strongly put me off guild life back in the mid-noughties. It's a far more relaxed, casual, laissez-faire experience than anything I remember from EverQuest or EQ2.

As I do my dailies in DCUO, slipping my Qwardian coins into my wallet as I save up for Krypto, I'm still getting random drive-by guild invites. I haven't yet accepted one because it seems a bit louche to join and then never turn up for anything. At best I'd be a classic What's Going On Lately, dropping in for fresh events, grabbing the freebies, maybe staying for a week of dailies then disappearing until next time.

Even so, I am tempted. I never want to have to deal with proper Guild Drama ever again but I wouldn't mind being Things Explainer or Chill AF in a nice, quiet, steady guild somewhere. Maybe that time will come in Ashes of Creation or Pantheon, if either of them ever happen for real. Pantheon particularly strikes me as a game where a good guild would be more of a necessity than a luxury.

Meanwhile I guess I'll carry on as I have been, with the personalities I know from map and wvw chat standing in for guildmates. I could allocate a few names to categories there as well...

The Gang's All Here! : GW2

Almost from when I first began playing MMORPGs I've enjoyed reading and joining in with the free-rolling, wide-ranging conversations that fill whatever passes for open chat. It's a conversational platform that's sometimes derided, even shunned, often with good reason. There have been plenty of times I've had to switch it off for the sake of my own sanity and one of the first things I usually do in a new MMO is add a chat tab that doesn't include any of the open channels at all.

Nevertheless I've always found the background chatter of a million voices to be an integral part of the MMORPG experience. I'd no more go without it than I'd replace the in-game music with choices of my own or mute the obsessive chorus of NPC voiceovers. I've heard  people do that. Go figure!

The nature of what passes for conversation varies a good deal from game to game. WoW,  the MMO that has probably done most to bring the concept of freeform, unmediated player-to-player interaction into disrepute - it spawned the semi-generic "Barrens Chat" after all - can sometimes be unbearable. Alright, often. General chat in EverQuest these days tends towards the smug and cynical while EQ2, particularly in a couple of the game-wide custom channels I frequent, sometimes gets too twee even for me (and speaking as a ratonga with an apparent mental age of around five or six that takes some doing, let me tell you).

Guild Hall? Guild Island, more like.

Generally, though, most MMOs chug along pleasantly with a mix of question-and-answer sessions relating to the game itself, attempts at humor (some more successful than others) and the occasional very welcome flurry of surrealism or roleplay. GW2 has always been  particularly chatty in a mostly good-natured way and the arrival of Heart of Thorns has highlighted that tendency, with many helpful hints and observations scrolling through the little box in the lower left corner of the screen throughout most of the many hours I've played.

One thing others do have going on that I generally don't, however, is Guild Chat. The last time I was in a guild with enough people to get a conversation going was back in EQ2, getting on for four years ago, before GW2 launched. Even then there were fewer than a dozen of us and rarely more than four or five on at the same time. I'd have to go back closer to a decade before I hit the point where Guild chat was as busy as any open channel.

Heart of Thorns changed all that. GW2 has always allowed a player to be in multiple guilds at the same time. Five guilds to be precise. Until the launch of the expansion, however, to speak and listen in guild chat you had to "represent" that guild and you could only rep one at a time. For three years the virtual currency used to power guilds, "Influence", was tied to Representing so who you repped was often an issue.

Guild I.D.? Erm, I think I left it in my other robe...

Outside of a couple of stints raising Influence for a personal bank guild or two I have always repped the small guild made up only of my characters, Mrs Bhagpuss's and those of two friends, one whom only plays occasional weekends and the other, who gave up on GW2 after about three months. Not surprisingly, guild chat hasn't been much of a thing for the lifetime of GW2.

Well, it is now. With the launch of HoT Influence was retired and Representation was streamlined and simplified. Each guild you belong to now has a discrete, dedicated chat channel and you can hear and speak in all of them no matter which guild you are currently repping.

That still wouldn't bring the noise if the only guilds I was in were my own tiny one and a couple of single-account bank guilds, but just before HoT dropped, in anticipation of both the arrival of Guild Halls and the new Squad Commander system, I decided it might be time to ally with a larger organization. As it happened one of the largest WvW guilds on Yak's Bend was recruiting and as Mrs Bhagpuss was already a member, having been headhunted long ago for her tactical acumen, they seemed like a good choice. Also they let me in just for asking, which are the kind of entry requirements I like!

The opening cinematic is all I've seen of Lost Precipice so far.

As a result I've not only been able to follow the process of Guild Hall acquisition and upgrade but my chatbox is busy non-stop and not just with the usual guild gossip, either. Given that the guild has some of the more skilled and experienced Commanders and sPvP players around I've learned quite a lot.

The changes to the Guild experience have been instructive all round. Far from feeling disenfranchised by ANet's decision to set the practical lower limit for Guild Hall acquisition somewhere around five members I feel positively liberated by not having to bother with the onerous process for our small, personal guild.

