[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Vincent Archer]

According to Dave Rickey:

> EQ's UberGuilds are centered on the "Planes Raid" class of
> encounter, to get the individual rewards they are after (phat
> lewtz), they need to hit the encounter with 30-100 people, many of
> whome will be "killed" in the encounter.  The reward structure
> certainly fosters community forming, but with some...interesting,
> side effects.

Well having encountered them all now, there are three different
levels of EQ guilds.

The first is the small/medium size guild, which is filled by all
kind of players, from the level 10 newbie to the level 55
uber-dr00id (lewt slang). These guilds have a pure community goal;
they're formed because people want to have other people to talk
and/or adventure with. Or, often for europeans and asians, because
they have a culture in common (my server used to have a german
guild, a french guild, a scandinavian guild, and so on).

These communities are very tightly knit. They have strict
recruitment, often based upon friendships, "coolness", and very
non-measurable (in game terms) criteria. People rarely leave, except
when they leave EQ for good, or there's a major emotional crisis.

The second is the medium/large "gamer" guild. This is the
game-oriented guild. They always play together, almost to the
exclusion of everybody else, tend to have a relative
self-sufficiency in terms of game play, but the major difference is
represented in terms of recruitment. Even if applicant are screened
for "compatibility with the guild", the gamer guild recruit
primarily because of what character you are, as opposed to what
player is behind the character.

The EQ "uber-guild" is the next stage. The uber-guild is probably
best compared to a mercenary company. Recruitment is strictly
business: most über-guild put down a "fitness requirements": if
you're a blahblah, you must be at least level 55, have this or that
dropped spell in your spellbook, a resist set vs fire of 100 or
better, and so on. Some filtering is done (to check if you know how
to play, instead of being an ebayed character that knows zilch about
his class, for the very basic personality compatibility), but the
recruitment is primarily about game performance.  Some guilds even
have a requirement in ping times to the server!

I tend to disagree about the "30-100 people". You can't raid with
100 people at the same time, 50% of the people's IP connection
breaks down when exposed to the major spammage of a large encounter
with more than 50 players acting simultaneously. Even with
serverside filtering.

Uberguild often have 100 people that are raid-capable. But most
uberguilds have a two-tiered structure: there's usually a core group
of about 30 people, who know each other very well, and raid almost
always together (and they often knew each other prior to being in
the uberguild), plus a larger set of "extras" who show or not on
raids depending on the circumstances. Even if loot is always a major
consideration for the people of an uber-guild, the core is often
more motivated by the sheer challenge of these raids, while the
fillers is motivated by the phat lewt that's obtained during these
raids.

As of the internal community structure, it's always autocratic, or
even downright dictatorial. There is one, and only one authority
figure, with an absolute and usually undiscuted power, plus various
delegates, who fill for organisational, I'd even say bureaucratic,
spots. I think it can best summarised by the words of Furor, the
leader of one of the best known and the oldest uberguild of EQ,
Fires of Heaven. He said in an article that the trick to getting an
uberguild to work was simple:

	"Rule with an iron fist"

I haven't heard of any succesful uberguild that is not autocratic to
a major degree. The large guilds that have no clear and absolute
ruler (not just leader) are rarely able to go "really" uber. They're
certainly plane-capable, but rarely able to go after the major
Velious challenges.

Velious, in fact, was responsible for rise of the "Uberguild
syndrome" of EQ. It put the bar, in terms of encounters, very
high. For the level 60, a plane is a piece of cake. The real
challenge in uberguilds is how fast can you clear a plane with 3
groups of 6 people. You haven't seen an uberguild at work until you
witness the following kind of dialogue

  Puller shouts "incoming, multiples"
  Raid leader shouts "how many?"
  Puller shouts "dunno, 6 or 7"
  Raid leader shouts "ok, bring them all, we're almost finished with the
  previous ones"
  Enchanter shouts "let me mez this time"
  Crowd shouts "baaah, who cares, let's kill them"

Velious, by comparison, is an environment which is rich in targets
where you DO need 30+ people with a very high quality of play (not
just equipment; you do need skill when the encounter is high enough
that a fully buffed warrior with over 5000hp can be killed in 5s by
its opponent). It's not surprising that structures arose to enter
that specific game.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev