I had a little break from Black Desert due to my computer not liking the new Valencia patch. For some reason it wouldn’t download it. After ten days I finally managed to resolve the issue and I was in!
Except I wasn’t in a guild anymore. For fucks sake …
So I called up my gaming buddy and he gave me the lowdown, and then we both logged on and he invited me to the new guild. This is the fifth guild that I’ve been in since BDO started. Or is it the sixth? I don’t know; so many guilds, so little time. I’ve been doing this guild-shopping with a core group of about ten other players from Australia and New Zealand. Alliances form and dissolve in BDO like personal relationships between 14 year olds. It’s so hard to keep up. But here’s the thing:
Apart from my core gaming buddies, I don’t know anyone else from these guilds. Sure, I hear them speak in Teamspeak. Mostly fart jokes and boasting about how they’re going to “rape” this person or that person. But it’s all a big load of whatever. I don’t make any effort to get to know them because due to the nature of the game I know it’s all going to be over again in a couple of weeks. Last night one of my main guildies said that they were negotiating an alliance with another big guild. There are some downsides so he asked me what I thought about the deal.
“I have no opinion,” I said.
“That’s not like you,” he replied.
There were other ribald comments in Teamspeak at this point, mostly along the lines of “fucking Noisy”.
“No really,” I said. “I don’t give a shit. You could negotiate that we have to dress up as cows and yodel for all I care. It makes no difference. It will all be changed again in a few weeks.”
They didn’t like that attitude much. But what else am I going to say? It got me thinking. Years ago now, it must have been back some time in 2010, Blizzard introduced the LFG feature and a bunch of us said that it was the beginning of the end – that this would lead to a total social breakdown where nobody gave a shit about anyone else in the game. And we were right.
But have we reached a similar point with guilds? Are guilds now so completely interchangeable that we don’t make any real effort to get to know the other players? I’d like to think that this is a feature of BDO but then I think back to Elder Scrolls and the guilds I was in there. Nothing. Nada. Crickets. I can’t remember a single thing about anyone that I played with. But WoW in 2010? I can remember people’s names, what we did, who we fucked over, the dramas, I can remember it all.
So here I am – a stranger in a strange guild.
CIV VI is looking better all the time.
The Noisy Rogue 
July 13, 2016 at 2:15 pm
Why don’t you start your own guild and recruit people after some selection?
The “fart jokes” and the “we’re gonna rape those cunts” is the reason I have no guild tag and won’t have any until I find a reason to start my own guild. The guild perks are way too low for me to listen to a single minute of TS with random socials “having fun”.
July 13, 2016 at 10:12 pm
The core group of gamers that I follow around are outstanding pvpers and are mature – it’s not them doing the fart jokes. I’ve been playing with them since ArcheAge.
Recruiting players now in-game would also be a nightmare. Top-end players are in huge demand. They want to see as a minimum that the guild skill scores are completed. Which is a huge amount of work in of itself.
July 13, 2016 at 10:39 pm
How critical are these so-called “top end players” to the proper functioning of a guild? Can you not simply start your own guild for you and your ten buddies to hang out in and it be functional as a guild? Granted, it won’t be as successful as the “top end” guilds full of fratbros, but is it worth not being the best to not have to put up with their shit?
July 13, 2016 at 10:43 pm
I suggested doing exactly that but they turned me down because they didn’t want all the hassles that come with it. Now, ironically enough, they’re getting all the same hassles.