World of Warcraft inspired the creation of thousands upon thousands of guilds. Once the population started dropping, though, and fickle gamer eyes started to wander I think most savvy guild leaders saw the writing on the wall and started looking at multi-game structures. I know I did! It doesn’t matter whether we called it a community or collective or organization, the idea across the board was not to hook our group’s existence on one single game.
It’s a structure that makes more sense given the current general nature of MMO gaming. Sure, play what you want, when you want, just hang out, whatever. For the most part, at least in my guild, I noticed that generally this resulted in people being far flung in a huge number of games, and occasionally congregating in one “flavor of the month” like Diablo 3 at its launch. While we had branches in more than one game, often only one at a time would have any kind of population of note.
Except for now. Now we have a very popular game (Guild Wars 2, natch), and a less popular one that has a few highly tenacious members (RIFT fistbump, Belghast!). The two games are kind of coexisting at the same time, which is great, but it raises an entirely new problem: a big resource imbalance.
While I’ve noticed this in my own guild obviously, I suspect it’s endemic to the gaming community model. Game B players can respect that their game isn’t as compelling to the group and people should play what they want, but still feel a little sour that they’re pugging content while the other game has three times the players online. Game A players just wanna play their game and have fun and not be made to feel bad for it. No one is wrong in this scenario. It’s just human nature at work.
So how does a gaming community weather having two or more active “camps”? It reminds me of trying to run two simultaneous groups in Karazhan back in the day. I suspect that the solution, like pretty much anything related to guilds, is recruitment. Recruit enough people to keep both sides lively! My recruiting days are well and truly over, god willing, but in theory I think that’s probably the answer.
Anyway, are you a part of a gaming community or multi-game organization? Do you find that there are power balance issues between the games, or does everyone seem to generally squish around happily? Do you put more emphasis on recruiting new people, or getting the existing folks to try other things?
Herding Cats is the blog of Liore, known in the real world as Jessica Cook. She writes mostly about MMOs and RPGs, and believes in 
Interestingly, my guild’s in a similar boat, only with different games involved. We first formed in SWG, then went to EQ2 en masse, then to WoW, with various small guild projects in other MMOs du jour (Warhammer Online, AoC, LotRO, etc). Then came SWTOR, coinciding with a growing dissatisfaction with WoW, and we had to work out how to split the guild without destroying things.
Complicating matters was the fact that I intended to move to SWTOR and quit WoW entirely — I was the WoW guild leader and one of the raid leaders, and I was very concerned that if I just upped sticks, the guild I left behind would collapse, and I didn’t want to do that to them. (I’d been the GL in EQ2, too, and didn’t handle the transfer nearly as smoothly as I should have when I left for WoW – I learnt a lot about what not to do then.)
What we eventually did was split off a separate tier of “community officers” with me as community leader, who’d be responsible for the guild as a whole, providing web services, helping the game branches liaise, that sort of thing, so that each individual game’s guild could do their own thing but still be part of the guild as a whole.
It’s worked fairly well so far, although I think there was a bit of resentment from some of those who stayed in WoW towards those of us who left for SWTOR — but ultimately it’s been better for the guild, because those who were sick of WoW were going to quit sooner or later anyway, and at least this way they have other potential homes within the guild… and if/when they get enthused about WoW again, they can go back to the WoW branch. Without the whole-guild community, they’d be much more likely to get absorbed into some other guild in whatever new game they went to, and then they’d be lost to us forever.
Siha´s last post: MMO communities aren’t a monoculture
Oh, and on a completely tangential note, what WordPress plugin do you use to show your blogroll’s recent posts? I still haven’t been able to find a solution for that!
Siha´s last post: MMO communities aren’t a monoculture
Thanks for the posts, Siha. I totally agree that the flexibility can lead to some resentment, but otherwise people really will just disappear when they’re no longer enthused with the same game. It’s tough.
And the plugin is WP Social Blogroll: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feed-reading-blogroll/. It works like a charm!