My guild is inactive - and it's Blizzard's fault for that!

Community General Discussion
1

My guild is inactive. This means that out of 85 characters inside, I’m literally the only guy playing there. This is me, the guild master. Hello? Can anybody hear me?

Occasionally, I still hit the guild invite macro in General and Trade channels. Nobody joins these days. Two days ago somebody whispered to me:

“-Hey, do you plan to do raids or group events?”
What could have I replied?
“-Dude, the server is dead. I am still struggling here on this dead server. Nobody can promise you anything, because there’s nobody to play”.
“-Thanks for confirming my suspicions”, he replied. “Now if I want to do group content, I have to pay for transfer”.

And so here I am. I log-on each day, do the dailies so I can get the flying, then log-out. Already got Rustbolt, just two or three more days with the Unshackled, and I am done. I don’t know yet if I will push forward to Exalted, or stay at Revered. Maybe I’ll just take a break until the end of August, and then play Classic. I won’t unsubscribe - Warcraft is still my favorite fantasy genre.

Then suddenly yesterday came. I logged on, and saw 3-4 more people inside the guild roster. What? My guild can’t be alive once again.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Okay, I’m not sleeping. What? How? Hello? Long time no see! How are you? Is everything okay with you?

Yes, they said, everything was OK with them. It’s just they don’t have incentive to play. They said they got a 3-day invite, so they joined to see how the game looks like today. And nobody promised they will return, unfortunately. They are just curious. Nothing more. They won’t even dedicate their time to do the flying reputation.

Apparently, patch 8.2 wasn’t enough for them to return. I came back for the game when it hit live servers. They didn’t. Perhaps Blizzard can’t stimulate them to play “meh content”. This is how I’ve come to define the distribution of content inside the game. We have “cool content”, which is the expansion pack. Huge continents, level gaining, new gearing system, new things to try. Then we have “meh content”, which is the patches. They are grindy, less interesting and just can’t keep people engaged.

Perhaps it’s not the game that’s flawed. Perhaps it’s the subscription based model that’s badly outdated, yet Blizzard sticks to it. There are good reasons for that, I know, other models that were implemented in MMORPGs had annoying flaws that turned the games into pay2win experiences. But, speaking about World of Warcraft, when you charge people with USD14.99/month, you need to offer them engaging things to do. Otherwise, there’s no need to have the subscription price.

I am enjoying these three days when my guild will be active. Perhaps this is the last time when it will be active. After Classic comes, I may try to re-create it there. I don’t think I’ll see the people coming back until the end of expansion. Maybe even later.

When the 3-day period expires, I will be once again alone.
Hello?
Aybody there?

8 Likes
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I really hope they connect more realms . But as you say its the content it really does not help.

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The problem is, realm connection that was done on my server didn’t work before. They merged three low-pop servers, and this didn’t help. People didn’t start roleplaying again.

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Haha you are precious!

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And you told me to be nice ironic much . Roll on 31st when we dont have to put up with your ff14 sooo good bois !!! Nice derail of thread though gj.

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yeah the same thing happened to me, sort of.

had a fantastic guild during legion. at the end of legion half of the guild changed to horde because they wanted to prepare for bfa there and start right with a zandalari. i mean LOL that didnt happen and they all quit before they were even released, the irony.
my guild on the alliance side never recovered from that until it disbanded.

i ve ever since been guildless (except the occasional random invite from those mass guild people, but this never lasts long) because i have never found a guild that was either as active as my last one or i just didnt feel “welcome” or part of the existing community.

now since a couple of months, except the 1-3 people who occassionally log into wow, my friendslist, once filled to the brim with active players, is empty and i get to be the lone wolf i guess.

i pretty much struggle to stay subscribed. its not the subscription that bugs me but the content. i dont want to imagine what wow would look like as f2p though. bet it d be a living nightmare.

really wished they would at least allow more cross realmed guilds. i sometimes meet some interesting people from other realms here and there but it kind of seems hard to stay in touch outside of a guild.

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I really like that idea . It already works with merc mode pvp.

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well at this point we can safely say, social part of the game is almost dead, it rised its leg to step in to abyss of nothingness…

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Just completed yet another silent run. We killed the mobs, we killed the bosses, we completed the place, with no hint of convo. I greeted the replacement healer: mine was the only voice. Players becoming bots? Truly creepy atmosphere.

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They should not connect more realms, they should not merge them either… and layering ain’t helping to get a"feel" of other players in the world.

