My boyfriend is taking it even harder… he hasn’t logged on since the split. Maybe I’ll show him this post and it will remind him that it’s alright to be upset.

For me it feels very impersonal to assign a number to individual contribution that is often viewed by every member of the guild. In many cases my guilds try to focus the members toward playing the game and less on playing manager. The more information they have that they don’t need, the more likely it is that those members will try to fond a need for it, and the last thing I need is backseat raid leaders.

This is one reason why many of the guilds I’ve been in use a loot council of extremely dedicated individuals who know what is necessary for success. However, it only seems to work well because we’re so small and tight-knit. Measuring performance and balancing rewards accordingly is much easier when your raid group contains roughly the same 25 people week in and week out.

Other games encourage different types of guild. For example, although there are LOTRO raid guilds, it’s not really that raid focussed of a game.

That’s probably a good idea, but DKP in particular encourages players to think that the guild will be around for long enough for them to spend their points. And people often assume that raid guild == weekly entertainment for the foreseeable future.

But this is also my gripe with the contemporary guild mentality: Actually it is not a guild in the sense of a band of buddies but a raid organization machine.

Ofc, it wasn’t as amusing when it happened to us

I always view any prospective recruit with a degree of …well waryness. I have been in several guilds that died due to rash recuitment polcies. A few were those ‘nice friendly social guilds’ that would recruit anyone that answered officers spamming channels.

One was one I was an officer in. We opened recuiting to ‘friends of friends’ and before long we had a bunch of strangers and a broken guild that split in showers of forum napalm and bile.

A mass of refugees of dead raid guilds is a new phenom to me, as you point out these people look like really class acts. If you’re not carefull you import an entire clique and integrating those folks could be a tough job. A lot of folk are going to be afraid of the incomers as they are unknown and ‘Coming here and taking our jobs!’ Not to mention maybe inheriting whatever politics that broke the orginal guild. But a lot of these guys and gals will be great players and great guildmates. Hard call and I’m so glad I’m not an officer these days

However, I’d be a right fool indeed if I never wondered or analyzed the chain of events that led to the dreadful disband. Interestingly, it almost always involved complications arising from real life events attacking key members through a myriad of dastardly tools like babies, new jobs, or the eternal march of war.

This is why I believe Usiel’s guild is the diamond in the rough. Every member is a key member, and while each maintains an equal or near equal role within the hierarchy, no one member is more important than another. However, in my guild travels as part of more traditional structures, losing a competent raid leader or well played key component to a raid group (as in a tank or premier healer) led to a long downhill process that eventually resulted in guildicide.

And yet I’m still attracted to those elite but smaller guilds that continuously compete closely with the far larger and more stable guilds that have solidified their position through ridiculously high recruitment rates and a raiding roster featuring 85 potential raiders.

We still manage to compete, and often dominate our competition on the server stage until raider burn out or real life catches up to us and starts the decay. In the end though, the time there was much better than I would have ever expected. With such a small yet dedicated raid force, we all manage to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses much more than we ever could have. However, with the goal being competition, we cannot afford to mold a perfect guild akin to Usiel’s. We simply can’t expect all of our players to take that amount of responsibility when their entire career has been built around listening to or being a raid leader.

A guild with the mentality of Usiel’s and the dedication to competition I’ve enjoyed in my past guilds would be unstoppable.