On the subject of guilds, one thing that has always irked me is finding a guild in a MMORPG which is a “good fit.” It’s been my experience that the guilds that recruit the most heavily are the ones that I want to avoid. And I’m not even going to comment about the ones that spam invites to everyone in the zone without saying a word to them. Word of mouth seems to be the only reliable source of information about guilds. That makes sifting through all of the guilds on a server rather tedious.

I don’t think it’s inevitable that we lose server community but I can see that on more recent games, there are fewer and fewer reasons to mix outside your circle of friends. And I feel it’s kind of losing some of the whole massive feel … for me at least.

I can never get over how many people play WoW, and how relatively hard it is to find eg. a guild who doesn’t raid on Thursdays.

What I usually do is ask around, but that only works because my guild is very old and loads of ex-guildies are now scattered around lots of different guilds. It really would be a lot of work … and that’s just one server.

I just sometimes feel that server communities are so weak in WoW, it’s so easy never to talk to anyone outside your raid group. And I wonder if it’s because we never have to know or care what anyone else is doing.

I used to. Sadly, in the last few years/games I just haven’t felt that most of the servers I played on had any kind of unique identity — just more of the same asshats complaining endlessly about whatever irrelevant pseudo-nerf is the whine-of-the-day.

Oh dear, I didn’t mean to let my crushing cynicism about “the masses” shine through so loudly. I’m really mostly an idealistic and optimistic person, but these days the signal:noise ratio on most mass-sized community sites (forums especially) just tires me out.

It’s saddening, now that you make me think about it, to see how my gaming community “feel” has shrunk from an entire server (as it used to be in AC and SWG) to maybe a few score friends, acquaintances and guildies.

I’m going to go off and a) juggle some kittens while shouting BAH HUMBUG and b) sniffle quietly in a corner at the depressitude of MMO-life.

I’m not sure if a blog with a “gossip oriented” journalistc touch would gain a huge audience. Probably it would, if it was good. But it would definitely require quite a lot of work to run it. It requires a huge friends list, connections in all the top guilds and loads of time and passion. I’m definitely not up for it.