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Community Blog Topic: Should well-behaved players be rewarded?
Last time we talked about getting rid of funsuckers, but what about the many players who enhance our gametime? Should they be rewarded? How would you go about it? Perhaps we could have a dropdown box where you could report a player for being extra helpful or otherwise going above and beyond to make your day better. Perhaps someone answered your question politely in tradechat. Or a player asked if you were going for the mining node you were fighting on top of rather than just ninjaing it during your battle. Or maybe someone helped you fight a battle out in the wild that got out of control with adds. Once someone gathered enough reports of being helpful, what would the rewards be? I would think it would have to be something that doesn't affect gameplay. If it did, guilds may insist on guildies reporting each other has helpful just to skew the system in their favor. Perhaps it would just reward a series of titles. Unfortunately, guilds may still require guildies to report each other in order to get those titles just to collect.
Community Blog Topic Results: WoW without guilds
Last week, we tackled the topic of what World of Warcraft would be like without guilds. This was prompted by a comment by rayden54 suggesting that the community in general and PUGging in particular would be better without guilds, as they foster cliques as well as bad behavior toward non-guildmates. My answer primarily dealt with the fact that guilds would happen regardless of whether Blizzard formally implemented guilds in the game, but that even without them, PUGs would be the same or worse since it's anonymity and lack of accountability that breeds bad behavior. Certainly there are guilds that have members who are rude outside of their guild, but all good guilds that I've belonged to have rules against giving the guild a bad name by being a funsucker. Guilds without those rules don't keep their non-funsuckers long.
Community Blog Topic: What if WoW didn't have guilds?
In the comments of a recent Drama Mamas article about the etiquette of going AFK while grouping, rayden54 said: ... I think the best way to improve pugging (and the community in general) is to remove GUILDS. All they really do is subdivide the community into a bunch of exclusive groups that only interact with outsiders when they have to and regard them as little more than nuisances. Whoa. Having guilds is such a large part of playing an MMO to me, that I never even considered what it would be like not having them. I think guilds are very important for making WoW a multiplayer experience, at least on the social level. Even if you play WoW as if it were a single-player RPG, you can still be chatting with fellow players as a group. That's all guilds used to be when I first started playing Everquest oh so many years ago, just a chat channel that you could only join if invited. And then there were games like Quake and Tribes where clans were formed outside of the game or you frequented particular servers that had the people that you liked to play with.
Community Blog Topic: What makes the perfect guild?
Most of us have been in more than one guild. With guilds falling apart over drama or absent guildies or whatever, we haven't been able to stay with the same guild we were in when we first started playing. It can't all be blamed on the guild; sometimes our tastes change or we move on to greener pastures. Once you've been in a really good guild, it's hard to let go even when things go sour. This is a topic that comes up in Drama Mamas so often, we've written a guide as to how and when to leave your guild. A bad guild can be detrimental to your enjoyment of WoW, just as a great guild enhances your gameplay experience. But what defines the perfect guild? I think there are three factors: Posted guild rules Whether they are in the in-game guild info or posted on a separate website, clear and easily accessible guidelines for guildie behavior are a must. So much drama can be avoided when everyone is clear about how to behave both in and out of guild.
