How Did You Join Your First Guild

With all the various pro solo discussions, I started to wonder how do players get into guilds? As group centric as AoC intends to be, having systems in place to help facilitate those critical social interactions in the first few hours of gameplay will be critical to the success of the game. So I ask you, how did you join your first guild? What do you remember about your reasoning for joining?

For me. the first guild I can remember joining was in WoW in 2005. I was waiting for a boat in the nightelf starting area trying to figure out how in the hell to get to Westfall to get my water form. I ended up asking random people waiting on the boat next to me in /say and eventaully made friends with a hunter named Eibbor. After a multiple hour trek across the world, he invited me to a guild called THUGZ which I stayed with for a few weeks.

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Smaashley

https://discord.gg/8z9rQjC7

Zehlan

I was playing Dark age of Camelot 2003 I think I would always camp bridges especially if a castle siege was happening and catch all the stragglers crossing to get back into the siege. More and more I found the same few guys were there doing the same. They invited me one day and I joined since i was playing with them most of the time now anyway and stayed with them till I stopped playing. Still remember the name of the guild Midgard Fiends and the guild leader was Ibe. Was good times and AoC alpha 1 footage especially of the castle siege reminded me of those good times and that"s why I am here now!

Mic

I was playing with my friend as low level Dwarves in Shadowbane. Our little levelling group got rolled by a group of all Dwarves, who let me and my friend live because we were also Dwarves.

That was 20 years ago.

nanfoodle

Think it was more organic back in 1999 in EQ. We just made in game friends. Teams became friends lists. Friend lists turned into tells. Before long, just had a guild of people I had just played with for some time.

Hinotori

My very first "clan" I stumbled into playing unreal. Just a bunch of competitive gamers who liked instagib and we all hung out calling eachother toxic stuff so why not be friends?

Got into wow together and became a "guild" when that started taking off. Stayed with them through to wrath when some amazing guild drama broke us up.

Current guild is also a nice story. I just joined a bunch of guild discords when new world was happening. Everyone seemed to brush me off because they were all busy focusing on NW.

The folks at Amnesty pulled me into a chat room almost immediately and wanted to know me and also invited me to join them in some NW content to get more of a feel for how they played, rather than just excluding a newer person for not being in the guild, made the decision to join pretty easy.

Laetitian

KingDDD wrote: »

first few hours of gameplay

I already dislike that assumption. I joined my first guild when my character was at max level. (I was far from a solo-player before then, though.)
15-year-old me was kicking it in local chat with the bossy army commands in stilted "eloquent" archaic language for over a year, and eventually I got adopted by a semi-competitive guild with an always-online Mumble policy. They were officially an 18+ guild, so I felt very special. I'm sure not everyone loved the guild leader's decision of allowing the squeaker in, but I stayed for many years.

Personally, I was never a big fan of newbie guilds. I think they stand in the way of organic player interaction, because everyone ends up hyperfocusing on efficiently spending their time with their guild and racing to max level, causing people to lose out on discovering and theorycrafting on their own. Not to say you can't use other people's research, but you shouldn't be encouraged to copy everything without learning to understand it yourself. And by being part of a streamlined community where there's always someone available to do things for and with you, that habit gets reinforced.

More importantly, I think a guild should be a community with a shared higher purpose, directive, and personality/playstyle, not just random players who farm XP together whenever someone's available.
So I really think systems that facilitate grouping up with a random guild are flawed game design.

I'm not naive; I know newbie communities and random level-up communities that isolate players from the rest of the realm will happen anyway. I just think the game shouldn't do anything to reinforce and speed up that process.

Caww

just throw out an ingame chat "friendly, mature and family-oriented guild recruiting - no requirements" and I'll bite...

CROW3

Vanguard forum community in 2002.

Nemeses

Caww wrote: »

just throw out an ingame chat "friendly, mature and family-oriented guild recruiting - no requirements" and I'll bite...

That’s sounds like us.

First guild I joined, was the first one I created, though as a guild that stayed together that happened in LoTRo, had a kinship their called Rohan Riders, and even if I say say so, it was one if not the best on that server. (Just a kin, that really clicked)

(We only use The Immortals in games that have PvP)

Aszkalon

Hinotori wrote: »

You truly love big Pictures. ^.^

PavlovDead

I was solo leveling in GW2 near release. Someone ran up to me and said "Hey do you want a guild?" and I joined. We were all trash at the game but it was fun being trash together.

tinukeda

Recruited in the wild, as it were in L2, technically my first guild.

AA I shopped around between beta and launch and joined a guild that had been around for alpha. That didn't last more than a month or two and began a long chain of merges, absorption, rises, declines and eventual ownership after everyone else was gone. XD

KingDDD

tinukeda wrote: »

Recruited in the wild, as it were in L2, technically my first guild.

