After putting it off for a week or so, I have finally broken down and joined a guild. I didn't join one to raid or anything like that; as you learned in Monday's post, I am a happy solo-er and have no desire to change that fact. So rather than join a raiding guild which would level up quickly and need to live a lie every time I log in, I posted the following message to my realm's trade chat:
Solo-er looking for guild. I'm not looking to raid or PvP, but if you let me into your ranks, I will help your guild level and earn guild achievements. PST, but please don't just send an invite; I want to get to know you before I join.
And so, the serially guild-less player has joined a guild, all because he couldn't resist that 10% mounted speed increase or those items awarded by the guild achievements. What have I done differently since joining this guild? Well, I've killed a lot more critters and had a conversation about archeology... so really, not all that much has changed. As I said in my post on Guild perks and the death of the independent player, I was happily guild-less until Cataclysm came out, so when I joined a guild, I didn't plan on changing much about my playstyle. Still, considering that I have enjoyed the conversations I have had since joining the guild, I suppose this change to my playstyle has been, overall, positive, and also fits my prediction as to why Blizzard seemed to be targeting us solo players with these guild perks.
See, in my post that I mentioned above, I theorized that part of Blizzard's motivation for putting in these guild perks was to get willingly guild-less players like me to join guilds (or, at the very least, it was an unintentional positive side-effect). This would be good for Blizzard because being guilded makes a player less likely to quit should he/she get bored. If it's a raiding guild, the player risks losing his spot or falling behind in the progression if he/she takes a break. If it's just a social guild, that social element could be what keeps the player playing after he/she has stopped finding the game itself interesting. But in my searching for a guild, I found many people who had come up with some ways to obtain these guild perks that didn't really mesh with Blizzard's seeming intentions in putting in these guild perks. I found people who had created guilds comprised of only their characters. I heard tell of people who had created guilds for the sole purpose of avoiding being asked to join guilds, guilds which didn't even have a chat channel, and which would now also serve the purpose of giving members the guild perks, but served absolutely no other purpose.
These guilds seem to me to be a sign that some people would rather work around the encouragement Blizzard is providing to join guilds and would rather just go for the rewards. In other words, Blizzard is encouraging players to play one way and giving them incentives to do so, but players would rather work around the system put in and try to get those incentives without conforming to Blizzard's pro-guild ideals. If these perks were put in to encourage players to join guilds, the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds exist shows that not all players are willing to play as socially as Blizzard wants them to.
Now, I'm sure that encouraging guild-less players to join guilds wasn't the only purpose of these guild perks. The fact that it takes a long time to level up a guild means that these perks reward guild longevity, as well as discouraging players from reacting to guild drama by breaking off and starting their own guild, instead encouraging them to actually work through their issues. The fact that leveling up a guild actually requires the members to do something (questing, PvP, raiding, etc.) means that the guild perks rewards guilds who seek out members who are active participants, rather than seeking out large numbers of players just to have an impressively sized roster. And if nothing else, the guild perk and guild achievement systems breathe some life into what has long been a very stagnant and simple system. Still, one can't deny that those perks also discourage players from remaining guildless; the fact that these "for guild's sake" guilds are popping up prove that they do. Whether these other benefits to the perks system actually materialize remains to be seen, but if, as I theorized, Blizzard wants players joining guilds because it will discourage them from quitting, than the "for guild's sake" guilds show that they haven't exactly been successful in that goal, because those guilds don't provide any incentive to keep playing after the game has gotten boring.
All this makes me think that the guild perk system has failed in its purpose of bringing guild-less players into guilds, simply because it hasn't meaningfully changed their playstyle or made them more likely to keep playing when they get bored. What does this say about the system as a whole? Well, it's entirely possible that it was never Blizzard's intention to change the playstyle of us serial solo-ers, so perhaps it hasn't failed because it was never trying to do that in the first place. It also says something about us players, something which I don't think will surprise anyone: some of us are quite stubborn. You can see this stubbornness in the refusal of some people to adapt to the new methods of play required by this expansion (crowd control, triage, etc.), but if these guilds for guild's sake have shown us anything, it's that that resistance to change applies outside of combat as well.
But if it was indeed Blizzard's intention to use these perks to make us guild-less players join guilds, then the fact that they have failed shows that some of us aren't going to change that easily. We players who don't look to play WoW socially may be rare, but we do exist, and we don't like being told how to play. It's bad enough when other players and our friends try to "convert" us to a more social playstyle ("Raiding is fun, you just haven't found the right guild yet!"), but when Blizzard does it too, that's especially infuriating. But perhaps that's just Blizzard's way of saying, "This is our game, and we get to tell you how to play it. Now be social!" Fine, Blizzard; you have won this round, because I have indeed joined a guild and started being more social. Just don't think you can push this much farther.
Friday, December 17, 2010
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I think you're looking at it the wrong way around. I don't see guild perks as incentives to encourage more players to participate in the social aspect of WoW. I view them more as bonus rewards for those players who already are engaging in the guild-oriented social playstyle. Less commission check and more end-of-year bonus.
ReplyDeleteFor that matter, the way in which players view in-game rewards, and how that informs their decisions, is itself an interesting philosophical topic. I tend to fall more strongly under what you described previously as the "subjective reward" players. I participate in an aspect of the game because I enjoy it for its own sake. Thus, when the game provides some kind of objective reward for performing well at something I was doing anyway, I see it as a nice bonus.
I have definitely seen the opposite of this as well, how more objective-reward motivated players can sometimes develop a similar mindset toward what you mentioned in your last paragraph above. From my perspective, it seems as though many players start from the mindset that they "need" this reward, regardless of how onerous the activity required to earn it may be, and so they begin to gripe that Blizzard is "forcing" them to engage in something they don't want to.
A classic example of this was back in Burning Crusade, when for some classes their best itemized raiding pieces were sometimes arena gear. I heard many, many complaints from diehard raiders who lamented that Blizzard was forcing them to do PvP to earn gear for raiding.
The idea that they could just make do and be content with something slightly lesser seemingly never entered into their minds. They were driven to acquire the very best regardless of the cost, or whether they enjoyed the process of getting there. The end destination was all that mattered, and the journey to get there was pure drudgery.
Perhaps I'm reading into your posts things that aren't there, but nevertheless interesting food for thought. I, for one, can't fathom that idea of forcing oneself into an unpleasant activity during what is supposedly leisure time. I do enough ratrace treadmill running at work; I certainly don't feel like bringing that mindset home with me.
So from my perspective, guild perks, while extremely cool, are just one more of those many bonuses that give active social players a little something extra for working together with their friends.
While I can see where you come from when you say that guild perks are "less commission check and more end-of-year bonus", I still think that rewarding one way of play implicitly discourages the other way of play, so by rewarding players for playing socially, these perks are implicitly punishing players who don't play socially. I would agree with you completely if these perks did not benefit non-social players, but they do. Greatly. As such, we'd have to be foolish to not want them.
ReplyDeleteAs for making due and being content with something slightly lesser, the problem is that the guild perks and items awarded by guild achievements are so powerful that not joining a guild wouldn't be settling for something slightly lesser; it would be settling for something much lesser. Besides, in my experience, joining a guild hasn't had any negative consequences for me thus far; it just took effort that I wouldn't have put forth if it weren't for the guild perks. As such, the awards vastly outweigh the "inconveniences"; if that weren't true, I'd still be guild-less.