Guild achievements: a further push towards an extrovert-oriented WoW?

I can't lie, my fellow introverts; I don't think we're long for this world (of warcraft). I say this after reading a post on Larisa's blog about how Blizzard lifting the cap on the number of players who can contribute to a guild's leveling process and achievements could destroy smaller guilds. For those of you who are out of the loop, let me catch you up to speed. The guild leveling process and, assumedly, the earning of guild achievements, was once going to be limited to whatever was contributed by the top 20 contributes in a guild. This would prevent the huge guilds from having too much of a leg up over the smaller guilds when it came to the guild leveling process, and would thus discourage people from joining a large guild just for its size. However, it was recently announced that this cap had been scrapped a long time ago, and anyone and everyone will be able to contribute to a guild's leveling. This means that the big guilds will have an undeniable leg up over the smaller guilds in the leveling and achievement-gaining process, and will thus gain access to those awesome guild perks and the rewards of those mass-effort guild achievements that much faster.

As Larisa puts it in her post, there has to be a reason Blizzard is doing this. "They don’t give away carrots randomly; they normally have a purpose, trying to make players to play the game in a certain way. They handed out badges to make us play more five-mans than ever before, and extra badges to make us do it with random strangers. They’ve made us revisit old raid content through the weekly raid quests in a futile effort to revive raid instances we’d left behind. If they now mainly reward quantity-related guild achievements, they apparently want to give incentives for guilds to grow bigger." Well, I have my own theory as to why they're dangling this metaphorical carrot, and it's doesn't bode well for the future of WoW and us introverts' place in it.

A few months ago, I predicted that Blizzard was designing WoW to be more appealing to extroverts, a market not typically targeted by a company making an MMO. After all, video games have typically been the realm of the social outcasts, especially MMOs, due to the amount of negative publicity they got--when they got any publicity at all, that is. Extroverts just can't stand being social outcasts, so the social outcasts tend to be introverts, and thus most gamers were introverts. And considering that most of the original video games were single player or designed to be played by only a few players playing together (an intimate experience), its no wonder introverts flocked to video games. MMOs were no different; though they were more social in nature, the player-bases were small, keeping things intimate, and thus introverts still felt very much at home.

Extroverts are a difficult market for developers of MMOs to tap, and in the same way that the holy grail of toymaking was once a doll that could be marketed to boys (and thus the action figure was born), the holy grail of game design may now be an MMO that can be marketed to extroverts. However, with WoW having grown as successful as it has, it has the qualities it needs to break into the extrovert market: a large community and mainstream status. The large community appeals to extroverts directly, and the fact that WoW is mainstream means that being a WoW player doesn't instantly put one in the same league as social outcasts. Both of these facts work together to create a positive feedback loop (or vicious cycle, depending on who you ask) where each fact encourages the other to become more true, and each fact helps make itself more true. A large community attracts more people who judge something by its popularity, as well as bringing in new players simply by word of mouth, and thus the community will grow because people will flock to it due to its size. Mainstream status means people will start to see WoW in a more neutral light or even a more positive light than they might have otherwise, helping make WoW more mainstream. A large community helps make the game more mainstream simply by saturation; its hard to say that a game is for social outcasts when you know "normal" people who play it. And of course, being mainstream attracts more people to WoW who might not have otherwise considered trying an MMO, causing the community to grow.

Blizzard is now closer than any company has ever been to cracking that market, and encouraging large guilds may be one more small step in the process. While I've never done a mathematically rigorous survey, there is a pattern I have noticed in my own experience with introverts and extroverts that might give us some insight into why this is the case, and I invite you to see if this pattern applies in your own life. I, like many, have an account with the social networking site Facebook. In my experiences with this site, I have noticed a striking pattern among the people I am friends with: the more extroverted they are, the more friends they'll have on their friends list. While the inverse doesn't seem to happen consistently (I myself, an extreme introvert, have a relatively robust 162 friends, and my best friend, an introvert himself, has 344), the extremely extroverted of my friends invariably have friends numbering in the 700s, 800s, 900s, or sometimes more. Now, while I can't make any legitimate guesses as to why this is the case, I can guess that extroverts seem to somehow gravitate towards large numbers of people, even if those numbers are meaningless when it comes to how close those connections are (that closeness is what we introverts strive for, which is why I have the fewest friends out of most of the people I know).

