I tried making a fun guild with my friends a couple years back. It worked fine for a little while, and then the number of friends playing WoW slowly decreased until there were only two of us. At that point it's often just not worth the hassle of organizing and running all of the different things you want to do with a guild group, since the friends you had helping you organize them have all left.
To be successful long-term you need a consistent group of people to help organize events or even just regularly be online to create a community that doesn't just feel like another LFG chat channel. Building a guild is easy because everyone is gung-ho at the start, but maintaining it is the hard part since you have to keep putting in that same level of effort over months or years. Most people don't or can't keep up with the required time and effort to be successful over the long haul, and that's why each server only has a few "big name" guilds that have stood the test of time across 3+ expansions.
Guilds really only work long-term, or even for a single expansion, so long as the guild leadership (GM and/or officers) are consistently online at least 4-5x days a week for the entire lifespan of the guild. That's the amount of time it takes to organize and run everything, as well as just generally be present to ensure the guild is active.
It's also a larger commitment than what most people playing can give, particularly because that's the minimum and doesn't necessarily include time spent just on your own gameplay (dailies, weeklies, gearing, achieves, etc.). That's just what you need to get all the planning/organization done and ensure there's always activity in the guild (helping out people who need it or grouping up for tasks everyone does anyways).
It's rewarding to build something like that, but the long-term maintenance requirements are just so much larger than most players ever realize.
Post a Comment