I touched on this in my rant about GW2, but I think this
deserves more explanation and talk about my view why I think that multi-guild
is a terrible thing and will only increase guild drama. I don’t think people
have to go far in GW2 to see this has already begun to happen, but let’s get it
out of the way and discuss it at length. I will try to keep each point to its
own paragraph, but they will undoubtedly bleed into each other as I have a
tendency to ramble. So, without further stalling let me get into the reasons
why multi-guilds are terrible.
First and foremost, for the multi-guild system to work you
need to represent a guild, but you can only represent one guild at a time.
Right out of the gate you are already going to garner hurt feelings from people
as a lot of the functions of one guild are locked out until you represent it,
including the chat features, and any contribution you give only goes towards
the guild that you are representing. This is just stupid in and of itself. Why
even have multi-guild in the first place if all of the guild features are going
to be locked out to you unless you represent them? Not to mention this also
causes hurt feelings because people on both sides of the fence feel you should
be pulling your weight for them. And you are left in the issue of who do you
represent more.
Next on my list of why multi-guild is a bad idea is pretty
simple one; it destroys community. If you can casually hop in and out of a
guild, ignoring that people are going to get offended by this, then it doesn’t
foster the idea that growing a community in a game is even something to strive
for. Guilds are a large part of the backbone of a gaming community. But casually
tossing the one last bastion of gaming community into the recycle bin like that
completely negates all that. It just creates more undue tension and drama as
people are stressing over who they should spend more time with.
And now my biggest gripe about multi-guild systems is this;
it makes it way easier for spies to get into guilds of opposing factions to
relay info to enemies. If people don’t think this is a big deal for PvP then
you obviously have never played an MMO in PvP or any PvP based game before.
This is one of the issues that GW2 has, outside of bots and cheaters, the
number of people that relay information to opposing groups. And if you think
that PvPers would not find that edge by getting alternate accounts, then you
really have not played MMOs before. Just go over to the WoW forums and see how
much of a stink has been raised by multi-boxers (players who play more than one
account at once) because the /follow command was removed from PvP.
You want to know how to solve multi-guild issue. I’ve
brought this up before in other forums, but it’s a fairly simple concept that,
believe it or not, older MMOs from the early days actually used. It was called
guild alliances. What makes this different from multi-guilding you might ask,
well many things. First, an alliance is a separate chat channel and you can
participate in an alliance chat, even if you are in another guild. Furthermore
it bolsters community and healthy competition between the guilds in an
alliance. Finally, it removes a lot of undue pressure on individual players
from their guild that their guild might be offended they aren’t representing
them enough. It leaves the control within the group of power, and it doesn’t
cause break ups or harsh feelings. It solves all the issues and creates no
extra drama that multi-guilds would undoubtedly create. Even if your guild is
not hardcore PvP, a guild in the alliance most likely would be so wouldn’t be
hard pressed to find it.
That’s my feelings on the whole multi-guild thing. It’s
stupid, it’s creating undue pressure on individual players as well as the
guilds in question, it removes any resemblance of community that MMOs even have
left and it’s a breeding ground for battleground spies. I don’t know why
developers have been opting for this when they have to see the negatives vastly
outweigh the one positive multi-guilds have, and foregoing a system that has
existed almost since the beginning of the modern MMO era, and that is
Alliances.
Anyways, feel differently about it, leave a comment below.
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