Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?

(Part four of "teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff")

OK, so you've joined a guild. What now? Well... it depends!

Thank you, the end.

Hrm. That climactic grand finale was a bit of a let-down, really, but as Oscar Wilde once said: "There are more guilds than there are stars in the sky, and, as snowflakes, no two are alike in their infinite variety. Which is lucky, 'cos seriously if Whistler bumps me from the Kara team one more time I'm totally going to /gquit and find another one."

As I mentioned in the prologue, what really started this whole series was Will Wallace's piece, "Guilds as Retention Mechanisms". I was going to leave a comment there along the lines of "It depends!", which then grew into a musing on the nature of guilds, which mutated into a sprawling series of posts, and has now come back to "it depends", because as old Oscar (what a visionary) pointed out, guilds cover the gamut from a couple of people who wanted their own cool tabard to huge multi-game communities of hundreds of people, focused on any or all of PvPing, casual questing, crafting, raiding, roleplaying, and anything else you can do in a game. Coming back to the question I asked myself, did I stay in certain games longer because of the people, or did I forge closer ties with the people because I enjoyed the game and therefore played it more, my grand conclusion is: it's both. If you're enjoying a game, you've got more incentive and motivation to find groups or a guild, and they in turn (barring colossal clashes of personality and guild meltdowns) reinforce the enjoyment to keep you playing. If the game itself isn't really working out for you, it can carry over into groups/guilds, with minor annoyances that you'd otherwise overlook becoming extra reasons to quit. Which is still a bit of a disappointingly woolly ending really. Hrm. I know! Beckett said, "always leave them with a joke", so here's one of his:

A man walks into a fish and chip shop, and asks for cod and chips twice, and the other man says... I heard you the first time.

Lookin' for somethin' you ain't quite found yet

(Part three of "teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff")

(As a quick semantic diversion, I'm using "guild" in these posts as a shorthand for guild/supergroup/kinship/other game-specific term, and the general ideas carry over to other groupings too; players with common in-game chat channels, voice comms, message boards, instant messaging etc. There's possibly the nub of another deep social treatise in there, "What is a guild?" (or "When is a guild not a guild? When it's ajar" *badum tish*), but I'll spare you that for now.)

The conclusion of Part Two was that guilds are a Good Thing(TM), on somewhat nebulous philosophical grounds involving dilemmas and ethics, and wombats and hatstands were in there somewhere for no adequately explained reason. So! How to find one? One option, of course, is to start your own. This, frankly, involves such an awful lot of work it makes me feel faint just contemplating it. I just plugged "How to start a guild" into Google, on the off chance there was some pithy advice I could nick, I mean, er, be inspired by, and within the first couple of pages was "the Psychotherapists' Guild can help you find a therapist", which sounds about right to me. Good, successful guild leaders truly have my utmost respect (and a high burn-out rate).

Another option is to boldly adventure away, strike up conversations with those you meet on your travels, and band together with like-minded types. A while back in World of Warcraft, I was running around Westfall. I'd teamed up with someone for some quest, the Defias traitor probably, they were a decent player, we chatted a bit between ambushes, they asked if I wanted to join their guild. I figured "why not", what's the worst that could happen? (You can see where this is going, can't you?) So the next day, I log back in, I'm at the Sentinel Hill inn, and I see a message on guild chat, "NEED HELP 4 QEST", or something equally literate. Normally I'd run a mile from requests like that (or possibly run a mile towards them, to really build up momentum for a decent charge, but then you remember you can't actually hit them so it's all a bit of waste), but the guild log showed the chap was in Westfall, and I was in Westfall, we're similar levels, heck, why not show what a fine and helpful guildmate I was. "I'll help!" I pipe up, "pop me an invite". No invite is forthcoming. "NEED HELP 4 QEST", goes the guild chat. At this point, I see the chap running down the hill. I wander over, stick a buff on him, and send a whisper (in case he hadn't spotted guild chat) indicating my willingness to assist. Off he runs down the road. "NEED HELP 4 QEST", goes the guild chat. With a sigh, I set off after him, preparing to once again offer help when he stops, turns around (slowly) and yells "STOP FOLLOWING ME ZOSO" (I can't actually remember if that was a whisper, in guild chat, or maybe even shouted zone-wide. I might as well make it the latter, for comedy anecdote purposes.) Strangely enough, I didn't stick around in that guild...

Now, I'm not saying it *never* works, but it's bit of a lottery, depending on bumping into like-minded players. An alternative is to hit up the ol' game forums/fansites, and have a browse of recruitment threads. Weighing those up isn't always easy; pretty much every guild recruitment post says their aim is to "have fun". And I'd always thought, yeah, sounds good! Having fun, that's what I'm after as well, sign me up! But then, having fun means different things to different people, which seems pretty staggeringly obvious, but I only really twigged when someone pointed it out. I mean, nobody's going to start up a guild, and proclaim that their objective is to endure several months of grinding misery, detesting every moment, then quit the game, smash their PC up with a hammer and become a hermit. Least, I've never seen that guild advert... No, everyone's out to "have fun". But fun for Geoff is the achievement of getting a server-first kill of a certain boss, and the associated dedication that would require, whereas fun for Steve is logging on and having a good old natter in guild chat while killing a few goblins, and fun for Kev is taking all his clothes off (his character's clothes, that is. Well, maybe his clothes too, but until they integrate webcams with MMOs (or "The Doom Apocalypse Time Of Hideous Doom Imagery Of Doom" as it would be known in hindsight) we thankfully don't know) and /dancing on the bridge outside Ironforge bank. Geoff and Steve aren't going to have much fun unless the rest of their guild are of a broadly similar mindset (Kev doesn't care, he's busy /dancing); Geoff's too focused on damage, threat and healing to reminisce about 80s kid's TV shows with Steve, and Kev's vocabulary is pretty much limited to /saying "LOOOOOOLLL" anyway.

Still, so long as the recruitment post doesn't solely consist of "Join us and have the fun, oh yeah!", you should at least find a few potential matches to your play style that you can investigate in game, or on the guild's website (if they have one).

Course, there's plenty of other ways of finding guilds too; real life friends already in guilds (or starting new guilds with them), work colleagues, people who read the same web comic...

So, you found a guild and got an invite. What now? Find out next time on... teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff!

Temptation's page flies out the door

(Part two of "teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff")

OK, so we saw an MMOG version of the prisoner's dilemma in the previous post, but just to bludgeon the point home, a couple of other examples.

An armoursmith, woodworker, weaponsmith and a cook go into the Great Barrows, and the landlord says "why the long face?", and the armoursmith, says "Arrrr! It's driving me nuts!" No, wait, sorry, took a wrong turn into random jokes there...

A armoursmith, woodworker, weaponsmith and a cook go into the Great Barrows. Amidst the chests brimming with gold and loot (well, a few bits of silver and nowhere near enough chalices for the like of some bloke in Bree who must have a *serious* drink problem, as he wants fifteen of them from *each* of you) are plans for a solid iron breastplate, a barbed wooden spear, a deadly bronze sword and a recipe for lobster thermidor aux crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam (obviously the undead value French cuisine as highly as implements of war). Optimal scenario: each crafter only rolls "need" for the item they can actually use, everyone ends up happy. Not so optimal scenario: everyone rolls "need" for everything, the good ol' dice determine who gets what. Least optimal scenario: half the group only roll "need" for what they can use, the other half rolls "need" for everything, the former end up with more stuff at the expense of the latter, everyone starts bickering about loot, the other three ask the cook what, exactly, he's doing rustling up tasty snacks while they're crafting useful weapons and armour, and while he's trying to explain the advantages of the buffs provided by various foodstuffs a bunch of Wights come along, kill everyone, and wander off nibbling on lobster claws.

I had to think pretty hard about City of Heroes, as until about a month ago there was no loot in the game, and it features such heavy instancing that competition for wandering mobs is hardly a problem, but even there a comparable situation could arise. If you have a group of two level 25 heroes and one level 21 hero, you can easily fight level 25 mobs. The level 21 probably doesn't contribute too much to the fight, but they rake in the XP from the group defeating much higher level opponents. Now, CoH has an option that allows a higher level character to "sidekick" a lower level; one of the level 25s could sidekick the level 21 who would then effectively fight as a level 24 (one level below their mentor). More use in combat, so mobs should be defeated faster to the benefit of the group as a whole, but the sidekicked character doesn't gain so many XP because the opponents are only one level higher, rather than four. That's not technically a prisoner's dilemma, as the choice is only taken by one character; perhaps there's another name for it ("prisoner's semi-dilemma with one and a half twists and pike", maybe), but it's good enough for my basic point, which is:

There are situations in MMOGs where you can optimise your own gold/loot/XP/quest completion at the expense of others. I'm no game theorist, so I'll just flail around here for a bit and paste random words in from Wikipedia like dominant strategy, non-zero sum game, Nash Equilibrium and Pareto optimum to make myself look clever and hopefully back that up. There should probably be graphs or something. Anyway! There are ways of getting ahead, not in an evil "muahahahaha" full-on griefing way, just optimising your own reward, being a bit selfish, stuff that doesn't directly flout the rules of the game (but will spark many pages of message board discussions). And why not? Why give a damn about other members of a pick-up group, or random people you bump into while questing; on a populous server, you'll probably never meet them again, and they're probably thinking the same way, so it's just self defence.

Back to the question from part one, then: how to avoid bozos, and the propagation of bozo-ism? Well, if you arrange things so you're normally out and about with a smaller subset of the server population like, say, a "guild", there's a couple of effects. Firstly the one-off prisoner's dilemma is turned into an iterated version, you keep running the choices knowing the previous outcomes. In that situation, it's a better long term strategy to keep playing nice, even before you add further incentives (like possibly being kicked from a guild if you choose your own gain at their expense). Secondly, the matrix of results can look a bit different. A shiny piece of armour that you can't wear drops while you're in a pickup group; if you roll and win it, you could sell it. If someone else wins it, no benefit to you at all. If, on the other hand, you're in a guild group and a shiny piece of armour drops, if Geoff the tank wins it there *is* a benefit to you: Geoff can tank better, you can tag along with Geoff in harder dungeons and potentially win the shiny loot that might drop there. Win-win!

Bear in mind, this is still a gross oversimplification of... well, everything really. It is possible to find pick-up groups of kind, fun people who you never see again (not likely, I grant you, but *possible*); there are game mechanics that reward successful team play over selfishness. There's all sorts of situations with any number of motivations for players to act in any number of ways (there's some barely studied philosophy of "ethics", or something, which I don't think anybody's really written anything about over the past few thousand years... if you have a spare half hour, there's a rather interesting programme on altruism that's quite fun). Apart from anything else, I've conveniently ignored the fact that guilds do nothing to change my *original* prisoner's dilemma, of hunting the same hatstands as someone from the other faction on a PvE server, but it was such a nice example I had to lead with it anyway. (I'm afraid the best I can come up with there is trying to convey, through the medium of interpretive dance and other emotes, that you should co-operate in your hunt.) I'm rather hoping nobody will notice... look! Over there! A badger! Can you see? I think he's got a gun!

So. Guilds: good things for encouraging people not to be bozos. Everyone join one today! Simple.

Of course, it isn't quite that simple, is it? As we'll find out in the next exciting (for certain values of "exciting") episode of "teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff".

Ah, my friends from the prison

(Part one of "teams, friends, guilds, other players and stuff")

I had one of those fun quests, "Kill 10 wombats, 10 badgers and 10 hatstands", where there's packs of roaming wombats and badgers everywhere, but only two hatstands in the entire zone (probably because wombats and badgers have little use for hats, and thus by extension hatstands, although for some strange reason each hatstand is totally surrounded by numerous wombats and badgers). So I'd racked up the 10 wombats and badgers in a couple of minutes, and was on 3/10 hatstands when I saw someone else, of the other faction. Someone else hunting hatstands. Oh dear. On a PvP server, it's nice and simple, you'd just kill them and get on with it. Or try and kill them, be ganked by the stealthy rogue hiding next to them, and get corpse camped for the next half hour, prompting you to send out a call for help, bringing a posse of guildmates to sort out the nasty old enemy and camp their corpses, just for a little while to teach them the error of their ways, prompting *them* to summon forth further guildmates and allies, and so on and so forth until the entire population of the server is locked in deadly conflict, digging series of trenches and fortifications opposite each other and contemplating amphibious operations in the Dardanelles in an attempt to break the deadlock, while the native badgers and wombats sit around their hatstands watching the whole affair with detached interest while eating popcorn. Like I said, nice and simple. On a PvE server, though, it's a dilemma. Specifically, the prisoner's dilemma. If you both co-operate, clear out surrounding badgers and wombats and take it in turns tagging hatstands, it'll take a while but you'll both get through it in the end. If you both go all out to try and tag hatstands as soon as possible, you'll wind up covered in too many wombats and badgers to handle, and die a lot. So why don't you co-operate? 'Cos obviously the optimal strategy for a single player is to let the other poor bozo engage the wombats and badgers, then you jump in and grab the hatstand at the end of it, and run off laughing. And you know that, they know that, you know that they know that, they know that you know that they know (etc.), so it ends up with the pair of you standing *just* outside aggro range of the wombats, hands poised over your weapons, while Alessandro Alessandroni whistles away in the background. Nine times out of ten, you're both perfectly reasonable people, but the possibility that the other person might be a bozo forces[1] you to pre-emptively behave in an indistinguishable-from-bozo-like fashion yourself.

[1] OK, obviously it doesn't *force* you to behave like that, it's only a silly computer game, what does it matter if they go around grabbing all the hatstands and it takes you a bit longer to finish the quest yourself? There's far worse things going on in the world, get some perspective![2]

[2] Yeah, right. Like there's anything more important than getting even with that kill-stealing jerk over there...

If the other hatstand hunter is in your faction, of course the optimal strategy of grouping up to hunt hatstands is far more attractive, but there's any number of further counter-reasons for not wanting to team up ('cos you get into loot issues, or maybe there's three of you, four of the other team so you can't form a single group, or the other player doesn't respond to tells or team invites, or you just don't feel like grouping 'cos you can't face the strained small talk and social awkwardness of extricating yourself afterwards...)

Anyway, that original stand-off was resolved as I was pretty bored of badgers and wombats by that point anyway, so I wandered off and did something else, returning for the hatstands later with some backup to make wombat-clearing easier. But the question is, how to avoid bozos, and the propagation of bozo-ism? Well that's where guilds can come in...

(Ooh, a cliffhanger, it's just like Doctor Who)

(Except for being exciting in any way, but never mind)

Seein' your world of people and things

I was cruising around the Blogipelago over the weekend and found some interesting stuff from Will Wallace, particularly Guilds as Retention Mechanisms, which set me thinking. The MMOGs I've played longest are the ones I've had closest ties to in-game friends/guildmates; is that why I played them longer, or did I play longer because I enjoyed the game, and as a result of that formed closer ties with people? Very chicken and egg. Ahhh! (Stop that! - Ed.)

Anyway, teams, friends, guilds, other players... plenty of food for thought there, enough for a series of blog posts, I think. Unless I get bored and wander off.

We sail through endless skies

So, my previous post might have seemed like a mere light hearted skit, spoof or humorous vignette, but actually it's a deep treatise that works on two levels. *At least* two levels. Probably three or four. Maybe ten. Ahh!

It's a parable, see, like the Vineyard Owner, only in this case illustrating that us bloggers may opine away and come up with all sorts of amazing ideas that we're convinced will transform the entire MMOG genre, but would actually be pretty tedious in practise. Ahh! OK, that's hardly a revelation, but still. Always worth bearing in mind.

The third level it works at ("Ahh!", "No, not 'ahh', stop saying 'ahh'") is that there *might* be the nub of a not-entirely-insane idea somewhere in there for some sort of player-based transportation system. EVE is the main inspiration ("inspiration" in the sense of "it already does exactly that so I'm just ripping the idea off them really"); unless I'm more vastly mistaken than a man who thinks Hillaire Belloc is still alive, it doesn't have a "mailbox". You're a miner, digging away, extracting ore from asteroids, and you want to take that ore to your corporation's manufacturing base so they can turn it into ships and guns and socks and sugar n' stuff... no popping it in the post, you have to physically take it there. Out in high security space that might be easy enough, set the autopilot and put your feet up for a while, but in the wild and lawless regions of 0.0, your big ol' freighter is a sitting duck. You'll want a convoy, with escorts, and there's wolfpacks out there... (Note: I'm extrapolating here from a brief dalliance with EVE's free trial and watching Das Boot and The Cruel Sea several times, it might be nothing like that). It's not a great leap to a fantasy setting; player characters getting hired to work as caravan guards is a good old staple of the genre. Course, you couldn't just tack transport of raw materials straight on to an existing game, or you'd just add extra tedium and difficulty in an area that already needs some improvement, but if you could somehow work it in to an overhaul of that...

And if it's a really stupid idea, then obviously I don't mean it literally. It's a metaphor. Ahhhhhhhh!

The post office has been stolen and the mailbox is locked

Melmoth's Standing Procedure, and Elf's comment on adding more realism to NPCs, got me thinking. Mailboxes are a bit small, aren't they? The ones dotted around Ironforge and Bree? Sure, you could fit a small package in there, with a ring or amulet in it, but a giant two-handed sword? No way. Unless perhaps the blade has some sort of ingenious telescoping mechanism. Or it's in kit form. Maybe with a magazine, you know, "NEW! Build Your Own Two Handed Sword Magazine! Free pommel and hilt with Issue 1! Each week you get fascinating two handed sword articles, like 'bits of your enemy you should try and poke with your two handed sword', 'celebrity two handed sword wielders' and 'other fun things to do with a two handed sword (part 1: roasting a lot of really big marshmallows)', and the included blade segments slot together to form a handsome Zweihänder with the complete collection. Order now!"

Anyway, clearly tiny mailboxes are an unrealistic way of sending and receiving large, bulky objects. What you need is a courier service. If only there was some sort of precedent... So I've come up with a new and revolutionary idea: when you sell a large item at auction, you receive a quest to deliver that item to the buyer. Imagine the larks! You could have a little cap and tabard, and the address you'd have would be the buyer's hearthstone inn, so you'd toddle along there, and they'd probably be out questing, so you'd have to write out one of those little "Sorry! We tried to deliver this parcel, but you weren't in" cards, and then the buyer would contact you and quote the reference number, and you'd arrange another delivery, only you wouldn't be able to specify morning or afternoon, and then you'd get lost on the way, or stuck in heavy raid-traffic...

If this idea took off, I reckon you could even expand it. After all, it would be a shame to only be able to perform such exciting tasks after selling certain items at auction, so certain NPCs could have objects too bulky, or perhaps too valuable, to send by mail, that they could ask you to deliver instead. It's a sure fire winner, the players are going to love it!