Blizzard need to straight up close 50% of the servers, and give free transfers to anybody and what ever guild might be there. Allthough if there’s unlimited space on the popular servers… then they should close more.

Heck, they way the servers work today, they might even just be fine with just having a Horde server, Alliance server and a RP server, where the Horde and Ally one is connected so they see each other :stuck_out_tongue:

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or its finally time for some mega servers

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12

my point exactly

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13

Megaserver is the solution, but there are likely to be problems with RP realms.

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If it comes to batteling empty servers and guilds, I am sure the RP community would rather have the megaservers. There will always be empty spots and hubs where you can do your RP.

Also, I really think that Non-RP servers underestimate how much life RP brings to the cities. As a former AD’er on Ravencrest, I really miss seeing people stroll the cities and pass by people who chats. Maybe I am biased, but it really brings immersion for me :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Absolutely agree! RP is a huge part of immersion.

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I’ve read many threads like the OP and I have to agree this is happening to guilds a lot, my recent experience has differed and so I have to ask myself why, is it realm pop, is it the way our guild is run… so many questions…

Around 4 months ago I fell out with the leader of the guild I had been in for a few years and not for the first time, so I decided to move on. Another previous ex guildie who left for the same reason had started a guild and I joined that, someone I knew made it feel less lonely if that makes sense. At that time there were just 5 of us in the guild.

4 months on, most evenings I log in and there are 20-30 people online, very busy guild chat etc etc

We are what many would call a casual raiding guild, we move at our own pace without chasing curve as a priority, fun is the priority. The GM and myself + 1 other are Co-gm and we organize mythic + runs, timewalking, legacy raids as well as current raids so that our members have something to log on for other than dailies, perhaps that is the difference… we do put a lot of effort into making sure something is happening, some reason to log in and they just need to turn up. If someone needs some m+ keys doing, we do our best to get them healer, tank or whatever is needed so they don’t need to.

Perhaps we are “holding their hands” too much, but it is keeping the guild active and we get more members all the time, mostly from word of mouth these days rather than any active recuitment.

I do wonder why there are guilds that thrive and guilds that don’t. Realm/faction population will no doubt play a large part in this and as someone suggested earlier, cross realm guilds would be a fantastic solution to that, though it may cause problems picking a raid team if you have too many… that’s something my guild is getting very close to, having too many that want to raid instead of not enough.

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There are very few reasons to be in a guild anymore. I say this as someone who is in a relatively active ‘social’ guild where literally nothing ever happens. We can have 10 -15 people online (relatively rare on my server) and no one wants to join together to beat the harder content because for a lot of people there is simply no incentive left.

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My guild has been empty after two or maybe three months in BfA. It was agreed in the guild that people will leave Earthen Ring and move to AD (or somewhere else) but they did not disband the guild, which is nice.

I refused to move with them as this is a guild I have been in since Cata and all my most played characters are in that guild and I guess I am waiting for the guild to become alive again at some point. Granted, it is more empty now as I am having a break from WoW

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What you say does have a point. My guild has been advertised with mostly as being social, with having a relaxing and friendly atmosphere. Perhaps this is why it attracts people who join, play for a while, and they leave (and later rejoin when Blizzard activates their accounts for free).

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This is almost precisely what happened to me this expac; my Legion guild stopped raiding completely early into Uldir because the raid leader wanted to go do Mythic raiding, but hadn’t organised anything to help us continue after he left. My keystone group left the guild, we did pugging for raids for a while, and one day came across a guild doing progress on Uldir on our server group.

We joined them two weeks later, and kept doing Uldir. They were stuck on Zul when we first pugged with them, I can’t remember how many weeks it took to reach G’huun, maybe two? Three? But after Uldir the old leadership lost the drive to keep playing, and it ended up getting handed over to my keystone group; I’ve been joint raid leading with our main key healer since then, and while we had rather low numbers going into Battle, the guild has progressively grown since then.

It can be a bit quiet on weekdays, especially in the morning, but as the day goes on it gets much more active, especially in chat. We’re always doing keys and trying to get as many with 10s done as possible, and even though we only raid a total of 5 hours each week we’re still 8th on our server for current heroic progress.

The reason people seem to join and stay, at least from what I’ve heard, is just because its a good atmosphere; people get on well and there’s rarely, if ever, any drama, and even though we’re doing some of the more difficult content in the game (Heroic raiding and 15+ keys) we take a very laid back approach to it all. Barely any of the old raid group from Uldir is still playing, and a lot of the people we do have are from guilds which were kind of abusive or hardcore; they put a lot of restrictions on people and often a ton of drama.

1 Like