Friday, February 15, 2008

Guilds and summer holidays

I spent a day in Paris for work, and picked up a new French MMO print magazine at the newsstand there to read in the train: GameGeek. Some news about MMOs in general, but most of the magazine was covering World of Warcraft. There was one interesting article describing the history of one guild from early 2005 (when WoW came out in Europe) to now. And prominently in that guild history figures the problem of summer holidays.

People in Europe get a lot more holidays than Americans, and thus many spend 3 weeks or more in summer on the beach or traveling. France is practically shut down during the month of August. Of course raid attendance during that time on European servers suffers mightily. And many an European guild split up during those summer holidays, because some people wanted to continue raiding and rather joined up with other people spending the summer holidays on the computer and not with their previous guild mates tanning on some beach in Spain.

The story is only interesting because I've heard that story several times from various people on various European servers, especially French and German ones, but very rarely from people playing on American servers. Continent-specific guild drama, triggered by different public opinions on work-life balance. Funny.

No comments:

Post a Comment