AA I shopped around between beta and launch and joined a guild that had been around for alpha. That didn't last more than a month or two and began a long chain of merges, absorption, rises, declines and eventual ownership after everyone else was gone. XD

I guess what I'm trying to get at is how do you game systems facilitate recruitment in the wild without being so overbearing that no one gets to that point. If a game requires grouping in the first 30 seconds, the retention rate of players past 5mins will be abysmal. How do you introduce grouping, guilds, and the other multiplayer aspects of the game while still getting people invested enough to get past the pain point of needing a group?

JeanPhilippeGunghar

A friend recruited me to WoW. It was my first MMORPG experience. I think it was back in BC or early WOTLK days. The 16 years old me got invited into a guild leaded by a friend of my friend.

Dygz

KingDDD wrote: »

With all the various pro solo discussions, I started to wonder how do players get into guilds? As group centric as AoC intends to be, having systems in place to help facilitate those critical social interactions in the first few hours of gameplay will be critical to the success of the game. So I ask you, how did you join your first guild? What do you remember about your reasoning for joining?

I don't understand why people are suddenly associating Solo with not being in a Guild.
Solo is just adventuring while not joined in a Group.
We can have plenty of social interactions in MMORPGs without being in a Group or Guild.
Solo is not the same thing as being non-social.

My first Guild was with Jens Anderson, my Activision co-worker who told me I should play EQ and run with his homies on the PvP-Optional Server. Don't worry about PvP. They would protect me.
But, I was working on UK time rather than US time. So, they were typically sleeping when I had free time to play. Which means I mostly Soloed deapite being in a Guild.

My WoW main joined a Carebear Guiild that ran the Carebear Challenge of reaching max Adventurer Level with 0 Kills. I mostly Soloed that character, too. Despite being in a Guild.

In 2013, I joined CohhCarnage's Neverwinter Online Guild from hanging out in his Twitch Channel during Beta.
I think a gang of us who mostly Soloed and Duoed end up leaving and starting our own, more casual, Guild.

Dygz

KingDDD wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to get at is how do you game systems facilitate recruitment in the wild without being so overbearing that no one gets to that point. If a game requires grouping in the first 30 seconds, the retention rate of players past 5mins will be abysmal. How do you introduce grouping, guilds, and the other multiplayer aspects of the game while still getting people invested enough to get past the pain point of needing a group?

Games should not require grouping. Games should encourage and facilitate grouping.
Players should not need to be in a Group. Group beciase you want to; not becuase you need to.
(Keep in mind that I am not in the Target Audience for Ashes.)

caertaker

I was recruited. I think the trap was set by offering to craft a few pieces of Green Iron Armor I did not have the ability to make. The Guild ended up evolving into one of the largest on our West Coast Server. We did so stuff, had some fun and turned out to be a great group of people.

Harlow

First guild was Everquest (one). My coworker convinced me to play and he got me invited to his guild. From there I went on to EQ2 and joined up with some people I was grouped with. We went on to become IRL friends (they moved to my state and we became family - we hang out, we helped raise each other's kids, etc), and as we moved on to other games, we all moved on together and either formed our own guild or joined one en-masse.

In WoW, my cousin and many of her family members were playing and convinced me to play and join their guild. Also, another real life friend had a guild in WoW that I also joined with alts. So it seems mostly to be real friends/family or people I grouped with that I jived with.

For Ashes, I looked at the guild recruiting post, found one that seemed like a perfect fit for me and joined them. And (yay!) they truly are a perfect fit for me! Now we all play various games together while waiting for Ashes to release and form our own guild in all those games.

tinukeda

KingDDD wrote: »

I guess what I'm trying to get at is how do you game systems facilitate recruitment in the wild without being so overbearing that no one gets to that point. If a game requires grouping in the first 30 seconds, the retention rate of players past 5mins will be abysmal. How do you introduce grouping, guilds, and the other multiplayer aspects of the game while still getting people invested enough to get past the pain point of needing a group?

Theoretically I would think a good way to do it would be for most (leveling and farming) game content to be comfortably solo'able until the player gets comfortable with the gameplay and community. I would target group content towards mid-plus game content and add things like auto-raid to bring players together.

Most of my in depth experience comes from AA so my perspective is highly influenced by that game. I did also play EQ and L2 back in the day and those games definitely had points where it became impossible to solo in any meaningful way. AA was good because you could do a lot by yourself (plus/minus whatever risks you were comfortable) but if you wanted to do the main content you needed to raid (and possibly only by being in the right guild).

koltovince

Been gaming most my whole life, so many guilds I have been in that didn't work because I was a kid due to myself or the guild not wanting a kid in. The guild I got into as a teenager and I have been with since found me in PVP matches for SWTOR. We happened to face each other in multiple matches and I made an impression so they sent me a guild invite. We got to talking soon enough hanging out in vent/discord.

For Ashes one can always look for a guild via guild postings, but the guilds will come naturally when you play the game whether Alpha or live. Just play and they will find you

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