This might give us some insight into why Blizzard is pushing guilds to be bigger in Cataclysm. Extroverts gravitate towards large numbers of people, so if there are more guilds with large numbers of people, wouldn't that appeal to them? Not only that, but the fact that the game supports and encourages that kind of large-guild structure would invariably affect and influence other facets of the game--both its design and its playerbase--to become more extrovert-friendly. With this push, I could easily see WoW becoming the first MMO to achieve success with the extrovert market, which, considering that extroverts are a bigger market than introverts (about three times bigger, at last count), would mean the game would be very successful upon reaching that point. Part of me wants to be happy that Blizzard is in the position to reach that milestone of game development, that modern-day entertainment holy grail. But I can't be, because Blizzard can only do it at the expense of its introverted players.

We need only look at the likely outcome of these changes to which guild structure is encouraged to see that Blizzard is fine with sacrificing its introverted players for the extroverted market. Anyone can tell you that the more a group of people grows, the more superficial and shallow the relationships between those people become. Eventually, a group will reach a size where smaller sub-groups will form just so people can maintain that needed amount of substance in their interpersonal relationships. Robin Dunbar once theorized that there is a limit to the number of people we can reasonably interact with and maintain a meaningful relationship with. That limit is called Dunbar's number, and the most commonly used figure for it 150. If we have to interact with more people than that, we simply won't be able to form meaningful friendships with them, or even worthwhile acquaintanceships (it's a word; look it up). However, the number is more accurately put somewhere in the range of 100 and 230, and I would guess that introverts have a lower Dunbar's Number than extroverts, as well as a lower tolerance for situations where their Dunbar's Number is exceeded.

I bring all this up because expanding guild sizes will invariably result in a decay in the depth of interaction between members of that guild, unless those members form their own cliques within the guild, which defeats the whole purpose and will probably result in guild-ending drama. For an introvert, this is our worst nightmare, for we search for quality in our friendships, not quantity, and we have no issue with sacrificing the latter in pursuit of the former. Extroverts, it seems, have no problem sacrificing quality in their interpersonal relationships for quantity (I'm sure they have their limits, but their limits are certainly much higher than ours), and these changes to guild leveling and achievements will encourage guilds that do just that: boosting their numbers at the expense of the depth of interaction between their members. Again, extroverts will love this and could possibly flock to the game, if not as a result of expanding guild sizes, then as a result of all of the consequences of expanding guild sizes, while introverts will slowly be driven away as the game we grew to love becomes a game that just isn't made for us anymore.

Now, I'm not going to say for certain that Blizzard is doing this intentionally; they probably aren't. They're probably just trying to design WoW to be as accessible, enjoyable, and successful as it can be, and this pattern of changes (WoW becoming more extrovert-friendly and less introvert friendly) is probably an unintentional byproduct of that goal. As I said in my post on Real ID and the future of WoW, WoW is probably just a victim of its popularity. As it stands now, I don't think Blizzard is trying to design this game specifically to be introvert-unfriendly; I think they're just trying to design the game to be the best in can be, while still trying to make it a successful game, and encouraging large guilds is just one of the ways they're doing that. While I don't fault Blizzard for it, though, that doesn't change the fact that I don't think WoW is going to be a very friendly place for us introverts in the future.

So what to do? Well, for an extreme introvert like me, who doesn't even talk with anyone in-game outside of party chat in PuGs and the occasional deep one-on-one conversation with another player, I'll probably just join the biggest social guild on my realm, a guild where my quiet lack of presence won't be noticed, so that I can benefit from those achievement rewards and guild perks as soon as possible. It's an unfortunate course of action*, but it seems I'll have no choice in this new, more social WoW. So I will join a guild, as much as I may regret not being able to contribute to the guild in any way other than mass-effort achievements, guild leveling, and money in the guild bank from Cash Flow, but that's just what I have to do in this WoW that is slowly devolving from the game I fell in love with.

But I'll keep playing. As long as there is fun to be had, as long as there is a way to work around these pro-extrovert leanings in the game, and as long as I can still enjoy myself, I will keep playing. And as long as I keep playing, I will keep writing about this game that has brought me more than five years of fun times (that's out-of-game time, of course, not /played time), because I just can't help but be analytical about WoW--that's just how I am. So worry not, my faithful readers (and new readers, alike); I and this blog aren't going anywhere.

*As a player, I was happiest when I was guildless. The only times I ever resented being guildless was when I would PuG a raid and guilds would ask me if I wanted to join. I know they were trying to fill their rosters with actual raiders, but the message I always got from it was that one can't be happy without being in a guild, a message I disagreed with intensely and resented.