MMOs are very popular right now. There's more healthy MMOs now in the West than there ever has been, and they are actually growing and diversifying in focus, style and gameplay choices. Oddly, it's when MMOs were stagnant and dominated by one game that people here seem to think the genre was healthy. (Hint: A game was healthy. The genre wasn't and nobody realized it yet. )
We can also discuss broader topics in which any mmo experience is relevant. For instance..
Having retired from mmos, I haven't dealt with this issue in awhile but I'd love to get folks views on guild politics. I was lucky to join a few very good guilds, but even the best tended to face some ugly problems at one point or another. Whether it was the tension between the "first group" raiders and those trying get in said group, or arguments over raid times, I rarely remember a month that didn't have some drama.
Did you just ignore the drama and use your guild as a hub - basically a spot to raid for a couple hours and sign out until next time? Did you try to bring folks together, solve issues, etc? Something else? Personally I handled it a variety of ways. I remember the biggest problem in the guilds I joined was indeed the "first group" drama. Our main raiding group would be our 10 best player, normally. But while it tended to be obvious who the best tanks and healers were, dps was often rather interchangable in my view. Sure every group wanted a hunter and whichever shaman spec was OP at the time, but overall I could definitely see why a dps who was left out might feel like he was screwed over. Basically it became a buddy system: if you had been in the guild longer, were a consistent contributor etc you were in. The new guy was left out.
I remember trying to put together a solid second group for those left out, even offering to tank for that group instead of the main one (which pissed our guild leader off to no end). Basically my view was that if you want a healthy guild, folks need to feel appreciated and a part of progression. No one wants to be stuck in a scrub group that can't clear easy content. Unfortunately the guild leader disagreed, I wasn't able to consistently help the second group, and eventually the tension splinted the guild for good. To this day the thought just annoys me. Having two solid 10 man groups would have been VERY beneficial, and would have helped us become a more attractive guild.
I've been in super serious raiding guilds, super serious pvp guilds, casual guilds, real life and friends guilds, and mostly non-interactive leveling guilds. Drama or inactivity kills most guilds. It's not failing at a raid or losing a match. It's interpersonal bullshit.
In WoW, I played on the same server as PD. Our first guiild was born of thebore and was just bore members. Everyone but PD and myself quit playing. I joined another guild with a handful of players that I had been doing dungeons with. I was a druid, so I would fill in tanking or healing or dps. (Back when you could actually be a hybrid.) I also got to know others on the server by tanking or healing for them. When my second guild started to die, I kept being an on-call healer for others who had moved into raiding. When I hit 80, I started getting recruited by the friends who had been dungeoning with me as we all leveled up. Most of the server had been on the server for as long as we had. (Ravenholdt was a roughly new server at the time we joined.) So the community was roughly tight. I wanted to try raiding because I had heard so much about it. Eventually, I went with this guy Gundam's guild because his guild had the least amount of asinine rules. They said they were a friendly raiding guild of in-game friends. That's what convinced me. And it was the best choice to make. Eventually, we became the top raiding guild for Alliance on the server. I feel our social success is what lead to our raiding success. Other guilds had drama and blew up. We would take on people we knew and kept growing. What killed the guild was people taking a break and hitting a wall with recruitment.
After I took my own break and those wow-pals transferred off the server, I made my own guild, moved all my characters to it and begun anew on a Shaman. As I had been one of the best healers on the server, I aimed to be the best DPS. I eventually became the best DPS Shaman, but I kept to my own guild. I had former guildmates from the previous guilds in it, and the only rule of the guild was "No Drama. No expectations, No fights." It was an odd guild, featuring some of the top raiders, and yet people who never raided. It was a safe haven, and I kept it up through returning to raiding. Eventually, a handful of us created a PUG group that was clearing Zul Aman faster than their individual raiding guilds were. Again, our success relied on no stupid DKP, trust in each other, and friendliness. We liked each other and we played well. Both us and the top Ally raiding guild were trying to get the first Bear achieve for Alliance on our server. It was the top raiding guild vs Heroic Pug (as we called ourselves). This eventually lead to drama, as we had people from that guild in our group and each guild got mad that we were outpacing their progress. It was decided that we were going to join my guild and raid underneath its banner. Unfortunately, I had to stop playing and move to a place with no internet. So they made a new guild and I joined them months later. They had become top dog, which was pretty cool.
In the end, drama killed them. Girls flirting, nonsense, egos, etc. It got too big. After that, I never bothered with another raiding guild in any serious manner. I kept to non-descript leveling guilds. I did the same with Rift when I started playing that game.
Drama killed all my pvp guilds. We were in contention for the korean GvG tournament when we decided the frankenstein guild of PVPers we created in my GuildWars guild actually hated most of each other. My friends in GW1 pvp were filled with assholes, but the New Yorker sort of asshole I could tolerate. Others could not. It didn't work. I left the game, having contributed major additions to the game's meta (and never getting credit cuz I don't advertise what I run), I left to join some of the others in WoW. My first take with WoW did not work and I had quit MMOs for awhile.
When I returned to Guild Wars 1, I joined a friendly, casual and helpful guild. I am still a member of their GW2 incarnation. They're good people and an ideal guild. They help each other, don't have stupid rules and do stuff together. They succeed at the social level and so they have existed for years and across two games.
The GAF GW2 guild may be one of the best guilds I've been in. No stupid rules, no drama, and weekly events. The only rules are about social conduct. No bigotry or cruelty. It is also a huge guild that has avoided all the pitfalls of large guilds. There are 475 current members. There's 30-50 people logging in each day. Every other month, there's a culling to make room for new or returning members. If you haven't played for couple months, you get removed. If you return, just message an officer and you're back in. When we do Guild Missions and have new members that have never been to the part of the world where the Mission is, we walk them through the quickest path there. We don't ditch them for convenience or tell them they should already know where to go. We help and *gasp* it works better than being a dick. Similar to [PINK], the GW1 guild, and to my own private guild in WoW, it succeed at the social level and thus succeeds at the game level. We have casual players. We have serious dungeon masters. We have top spvp players. We have WvWvW commanders. We have PVE commanders. We have people go play Starbound or Borderlands or FF14 and we don't yell at them.
So now when I look at a guild, I look for particular warning signs:
-How the guild members treat others in the game outside of the guild.
-Do they have a long list of rules? Are there a lot of uptight rules? Stupid rules? Do they have DKP rules?
Do their rules show that they don't trust each other?-Is there a long application to join the guild? A game shouldn't remind you of a job application. Any guild that reminds me of filling out a job app is instantly nixed.
-Do they have families in the guild? If yes, then GOOD.
-Do they have people dating within the guild? If yes, then BAD.
