‘Want to be in my gang?’ – some thoughts on guilds in MMOs

Guilds are the soul of any MMO.

In every MMO that I have stopped playing in the past, there has been a mirror reason to why I have done so – all the fun had gone from the whole experience & it began to feel like work rather than play. Looking a little deeper at the reasons behind why each MMO experience lost that feeling of fun, I found that there’s one major factor that drills the hole in the bucket for me personally – the loss of friends/Guild, normally both,  from the MMO of that time.

It’s a thought that has been playing through my head these last few weeks while I have been considering WAR. My fear is – If I don’t get involved in a guild before WAR releases, am I going to struggle to find one worth joining at all? Maybe it’s an irrational fear which has been heightened because many of my old gaming friends are no longer looking to play in a MMO?

Looking back to when I last enjoyed playing an MMO(WoW), I had an idea of getting together with other bloggers etc & forming a guild. A bunch of like-minded gamers running around together as a guild sounded worthwhile. Unfortunately this is something I never got to experience, as I decided to have a break from playing WoW & with that the idea faded.

CoW Guild in WAR

With WAR on the horizon, CoW guild are now in a position to put a guild idea like this to the test. Formed fairly recently, Casualities of Warhammer(CoW) are a guild made up of a core group of gaming/MMO bloggers largely based in the USA. Since that original core grouping, others have joined to swell the CoW ranks & this has taken the founders a little by surprise.

Of course I have been flirting with the idea of joining CoW over on a US WAR server when the game releases but as with WoW before it, WAR accounts are to be location specific. This doesn’t allow for easy access to a US based server if, like me, you live within the EU. Frustrating as this maybe, there is still some hope of a EU chapter of CoW emerging from the shadows of initial US based chapter.

Guilds & WAR

Gaming in a MMO is unlike playing through a single player campaign game.

Playing through a game you know to be a solo experience is a choice you make before you even load up the first mission & your comfortable with that fact.

When choosing to play in an MMO, you enter a game that will contain a huge number of other gamers. MMOs are created to allow each & every player a freedom to interact with any number of other players, making the experience so much more about social groups than just leveling your character or completing a mission to progress.

Choosing to play an MMO suggests that as a player, you are willing to take more chances with your gaming experience & just as importantly, with your time. Interaction between players in MMOs can lead to positive as well as negative outcomes & so it makes sense to have other players around you that make the experience worth being part off. This is why guilds are so important to the fabric of MMO game playing, without them chaos would rule the whole experience & fun it certainly would not be.

With WAR making the feat of grouping within the game that much easier an event than in previous MMOs, I believe guilds will be under the player spotlight early on. WAR needs have a good guild mechanic on release, something which WoW has struggled to rise to in all the years it has been around.

So as you can see guilds are important factor for me in playing an MMO. I am hoping to bring together the 6 players needed to form a WAR guild before the 18th September. Discussions are ongoing with a CoW & a few other people I have met online over the years, so the outlook is looking positive for putting something in place before WAR ships.

What are your guild aspirations in WAR?

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