Once upon a time, long, long ago, in the late 90's when the internet still was young, I was playing Magic the Gathering. With cards, not online. But the place to be when online was the Magic Dojo (long dead, link is to an archive), where people discussed decks and wrote tournament reports. Probably the best writer there was Jamie Wakefield, whose tournament reports were so good he ended up publishing them as a book. And one day Jamie stopped writing about MtG, because he had found a new hobby: MMORPGs, or more specifically Asheron's Call.
The reason why people study history is that history constitutes the roots of the present and the future. Jamie Wakefield certainly has been an influence on me. I moved from Magic to MMORPGs a bit after him, and even later ended up as a blog writer. Blogs weren't even invented when Jamie wrote on the Dojo, but that was basically what he did back then already.
Thinking back about what Jamie wrote about Asheron's Call (can't find that post), I remember him enthusiastically telling about the AC allegiance system. I only played AC for a few days much, much later, and never experienced the system. But apparently it worked like this: New players could swear allegiance to experienced players. As a result of that, every time the new player gained experience, his patron would get some experience points too. And that could work in a pyramid, with the patron being the vassal of an even more advanced character. In return the more advanced players would look out for the new players, as it was in their own interest to get them geared up and leveling fast. Furthermore some abilities depended on the size and your rank inside an allegiance structure. Thus leaving an allegiance hurt both you and allegiance, which encouraged people to be nice to each other.
The comparison with how a guild in World of Warcraft works is striking. In WoW the more advanced players have not much incentive to help the less advanced guild members. And leaving the guild has no disadvantage at all for them. So guilds constantly break up or change, because it is easier to leave one guild and join a new guild with people who are as advanced as you than to try to gear up the less advanced players in your existing guild. I called that the Kleenex guild system once. You don't need a degree in social studies to see that the WoW system isn't exactly fostering long-term relationships and loyalties. There has been a distinctive backward development from AC to WoW in social game functions.
Now the AC allegiance system is one way to improve guilds, but certainly not the only one. It is easy to imagine other systems where being in a guild has other advantages than getting a raid slot. EQ2 has a less powerful system, where the guild gets 10% of all status points their members gain. I got recruited into a guild pretty quickly after I rejoined that game. But as far as I know the guild doesn't lose my contribution to status if I leave (unless I'm promoted to patron), so the guild isn't much more helpful to the newbies than a WoW guild is.
A good system would enable guilds to work together towards a common goal, regardless of level and gear (unlike WoW where the common goal is often the raid advancement, and that doesn't depend at all on the lower level guild members). The contribution of new players should be valuable, so the more advanced players would have an interest in helping the newbies. But even if the advanced players don't help much, the system should already reward players just for being part of a powerful guild, for example by giving them access to stuff based on guild level. Leaving a guild should have negative consequences for both the leaver and the guild, encouraging them to work out their differences instead of splitting. Guild membership should be an obvious advantage for everyone involved, with bonuses for loyalty and cooperation.
Unfortunately we are now in a period where new MMORPGs are heavily influenced by World of Warcraft. WoW set some standards, even in places where it is weak. The problem is that developers often don't really know what made WoW so successful, so they copy instead of risking innovation. I didn't read anything about any of the upcoming games that suggest a better approach to how a guild works than WoW has. You're lucky to get a guild chat channel, and that's it. For anything else: forums, event calendar, any sort of reward system, you'll have to rely on third-party software and the leadership of the guild officers. The time when developers learn that fostering loyalty to a guild equals fostering loyalty to the game is apparently still years ahead. What a pity!
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