Patch 4.1 is going to introduce a looking for guild feature. This move does not surprise me at all. If any of you are surprised then I suppose that you’re the type of person who reacts with shock after the girl you just slept with asks to be paid. Blizzard’s relentless march towards their un-stated aim of removing every part of the game that requires players to make some sort of social effort has at last come up against that granddaddy of all social networks, the guild. You can presently experience the entire game without interacting with another living soul. But if you want to join a guild however, you must actually force yourself to make the effort to communicate. Hands up those who don’t know what that word means.
So now we have the looking for guild option. It’s in its infancy stage at the moment, so there are no options to choose PvP or PvE, times of the week, etc, but the general gist is there. You say that you’re looking for a guild, you find a guild that is desperate, and you have a perfect fit.
Except, none of this makes sense. Who would use this feature? Well, first of all they would have to be people who were unable to find a guild on their own or who didn’t care about losing all their present guild perks when they guild-hop. Then they must be completely unaware of what guilds are on their server. Then they must be the type of person who is unable to jump online and look at the guilds that are on their server and then contact a guild that looks nice to them. So we’re looking at a typical user who cares so little about finding a good guild to put effort into the process that all that they could possibly be bothered to do is to open a window, tick some boxes, write something inane in the comments box and then forget about it until someone else equally as desperate to find warm bodies just so their guild can go up in level will accept them because there is nobody else out there.
Now I know that you’re all sitting there thinking that this is a good thing because it will keep the social nitwits together and out of our hair, and you may be right. But the eternal cynic in me views this as what will become the norm, just as what has happened with every other thing like this that has been introduced into the game. Joining a guild is the only remaining area left in the game where a player has to make some sort of effort to interact with other players, and Blizzard want to reduce this. It boggles the mind. This is the Claytons MMO. The MMO that you’re playing when you’re not playing an MMO.
March 8, 2011 at 2:41 am
I probably will be using it. The guild I’m on Barthilas has announced it’s no longer active. I guess it’s nice that the GM has posted as much in the MotD, instead of just dissolving it. So a LFGuild panel will help me find a guild that takes mature non-raiding casuals that PvP at end game, and have a host of alts that they’d like to bring along for the social experience.
That’s assuming I haven’t switched over to RIFT before 4.1 hits.
March 8, 2011 at 10:02 am
How’s that RAID BROWSER doing these days?
And the inbuilt VOICE CHAT? How about that one?
March 8, 2011 at 1:10 pm
And do you suggest a player finds a guild in WoW in its current state? With /1 and /2 switched to off because of all the drooling retards in it, and everything else being cross-realm, I don’t see any chance of applying social skills ingame to find a suitable guild.
I found Gevlon’s PuG because I happen to read his blog, but otherwise I would probably still be searching for a guild.
What I don’t understand is why the chose to make it a “looking for guild” feature, instead of a filterable guild list with “apply to join” buttons (like the ingame recruitment EVE has).
March 8, 2011 at 3:12 pm
I like the in-game guild application suggestion. My guild is looking for certain classes and everything to fill out an application requires players to leave WoW. I do like the idea that I’ll get the more dedicated people since lazy players won’t even ALT-Tab out of Wow for 5 minutes, but I’ve seen us and another guild in the top 5 raiding guilds on our server get zero replies for 2 weeks.
I think people are grasping tightly to their current guilds not wanting to forfeit guild rep for an unknown raid spot. Does Blizz allow any guild rep to transfer for any circumstance? If not, they could come up with some mechanic if the inviting guild approves of the new player. Maybe 50% of guild rep or less, but at least that would be something. I was in a terrible guild and hesitated to switch to my own brother’s guild because of guild rep. Retrospectively, it was a dumb hesitation, but if I thought about it, someone else thought about it.
March 10, 2011 at 1:07 am
I haven’t played since guild rep came out, so maybe I’m missing something, but wouldn’t every guild invite auto-approve taking rep with you? I would think it more prudent to put it on the GM of the leaving guild, saying “This person is leaving in a reasonable fashion.”
March 8, 2011 at 7:25 pm
“Joining a guild is the only remaining area left in the game where a player has to make some sort of effort to interact with other players?”
Actually, no. My unguilded alts get guild invitations all the time and often enough it’s just the screen to join the guild without any sort of introduction. I could join a different guild every week with no social effort at all.
The niche this feature works for are people who are lazy but picky and don’t want a big guild where there’s a little of everything going on. The ambitious will put the effort into finding a good guild. People who don’t care will join any guild that offers.
March 10, 2011 at 6:47 pm
To just add in my two cents here:
I recently made a goblin warlock alt on my home server. After logging in, I was trying to get an invite to my guild from an officer online at the time.
I had a difficult time. The minute I logged in I had a guild invite from some guild I have never seen before. As soon as I clicked decline another guild invitation immediately appeared. It took several tries and some good timing for me to finally receive the invitation to my guild.
