Jeff Freeman (not verified) on January 24, 2005 - 20:18.
In WoW a guild is nothing more than a tabard (that is also graphically horrid and badly animated) and a shared chat channel.
It's a *little* more than that.
On the one hand, I almost never join guilds in MMOs because they have an expectation that you actually do things with them, and I don't want to.
In WoW, I joined a guild anyway. For the chat channel, you understand.
Now, we collect all these bits and pieces of things that we have no use for. We could just yell "Anyone want this?" - but that's not nearly as satisfying as asking in the guild channel "Anyone want this?" and learning a name, which we see again and again, and sending those bits and pieces of whatever the thing is to them.
It is an opportunity to be altruistic (which you can't so much do via general chat, due to the risk of Being Taken Advantage Of).
Then too, there are gifts which come from guildchat to you. When your guildmates find something they can't use but which you can, and they are afforded with the opportunity to be altruistic and you are the benefactor of said altruism.
And once, the last stage of a quest was just impossible to do, and spamming general chat for help doing it was fruitless, and the high-level guildmates came to the rescue to do it.
There is a risk in adding 'communal goals' that the noncommital nature of the guild (which is the only thing that got us to join in the first place) would get stomped upon, in which case we wouldn't have joined the guild.
Then we lose the occassional prize that emerges from guildchat, the opportunity to be altruistic in guildchat, help when general chat is ignoring us, and most imporantly, the chat.
I do agree there ought to be communal goals, but I'm not so sure they should be attached to guilds.
And a little more
In WoW a guild is nothing more than a tabard (that is also graphically horrid and badly animated) and a shared chat channel.
It's a *little* more than that.
On the one hand, I almost never join guilds in MMOs because they have an expectation that you actually do things with them, and I don't want to.
In WoW, I joined a guild anyway. For the chat channel, you understand.
Now, we collect all these bits and pieces of things that we have no use for. We could just yell "Anyone want this?" - but that's not nearly as satisfying as asking in the guild channel "Anyone want this?" and learning a name, which we see again and again, and sending those bits and pieces of whatever the thing is to them.
It is an opportunity to be altruistic (which you can't so much do via general chat, due to the risk of Being Taken Advantage Of).
Then too, there are gifts which come from guildchat to you. When your guildmates find something they can't use but which you can, and they are afforded with the opportunity to be altruistic and you are the benefactor of said altruism.
And once, the last stage of a quest was just impossible to do, and spamming general chat for help doing it was fruitless, and the high-level guildmates came to the rescue to do it.
There is a risk in adding 'communal goals' that the noncommital nature of the guild (which is the only thing that got us to join in the first place) would get stomped upon, in which case we wouldn't have joined the guild.
Then we lose the occassional prize that emerges from guildchat, the opportunity to be altruistic in guildchat, help when general chat is ignoring us, and most imporantly, the chat.
I do agree there ought to be communal goals, but I'm not so sure they should be attached to guilds.