Player vs. Everything: Fixing the problem of guild-hopping
Filed under: Culture, Game mechanics, Guilds, Endgame, Player vs. Everything
There's a bit of a discussion going on in the blogosphere right now about how to handle the topic of dungeon and raid rewards in MMOGs (specifically World of Warcraft, actually, but it universally applies). Tobold started the whole conversation by suggesting that the problem of players leaving to join a better guild when their gear progression is further along than the rest of their guild could be fixed by adding deterrents to leaving, like forcing you to leave any gear acquired with the help of your guild in the guild bank. After all, he argues, you couldn't have gotten those epics on your own. Why should you get to take your gear and walk away with it when 24 other people helped you obtain it, while waiting patiently for their turn?
Other people then made the counter-argument that hopping to further-progressed guilds is only one of the many reasons that people leave guilds, and that tying loot to your guild would give too much power to guild masters and punish people for circumstances that are often outside of their control (what if your work schedule changes and you can't raid anymore? Many hardcore guilds don't allow casual players). There were some more good points made as to why this system would be a bad idea. Still, it's a good thing that Tobold brought this up, because it's a very real issue. Even if tying loot directly to the guild is a bad idea, what can you do to discourage people getting what they need and then leaving for greener pastures?
A large part of the issue is because of how MMOGs, and WoW in particular, handle loot distribution. P0tsh0t has an in-depth discussion of this problem in his response to Tobold's post here: Fixing WoW's Progression Problem. You really need to go and read it, because it's a very well thought-out piece. I'm not going to try to recreate his arguments here, but I'll summarize what he's saying for the TLDR crowd.
.jpg "Thomas Hobbes - The original self-interested asshat.")
P0tsh0t takes a very Hobbesian view of humanity in his post and states that everyone is a "self-interested asshat" at heart, and that WoW's system of loot distribution only encourages these tendencies. He argues that the problem with the system is that it promotes collective work for uncertain individual rewards. You could work for weeks or months every day and not get the item you need. Even when it drops, the nature of the system is such that you might lose the roll to someone who is on their first run. You need to do a substantial amount of work for each "pull of the slot machine," and there's always the same chance that what you need will drop.
Since drops are straight fixed percentage chances and the class make-up of a raid is rarely balanced (especially with some classes rolling on "off-class" items), the raid group is unlikely to progress at an even pace. Some players will get everything they need very quickly, while others will have to wait forever for their drops. This results in the players who have everything they need getting bored at having to run the same "useless" content over and over again, and eventually they leave for a guild that's further along in the overall progression. Everyone is bored of the content, and for some players, the "game" of getting better gear has come to a complete standstill.
P0tsh0t suggests that you could fix this by expanding WoW's system of badge loot to everything in the game, similar to the PvP honor system. Put in X amount of time, get X amount of incremental reward towards your items. This system isn't without problems either, though. For starters, it's not nearly as exciting as the random drop system (as explained in this article which Tobold pointed out in P0tsh0t's comments). Instead of having the chance at the item you need every time, you can calculate exactly how many weeks of raiding you'll need to do to get your items. It boils down to nothing more than a boring faction grind once you learn the fights.
Ironically, that system of time spent versus rewards gained is exactly what DKP systems attempt to simulate (with mixed results). DKP systems seem like they combine the best of both worlds: You still have the thrill of random drops, but the gear is distributed fairly evenly based on personal effort. What's funny is that loot distribution systems have probably been the cause of more drama than anything else, in aggregate. Besides, it still doesn't fix the original problem of some people getting geared up faster than others. You can only hand out what drops, after all, and you're not going to shard something people can use. If the random number generator gives you nothing but plate for weeks, then your tanks are going to be totally geared out while everyone else is still sitting around in sub-par gear (what can you do?). You still have to deal with the temptation of guild-hopping in that case, despite your best efforts to avoid it.
So clearly, nothing we've suggested yet would be able to fix the problem while keeping the players happy and having fun. What's a designer to do? Tobold has a follow-up post with some more interesting ideas that are worth looking at. Unfortunately, the reputation-related suggestions he makes are confusing and unintuitive, especially for someone who's brand new to the raiding scene or only plays the game casually. His ultimate point is a good one, however: "World of Warcraft has made it far too easy to screw your guild for selfish reasons, by giving you absolute ownership of the epics you only got through your guild. Some system that forces people to select their friends more carefully and encourages them to stick together would do wonders to the social cohesion of WoW."