March 8, 2011 at 10:41 pm
I would respectfully point out that I think the primary social aspect for most players is “within” their own guilds. Perhaps I’m biased, since i’ve been in my current guild for, oh, about 12 years now (we first formed in the early days of EverQuest). But especially now with guild reputation, guild hopping isn’t quite as prevalent, unless you’re leaving a guild that is defunct or just a very poor fit for you. In either case, the reason you leave that guild is precisely because of your desire for social interaction. “Getting epics” from a raiding guild might seem like the real motivation for people, but if you stop and think about it, very few would continue playing longterm if they have no real social ties. (Although, it’s certainly possible I’m over-estimating people!)
Additionally, as an officer trying to recruit in varying stages of a hardcore, progression, and casual guild profile (at different points in our history, we have been each of these), having an in-game tool to aid in recruitment is a welcome sight. Trying to get applicants to go to our guild website, read our charter, and perhaps fill out a form just doesn’t work anymore. And spamming trade chat for new candidates is pretty horrible. I for one, welcome this feature.
March 10, 2011 at 4:05 am
You summed up a lot of what I thought as I read this article. One thing I’d like to add is the applicant’s side of your second paragraph. Looking for a guild, specifying what kind of environment I want and when I usually play, without going in trade or interrupting my Heroic runs/dailies/material farming? Awesome! Knowing that officers/recruiters can easily read that stuff and compare me to their guild’s current/desired makeup? Even more awesome!
March 9, 2011 at 11:18 pm
I loved the LFD tool when it first came out. It was so luxurious, so easy, and such a burden-remover that I hailed its coming with garlands of roses.
Ah, that ole’ law of unintended consequences; he bit me in the bottom yet again. Two huge problems were introduced there (maybe more, but it’s off the top of my head). Firs, there’s no real way to meet people on your server pre-raid anymore. This hurts guild recruiting (from both sides – players looking and guilds looking) and the friends list (I noted good tanks and healers for when I wanted to do dungeons). Secondly, it destroyed people’s views of other players, which are now a commodity, served after a short (for a tank or healer) or long (for dps) wait like a dinner that can be devoured and disposed of.
Good old unintended consequences. I wonder what’s in store for this one?
March 9, 2011 at 11:54 pm
As a Guild Master I would love to be able to put up an ad in-game for my guild. The guild recruitment channel is barely useful and you can only get people who both have it turned on and currently in the city.
Not everyone visits the realm forums and it’s hard fighting for visibility in the official cross-realm guild recruitment forums.
If LFGuild can be used anywhere and Guild Masters can put their requirements up I’d be all for it. I’m really looking forward to the feature.
March 10, 2011 at 12:06 am
I feel like the entire feature is being blown out of proportion by a lack of understanding (or more likely an overestimation) of what the tool will do.
This isn’t going to automatically pair you with a guild or get you an insta-invite. It’s not going assemble guilds by itself like the dungeon finder. It’s not Match.com. If anything, this is most like a classifieds section in the newspaper. I’ll put in my info and it will bring up a list of guilds that fit the criteria I chose. It will still be up to me to contact those guilds, fill out applications, etc., just with the benefit of not having to go onto the official forums and dig through 52 pages of flame wars, trolling and other garbage. GM’s will no longer need to “bump” 15 times a day in order to keep their thread on top of the other 89 guilds bumping their threads 15 times a day.
The argument of “it’s not hard to tab out and open up a window to look for a guild” may be true for the average raider or competitive PvPer looking for specific things from their guild, but that’s not really who this tool is catering to. It’s designed for casuals, people that are unwilling to server hop, that may be new to the game and not know about the official forums, people that are just looking for someone to hang out with.
Also, it’s dang-near impossible to keep up with the constant flux of guilds that form, fall apart, merge, transfer off, progress, stop progressing, etc on really high pop servers. So “you should know who’s on your server” doesn’t really hold up either unless you’re on a backwater realm.
March 10, 2011 at 3:30 am
[...] The Noisy Rogue isn’t all that sure that the Looking for Guild feature is such a good idea. [...]
March 11, 2011 at 8:53 am
Luckily, the company that provided us with gearscore/ilevel as a way to evaluate players has a nice guild level feature so you don’t join an inferior level 15 guild when there are level 19 ones available.
I’v only been in a couple of guilds in my 3+ years. With the guild rewards you want to be in a guild now. When my guild falls apart, I might use the LFGuild. But in this day and age, it looks very, very primitive. Is a guild that is 1/12 now causal? or is that one where people take a week to get from level 38 to 39? So lfg may be a help but I think I’ll probably just move onto another game when this guild dies.
March 14, 2011 at 10:57 pm
Since they crippled the best way to find a guild as a new player on a new server (Joining pugs or filling out “need on mores” for guild runs) I think there is a need for it.
Easy to assume otherwise if you’ve got a long history on a server, though, I suppose.
May 20, 2011 at 8:52 pm
[...] recently introduced Looking for Guild tool is another interesting actor here. Like Adam, I can’t help but wonder how little someone needs to care about what guild they’ll end [...]