There's an argument to be had that Guild Halls could have come in a wider variety of sizes but, given that they are currently only available in the giant mega-sized full map version, not having to grind the insane requirements for upgrades seems like a lucky escape. Being able to visit and explore the guild's home in Gilded Hollow as a lowly member of a large organization, chipping in towards its renovation and reconstruction in a manner that fits my available time and resources, seems like a good deal, not as some have suggested a slap in the face.

A jumping puzzle our Guild Leader made for Halloween. Only two jumps but a lot harder than it looks.

Meanwhile, our little guild and all our bank guilds have access to all the facilities we need in the sumptuous and entirely private setting of the guild-specific Guild Initiative Headquarters instance in Lion's Arch. We have everything we need there and it's larger than some full-size Guild Halls in other MMOs. We can't decorate it but you can't have everything.

As it turns out I would have been able to visit the Hall even if I hadn't taken steps to prepare. Long ago someone sent me a guild invite at some event or other and I accepted it. It was from a guild based on Sanctum of Rall that exists to run large-scale, cross-server events, not in a hyper-organized, elitist fashion but in a more down-home, turn up and pitch in kind of style.

I did one event with them and forgot all about it but come HoT and its five live guild feeds and suddenly there they all were, chatting away down in the bottom corner. They also have a Guild Hall and, sod's law, they picked Gilded Hollow too, so I still haven't seen the other map, Lost Precipice. Also, since both the large guilds of which I'm now a humble member play primarily North American hours, they both began their expeditions to reclaim the maps from the Mordrem just as I was about to go to bed, so I haven't done the fights either. I did stay up long enough to hear one of them wipe on the first attempt though. Heh!

So there we have it. Another of the heavily-hyped features of Heart of Thorns about which my pre-launch feelings were, at best, ambivalent, turns out to be rather a good addition to the game from my perspective after all. Confusing, isn't it? It's almost as though someone at Anet knows what they're doing.

Now that really is a disturbing thought...

Are You Going To Be In There All Day?

Our little guild on Freeport now has a Guild House. We've been of a level to take a Guild Hall for quite a while now and the idea gets booted around every so often but there's never been sufficient enthusiasm to take it any further. Mrs Bhagpuss and I are wary of taking on any virtual responsibility and the thought of having to farm even the small amount of Status a basic Guild Hall requires is enough to ensure we never make a purchase.

We have some people who aren't us in the guild now, though and it would be nice to have a place to hang out sometimes, so when we were having our discussion this time I suggested a compromise. We're each entitled to a free Mistmoore Crags Estate Prestige House as a Seven-Year Veteran Award. Actually, we're entitled to lots of them since they come "one per character". It's unaccountably generous and yet strangely unexciting offer and until yesterday we'd never claimed a single Vampire Castle. I thought we could grab one and use it as a Guild House.

Dear Auntie Enid, The weather isn't all we'd hoped...

So that's what we did and we'll see how it works out. There's an awful lot of decorating to do, not least since the first thing we did was break out and plant our metaphorical Guild Banner in Loping Plains. We really should get a Guild Banner, come to think of it...

But before we made the final decision I went off and read up on just what you get if you have a real Guild Hall in EQ2. I was appalled! There have been guild halls since EQ2 started but if I've ever been in a guild that had one I can't recall it. I've rarely been inside one. I knew they'd been tarted up over the years and now have a whole raft of "amenities" but I had only the vaguest understanding of what those amenities were. They are these. (Or is that "these are they"? I can never remember how that goes).

That's pretty much every reason you'd ever want to go into a city. Is it any wonder the cities died? Is it any wonder it's taken a full revamp and a ton of additional content to draw a scattering of players back to add some life to the streets, squares and docksides of Freeport? It's one thing to offer guilds a nice big meeting hall where they can hold disciplinary hearings and dinner-dances among the tastefully plinthed and polished skulls of the many dragons they've slain but who ever thought it was a good idea to add in every other facility that might induce any of them to set foot in the shared part of the world ever again?

This is just part of the perennial, long-debated problem of instancing. WoW, which has no housing Guild or otherwise, has cities full to bursting with people. That the cities have the ambience of a metropolitan bus-station just after the pubs have closed is by-the-by. At least they're busy. Thinking about it, maybe that's not such a great argument.

Don't you hate it when mothers dress them all the same?

As ever there's a balance to be struck. The cities need to bustle. New players need to see crowds of other people around them, doing mysterious things they don't yet understand with objects they don't yet recognize, racing past in their fancy gear on their sparkling unicorns and clockwork chickens, trailing a comet's tail of unfeasibly cute and terrifying pets as they race who knows where on who knows what Important Mission.

Established players need a place of their own to get away from all of that.

It's a difficult balance, yes, but it has to be found. I hope we're doing our bit for the Greater Good of Norrath by resisting the temptation to set up our own City-State and settling instead for a nice big house where we can throw fruitcake at each other occasionally while we dance on the patio to the sound of our Snow Globes.