Back when I started WoW, my first real MMO, I was on a mission to meet people and make friends. I didn’t know anyone in the game, so I hung around the official server forums and contributed to general chat in-game. I ran a lot of pugs, chatted with a lot of strangers, and always updated my friends list after with folks who seemed nice.
Once I started a guild I spent the first year or two doing the same thing, although then it was more in service of guild recruitment and alliances and less making personal friends. I still did, though, particularly with other casual guild leaders and officers. Eventually my guild grew to the point where we could always fill our own groups, and I spent less and less time trying to meet and befriend non-guildies.
That’s just kind of the nature of having a guild, and it worked great while we had 40-ish active members in one central game.
Nowadays though things are a lot different for us as they are for most of those old WoW guilds. We have maybe 20 active folks, spread over a number of games. Even when we’re in one game we have a difficult time doing group content on a regular basis because of course almost a decade later a lot of us have kids and spouses and more demanding jobs now. Plus generally our attention spans seem a lot shorter, and my guild is certainly guilty of being “3 monthers” for new MMOs.
And yet even when I happen to be more serious about a game than the rest of my guild generally is, I don’t return to my old ways of running pugs, making forum posts, and just being open to meeting new people. I remain as insular as I was in the old, peak activity days. Pugs?! Ugh. I prefer a guild group, thanks, even a non-existent one.
I think there are a lot of us, perhaps even the majority, who are in the same boat. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how their guild is “getting back together” for WildStar. And that is totally awesome, but I think at a certain point it also hinders players from enjoying the social aspect of MMOs. We have blocked off any opportunity and interest in meeting new people because we HAVE a guild already. Why do I need to put myself out there and meet people in Game X when I already have a guild?
There’s been a lot of discussion on other blogs lately about making in-game friends vs. bringing friends to a game and the different effects on player longevity. It ties in pretty well with my suspicion that we’re all joining these new MMOs with our old guild and simply refusing to get out there and make new in-game friends because of it.
I’m not saying that the answer to MMO longevity is to ditch our virtual families or anything, but that if you too have been travelling to different games with the same pack of folks, particularly if they are only mildly committed to the game, it might be time to stick your head out and meet some additional, non-guild friends.