But it isn’t. Perhaps a guild *should* be more, but for the past decade guilds have been little more than a chat channel whose members share a common name and promote inbred loyalty for completing game content. The end.

I’ve been in great guilds, I’ve been in horrible guilds. The definition would be personal and apply only to me, however. Nowadays, I don’t login to an MMO and immediately seek out a guild. I do my own thing solo or in PUGs while I get a feel for the game and its community. If I decide I’m ready for a guild, I often look at forums. I know what kind of gamer I am, and more importantly I’ve been in enough varieties of guilds to know what type of guild I want to participate in. So I actively seek out only that type of guild. It’s almost like online dating. Just because your spreadsheet profiles mesh doesn’t guarantee you and the guild with actually be a match for each other. Just like any real life social group, in fact. You have to be willing to try, but you also have to be willing to leave one group that turns out to not be “for you” and seek another. If at first you don’t succeed and all that…

As for the rest, you’re saying being a member of a group = being a member of a guild, but I think a guild is much more. Let’s see, how can I say this… y’know when you’re in some kind of team building exercise at work and the person running it says “OK, now everyone form up in groups of 4.” and everyone groans?

That”s life in a guild. Every day of being in a guild is one of those irksome “team building” exercises where you end up on a team with the creepy guy from accounting who keeps a personal diary of what kinds of drinks show up on the female employees expense reports.

And conversely, where your worth is determined by your talent (class) and clothing (gear) rather than your willingness to learn or enthusiasm for the project. Again, I’m talking about large guilds, not small guilds of friends.

And lastly, the leader of most guilds is the person who happened to form it, not the person best qualified to lead people.

These aren’t qualities I ascribe to most social groups outside of games. But maybe my experience has differed from that of most people.

I guess the main difference between a guild ingame and “real life”, is that in real life, I belong to dozens of guilds. However, in game, I can only join one. That seems rather artificial.

Well, two people have challenged me on the guilds vs church membership thing, so I guess I’ll have to admit I was wrong. When I was a church goer, many many years ago, belonging to a church meant showing up on Sunday, listening to a sermon, and going home. Or going alone just to have some private time to worship.

While I was a member of a large group called the congregation, nothing I did really required anyone other than the man at the front of the room to be talking, and me to be listening. I don’t recall ever doing something that required X people to attend before it would work. But maybe churches have changed, or maybe my parents just kept me away from these other activities.

Anyway I stand corrected on that point.

But in a larger sense, maybe this is just an issue with some people. I really couldn’t think of any social groups that function similar to guilds in real life, but I’m not much of a joiner, either. When you say “They’re just natural extensions of what we do every day in life.” I have to disagree vehemently. They’re not even remotely extensions of anything I do every day in life. But I’ll grant you that they’re an extension of what you do.

Which gives me a lot to think about, really. To me, guilds have always been a necessary evil in MMOs, and one which have always led to bad feelings eventually, so I don’t like them at all (and when I say “guild” I really mean “large guilds” as opposed to small, intimate groups of people who legitimately are friends). But I lead a pretty solitary life. Perhaps for people who lead social lives, guilds feel very much like a good thing.

Maybe I should go back to arguing that we should keep levels and loot treadmills!!

As a church-going guy, I’d have to disagree here — there’s quite a few similarities to how guilds are set up in terms of social structure and function. With guilds, you aren’t always interacting with everybody, even if they’re online at the same time. You know some people better than others, but you all “belong” to the same unit. In church, we all see ourselves as an extended family, with some people that know me better than others, but we all get together at the same time and we all “belong” together. There’s common purpose, common activities and mutual support.

Maybe your experiences and/or knowledge might be limited in this area, but that was a quickly dismissive comment when you had the possibility to make a good correlation. I think there are many social groups that function very similar to guilds in real life — guilds aren’t as unique or different as you make them out to be. They’re just natural extensions of what we do every day in life.

Then again, your ultimate point was more about numbers, and here I’ll agree — any time a group reaches a certain number, it becomes impossible to know everybody and cliques start to form.

And you don’t need to be in a guild to raid. People frequently form PUG raids, and I’ve seen several cross-server raiding organizations set up over time that have people from small guilds and non-guilded all banding together to get the bodies without forcing anyone to give up their guilds (or join one).

Being a part of a guild where most of the members USED to be hardcore raiders, but now play more casually, this works out nice. We have an alliance with some of the more hardcore guilds so if we want to do runs, they’re there.

I think this helps get rid of the stigma that only uber guilds can run the high end stuff. While PUGs traditionally have a bad connotation associated with them, if you take alliance members, whether you know them or not, it’s better than PUGing.

Anywho … the idea of having a place where the people you game with and you can come together to accomplish things in the game isn’t a bad idea and I don’t think guilds need to go away, but I think the idea that you need a 150-200 member guild to accomplish the highest things in the game needs to be dealt with.

I moved from them to a much smaller guild, and when I went to EQ2 I created that small guild again — we currently have ~8 active players. I would like to get to the 15-20 range to provide more grouping options for those who want it, but we’re a good size as it stands for socializing. I agree that once a guild gets beyond the 20-25 member range or so, it is no longer a group of friends who all know and like each other — instead it become several small cliques who just happen to have a name/chat/bank in common…..

I’m sure there are exceptions, but I doubt they are the majority. Still — it seems to me that very large guilds are in and of themselves a minority, it is simply that due to their size, they get noticed.