Tobold has been thinking about how game design affects guild life. Foton already explained this one pretty well with respect to how WoW raiding has killed guilds.
In the Cities, we have supergroups (guilds) with 75 member caps. Do y’all have caps in other games? ATitD required you to pony up more bricks and boards to increase the guild cap, but I cannot recall caps in other games. I cannot imagine that in WoW, with 40-man raids and a 75-man cap. The 75 cap might have related to something at some point. I recall the claim that it was needed for supergroup PvP raid balance, or to prevent massive lag in said raids, but since said raids are two years late with no plans to implement them, it is just annoying to have alt supergroups into which to shuttle characters.
Am I mis-recalling the normal estimate that 1/5 of your subscribers are online during peak hours? That would mean a full CoX supergroup, with no alts, would average 15 members online. This is about two full groups, which is quite enough for a game that only recently added its second raid — there is not much to do with large groups. In our glory days, I recall our Teamspeak setting up rooms because we were running two full groups at once. We never went past that, despite a massive flurry of activity.
This seems like a combination of guild and game design. Your guild caps at 75, so your active guild playerbase caps around two full groups; letting alts in caps you around one full group. Since the full group is the standard unit for task forces and high-end play, that all falls together.
It all falls apart when people leave. You have an alt SG for alts, an elite SG for folks’ level-capped characters (now alts), and the main SG. Conveniently, you can communicate in a coalition channel or a global channel across the lot of them. When people leave, though, you are already that fragmented. You may only have a dozen members in these SGs, so any loses can kill the whole thing. Now the surviving members are spread across three guilds, each of which is a collection of alts and ghosts. I know one SG that made a half-dozen alt SGs for the various hero classes, then ended up with only a few active characters in each after the next wave of MMOs came out. Do you abandon the old base and everything that went into it? There are a lot of orphan supergroups out there, inhabited by long-dormant alts.
: Zubon
EVE corps used to cap out around 1250 players, but it looks like there’s a new skill to increase that by 5000. If I recall correctly this first cap had affected some of the largest corps involved in the big southern wars.
WoW’s guild UI is capped at 500, which means you can add more than 500, but you won’t be able to see everyone in the guild window, which means no promoting, etc.
They keep talking about maybe changing the way the caps in CoH work to 75 players instead of characters, but it keeps getting backburnered for new content.
That’s said, I’ve usually gotten more teams from global channels than I have from my own SGs. That’s probably because I can say, “Hey, anyone want to team up on Virtue?” and have people from four other servers respond, something which can’t happen in the supergroup channel.
I like the idea of having flexible guild caps. IE, you pay more to expand your guild size.
For our group of people playing CoH/CoV, the global channel that we use for chat if in practice our “guild”, not the various super groups we have. Due to that alts were allowed into the original supergroups, they became filled quite quickly and different super groups emerged for themed characters or just to keep a shared area for someone’s alts, i.e. personal super groups.
Ragnarok Online had a guild cap, 32 to start, but itcould increase as the guild level was raised (by taxing the individual member’s experience.. making the grindiest game in history even more of a grind).. i believe it topped out at 60 (when i quit playing a couple of years ago).. considering the purpose of guilds in RO was full on GvG war over castles twice a week, taking the place of the WoW raid-style endgame, a cap was an absolute necessity. otherwise you wind up with either one guild large enough to dominate the server by attacking/defending more than 2 or 3 of the 25 guild castles (and pretty much every large PvP guild on a server had 3), or a massive unplayable lag-fest with 120+ players in a pvp orgy, which it had a slight tendancy towards anyhow.
the game i’m currently playing, Rapplez, has no guild cap (or even a hard level cap, tho once characters get over about 160 or so the experience totally dries up, as the highest level prey in the game is 150) but has an artificial 1 dungeon per guild ownership rule, and a cap on number of players able to take part in the GvG seige events of 32. there is, again, no raiding, however the right to seige a dungeon is determined by speed of killing the 2 dungeon boss mobs, and there are seperate group limits on those (16,24,32 and 40, depending on the level of dungeon, in teamed parties of 8).
so i can see, depending on the game and style of endgame, guild limits can be either useful limiters of power, or just a nuisance.
@Eliah:
It can accomodate up to 1000. Sort alphabetically one way, then the other. There’s everyone.