Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Tips on Looking for Guilds

Ferrel and Karen took a chunk of the latest episode of A View From The Top to address a question I sent in about looking for guilds and recruits. Raiders have comparatively straightforward benchmarks to see whether a guild and an applicant are a good match, but things are less clear-cut for non-raiders like myself.

The podcast is aimed at guild leaders, so their advice was aimed at what a guild can do to make their advertising and outreach more effective. Even so, one of the tips seemed equally useful to applicants - think about what you want to be doing, and how many people it requires.

What DO I want in a guild?
The main things I look for in a guild are:
- Access to any unusually useful in-game perks (currently in EQ2 guild halls, planned for WoW's upcoming guild talents/heirlooms and DDO's forthcoming guild airships)
- People to talk to, more tolerable than the residents of public chat channels, but not so exclusive that they wouldn't let me in to begin with
- Groupmates on the rare occasion when I'm making plans to be on and attempting some specific goal at some specific time

In particular, I was thinking of how to go about looking for a guild when picking up a new game where I don't know anyone. My existing guilds don't look anything like each other, but they all work to address my priorities in the context of the specific game. When I do go looking for a guild in, say, DDO, the top priority will probably be size, because I'll want to be on a team that has a shiny airship and perhaps enough players to get some non-scheduled group content in.

I'm about as odd a fit as anyone demographically, since I spend enough time online to burn through content like a hardcore player, but I log the time on such a nebulous schedule that I don't normally fit in with the hardcore crowd either. Apparently, anything makes sense if you break it down the right way, though. Thanks for the perspective, guys!

1 comment:

  1. Finding a decent guild is really hit or miss for me. I find that I generally have to go through several before I can settle into one that I enjoy. As a non-raider, I think it is harder, and much more subjective, to find guilds that fit. I'll have to check out the show.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.