On Guild Management By Faust Chapter 3 - "Success" and Longevity

In my last foray into self-promotion via abstract verbosity (heh) I discussed a measure of successful guild management with regard to size. I concluded that any gaming guild who achieves its goals or expresses its theme is successful regardless of size AND in Shadowbane it sure looks like size will matter for a number of reasons.

This time we'll talk about the apparent "success" associate with Longevity and perhaps multiple game presences. Are these measures of success or are they a sign of a churning membership base or defused focus?

Again, in The Syndicate's extensive studies of the UO guild list and roster information on its site we found that 100 guilds are founded and closed per day. Astounding numbers! How did we figure this out? The information was exacted when OSI turned off the placement of new guildstones yet continued to update their guild listings page. Each day the number or guilds decreased by about 100. Once they turned it back on the number ramped back up and then stabilized. If you watch it day to day now, it doesn't vary up or down too much over time.

Further, we determined that each guild has an average life span of only 3 months. The 3 month lifespan was a bit of a long term study. Some time ago we made a spreadsheet of 100 guilds and tracked them for 5 months checking in once a month we picked guilds that started with the same letter so getting the list of them was easier to do and watched the drop off over time.

Doing some "back of the envelope" math 5 years x 365 days x 100 guilds per day (assuming guilds rose and fell in preUO days at a similar rate) = 182,500 guilds created and this just accounts for Ultima Online. The number is larger if you counted EQ, AC etc.. If you make a list of guilds that have existed for 5 years, the number is probably less than 40. Assuming, for the sake of argument, it is 40, that means .01% of all guilds have a life span of over 5 years.

There are lots of old guilds out there in NAME however. Often we encounter old named guilds with new faces at the leadership helm. These, I would argue, don't count. Simply picking up a banner and boldly explaiming that one's guild is of the Old Guard unless members of the Old Guard are still active and present within the group. And a flip side, Old Guard members of an aged name occasionally appear from beyond the ether and begin waving the flag of their long closed guild with a rampant but often temporary gusto.

And so, to be an "old guild", a group must operate for many continuous years with the same core group of leaders. Why is this a determination of "success"? Because the ability to live through the many bends and changes in the path of online gaming requires dogged commitment to the tenants of the order itself, the flexibility to merge the groups theme's to the several realities of the new realms they must migrate to, and the unceasing requirement of organizing and renewing its membership over many years.

Lets face it, the core demographic for video games is kids. Kids are occasionally known for a lack of long term wisdom and are known to have relatively short attention spans. Any "kid" who has run an online gaming guild for over 5 years probably isn't a kid any more. Each of the senior core leaders of large online gaming guild that I know of are adults, and VIABLE adults at that. What do I mean by viable? Well, currently players who devote more than 6 to 8 hours a day to being online populate the most powerful in-game guilds. If these "powergamers" are adults they have to be giving something up in order to play so much… stuff like Careers, Social Lives, a Tan. I don't think of these adults as "viable" because eventually their commitment to "Uber Guild X" will be overshadowed by their lapsed commitment to life itself. You may have three machines hauling level 60 characters around killing Epic MOB's in EverQuest and be the king of some magor "uber" guild… but its going to become much more difficult to single pull General Viagra after the Electric Company cuts the juice for failure to pay the bills. And eventually, your going to have to come up for air if you ever want to hang on to such stuff as wives, children, careers, sex lives, or (my favorite) mental stability.

Successful, elder, online gamming guilds are run by adults who have proven leadership capabilities, real jobs, well budgeted personal time and a dogged devotion to the people they serve, the members of their guild. If they want to keep things going they need to constantly be on the look-out for new member talent, trends in the industry, and they have to work well with people via email and in-game communication features which are woefully poor mediums.

Longevity is a measure of success because it proves that the core leadership group is made up of adults who have seen all the crap and panics that an online gaming guild has to endure. Most old guilds have had to reshape themselves into a variety of different playing environments. These leaders have had to, essentially, deal with entirely new paradigms of races, classes, skills, ideas and trends within the various realms in which they have lived. This shows a maturity level beyond usual and indicates their continued success.

There are quite a few old guilds out there and some are large.
There are several large guilds out there and a few are old.
But are these two claims to fame enough to consider your guild successful? Not by a long shot. There is no success unless you claim it.

Next time I hope to discuss some of the basic features found in successful guild structures. Everyone seems to have different titles for their central group of leaders but, surprisingly, the same "personalities" seem to crop up in each one. Are the Elder Statesmen, Old Guard, and Supreme Leader found in every guild? Or just the successful ones?

Discuss: Your Thoughts!