Social Paradigm Shift

Originally I didn’t want to write my article on the guild system until it seems valid to speak of a ’system’ rather than tiny bits of information, thrown at the gamer people during one of the famous panels. But GuildMag’s second Blog Carnival and ArenaNet’s abstinence regarding further information — I don’t actually know where the PR magic is hiding here — might justify a bit of atypical speculation. For the sake of reduced redundancy, I am not going to list the few known facts here for the threehundredeightyseventh time but rather start with the analysis right away.

The more interesting — and more controversial — of the two major announcement probably is the flexibilisation of guild membership. ArenaNet breaks with a design paradigm that I would compare to the Holy Trinity in terms of tenacity: the fixing of the user to exactly one persistent community of players, vulgo guild.

In general, a developer will, by the means of communication they offer the player, influence to a large extent the community that forms itself using those tools, and how the members of this community communicate. In traditional MMORPGs as well as Guild Wars 2 1, one could join exactly one guild per character or even just per account — which already shows to a great extent, which community subgroups the developers had planned. The decision for restricting guild membership to at most one guild on the one hand stems from a slightly romanticised historical picture of groups consisting of like-minded persons who achieve advantages for themselves and ideally even the public welfare by focusing their resources. On the other hand, it is influenced by the simple insight that players need a constant point of reference because of the MMORPG community being overly confusing due to its size. The attempt to bind a player to the game for a longer time can only be successful it they develop closer and, most importantly, lasting social relationships to other players, as MMORPGs cannot motivate players to play the game for years without the bonding force of a guild. This is one of the essential ’tricks’ of the genre: players are being animated to join groups — thus establish social relationships — which are based on the game in question as the common foundation for group members. Therefore the individual is forced to play the game if they don’t want to lose the group as well. To put it very negatively, one might say that peer pressure is one of the purposes of any guild.

Considering this aspect, it is also understandable why MMORPGs have been concentrating on the paradigm of „one character/account, one guild”. The chance that a close — thus stable, which is good for the developer — community evolves naturally increases when the game prefers this type of community, offering exclusive tools which other groups cannot use. A trivial example: it is not practical (whereas possible) to contact all people on the so-called friendlist via private messages in order to group up for this and that dungeon or sell an item. It is highly practical, however, to post these desires in the guild chat once — which will in total lead to more activities with guild members and less with other friends because the guild becomes the first place to visit for those activities.

Of course, dedicated players will find ways to circumvent these limitations. Bulletin Boards, IRC, Teamspeak and several other services offer cheap or even free communication with little configuration effort — yet they will by their very nature never reach the accessibility of those tools which are built into the game itself. For this reason, the developer’s decision establishes a tendency of the community to organise itself primarily in the ’predefined’ units, with most players choosing exactly one guild which they dedicate most of their time to.

Now Guild Wars 2 throws the One Guild paradigm out of the window, and the question naturally arises for players as well as developers how this will affect the increase in motivation that guild membership usually entails. For the player, ’increase in motivation’ is roughly equal to ’fun’, and for the developer it means word-of-mouth advertising and customers for DLC, add-ons and whatever we may expect.

I assume that two contrary effects will ensue from this move. On the one hand, most people will definitely not dedicate the time they pass with guilds fully to their ’main guild’, which might, not regarding the context, lead to less close relationships between the guild’s members. On the other hand, the formation of ’specialised’ guilds for various types of content will probably lead to many players in total passing more time with their various guilds — so that the time that one passes with other guild members overall increases. (I don’t consider being-afk-in-guild-chat here but rather actively playing together.) Of course, the various other design decisions which make playing in groups much more efficient compared to other games (Sidekick System, same amount of EXP for everyone and so on) will foster this. Time will show which of these two effects is stronger — whether guilds fall apart because their members are somewhere else all the time or whether the members play together more and the different guilds become more dear to their hearts.

Concerning all these considerations, note however that I am only speaking of the social level, not the individual one. ArenaNet does — as far as we know — not ’force’ a player to join multiple guilds, therefore every individual can decide for themselves to continue following the One Guild model and pass their whole playtime with one particular group (just as every guild can demand this from their members). Technically, the new system is an extension to the old one and therefore offers the individual player more possibilities, thus it does not lead to any immediate restrictions.

Another question which is totally open as of now is, how the influence system might impact guilds, and so we come to the second notable piece of news from PAX. According to Eric Flannum, one can earn influence by doing ’almost anything in the game’, as long as one represents a guild — which means that influence can be translated more or less directly to playtime. And as the latter is limited, every player has to choose which guild to support. This points towards a preference of the developers for the distinction between one main and numerous auxiliary guilds, where the average player would have one ’community’ and on top of that several guilds for specific purposes, mainly in order to search groups for PvE and PvP, later maybe even for specific types of PvE (Catacombs Guild, Caudecus Mansion Guild et cetera). This type of guild would in a way be a replacement for World of Warcraft’s dungeon finder, their attractiveness being based solely on their number of members and not so much on the influence they earn. I’m not yet sure if I would find this type of thing very good, as it would have very few in common with classical guilds.

Depending on what the influence mechanics will exactly look like in the end, it is also more or less probable that there will be some huge ’influence guilds’ which would be able to unlock all bonuses for their numerous influence-earning members. Like that, one could for example always activate an EXP buff while leveling solo. This depends largely on whether ArenaNet will implement ’influence sinks’, for example buffs that can be unlocked only temporary, or if they might even determine a guild’s influence relative to its number of members. Both doesn’t seem to be without risk regarding casual or fun guilds which want to build up their influence while just playing the game. At this point, the question arises how tangible the bonuses that can be earned through influence will be in the end: negligible advantages wouldn’t motivate anyone to ’work’ for the guild and thus also wouldn’t strengthen a guild’s cohesion; on the other hand, players who like to play solo should not have all too heavy disadvantages. Questions upon questions, and because of that in my opinion one should not make any judgemental statements regarding the influence system as yet.

For most of these possible problems one should however note that they could appear just as well with a traditional donation system, where guild upgrades are being bought with money (like in GW1). If the rewards were too powerful, ’money guilds’ would emerge quickly and solo players would have equal disadvantages. The influence system, however, has one clear benefit to it: personal and guild progress are not contrary to each other any more. In other games with upgrades for guilds, it is always a hard decision to make how much money (and therefore character progress) I am prepared to sacrifice in order to help the guild. By separating the two currencies, Guild Wars 2 avoids this problem: if I do something for the guild, I am also helping myself, and vice versa.

Before I come to the end of what is my longest article up to this point (Might two have done the job as well?), I’d like to make a little excursus. The new guild system has major points in common with the social networks that are expanding so rapidly at the moment, maybe not altogether inadvertently. Not being a member of one of these things, I always have the feeling that communication tendentially becomes more tentative, yet also more steady. One is more likely to stay in contact with friends from all around the world, but in a way that is less meaningful than a traditional letter would have been. And while I’m looking at this development with some scepticism in the real world, I tend to find it quite cool for MMORPGs. After all, I don’t want to know the most intimate secrets of my guild fellows but primarily have a lot of fun with them.

: Naum

(To the readers: I usually blog in German and only did this translation for GuildMag’s Blog Carnival. If you liked the article, please let me know in the comments so that I can determine if it would be worth the effort to translate more of my texts. And if you don’t, tell me what I can do better. )