A good sentiment, and one I agree with whole-heartedly. The game provides no motivation for players to stick together. The only reason why many guilds form is to get loot together, and the social cohesion comes later (if it ever comes at all). Why are we playing social games where we don't even know or particularly like the people we're playing with? When did personal character advancement and flexing your e-peen because of the shiny epics you possess become more important than having fun and building lasting friendships with like-minded players?
Most importantly, what can we really do to fix it in a way that keeps things fun and interesting?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
4-30-2008 @ 5:09PM
jackdonkey said...
low server population is one of the reasons for guild hopping in my opinion. In a game like Eve online it's a lot easier to find like minded people since you have 150,000 or so to choose from. In Warcraft you have about 6000 per server of your faction. Once you find like minded people stuff just kind of falls into place.
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5-01-2008 @ 8:50AM
Cameron Sorden said...
I don't think it's quite that simple. Things don't just "fall into place" for all of the reasons I mentioned in the article. The dynamics of the game are such that to progress in a large guild, some of your quicker-advancing members will eventually hit a wall where they're doing content they no longer need for months to help the lesser geared characters progress.
Since there's no stigma for just hopping over that wall (by switching to a more advanced guild), it's a powerful temptation even for the most dedicated guild members. If your guild was formed largely around loot acquisition (as most raiding guilds in WoW are), you're probably going to choose to continue advancing your character somewhere else as opposed to a lootless raid grind of indeterminate length.
4-30-2008 @ 5:26PM
Scopique said...
Unfortunately, where WoW is concerned, I don't know how one can expect to fix this. The WHOLE GAME is based around loot. It's based on the idea that everyone has an equal chance to get the loot they need.
Locking loot to the guild is far more problematic then the status quo. That gives too much power to the guild owners, because they could use members to farm the loot, and then kick the members from the guild. Who gets the loot then?
Some guilds couldn't care less about loot, and are formed for a purpose, but those are usually casual guilds, or guilds in games other then WoW. The fact that WoW focuses on loot means that they first thing people will think of when they think of joiing a guild is "what's in it for me?". The two go hand in hand, and unless Blizzard does a 180 and changes the focus of the game, it won't ever change.
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5-01-2008 @ 11:14AM
jarrad_nospam said...
> Locking loot to the guild is far more problematic then the status quo. That gives too much power to the guild owners, because they could use members to farm the loot, and then kick the members from the guild. Who gets the loot then?
Who says anyone else *can* get the loot? Forgive me if this isn't the case (I don't play WoW now, and never was a hardcore player even when I did play), but isn't it bind on equip?
If Epic loot gets 'tied' in some way to the guild, it should *still* be bound to the player that equiped it. If the player leaves, he loses the loot (though maybe he should at least get the vendor value of as some sort of compensation); the guild should not be able to 'reassign' it to someone else.
That way the player can only benefit from the Epic loot if he stays with the guild that helped him earn it, and guildmasters can't use members to get loot with the intention of throwing them out later.
4-30-2008 @ 5:44PM
Danath said...
Keep random loot drops, but make loot available for SPECIFIC classes, (in other words, properly itemized armor for everyone), if everyone of that class has the item, the item will not drop, unless everyone has every item possible, in which case it has no choice but to drop whatever.
This would mean more loot options from bosses, and of course, the dread of blizzard having to properly itemize things (no more hunter or rogue gear for shamans) and create proper class limits, that way, drops are still random but the more people who already have their items, the more likely it is the undergeared people will get their items.
A great example of blizzards poor loot system is ZA, did a run before... got 2 chests, everything was resto druid loot. We had 2 paladins and a resto shaman, all who had ZA gear, but our DPS was severely lacking in gear, although we cleared the instance, nothing dropped that anyone really needed, it was just a grind for badges, boring.
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5-01-2008 @ 8:50AM
Cameron Sorden said...
Yeah, this is what EQ2 does (sort of). Check out my article "I look hot in leather" for some more discussion of loot drop suggestions that could fix this issue.
4-30-2008 @ 9:23PM
pufonthis said...
Gee, I can fix this garbage right now. Don't do the stupid raid game.
Simple huh. Yea, it is that simple. Don't waste hours upon hours of your life for a piece of dumb virtual shoulders.
Can't wait for Warhammer so when we all get to max level we can worry about destroying the other races instead of doing boring raids.
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5-01-2008 @ 8:50AM
Cameron Sorden said...
Not good enough. For some people, the raid game IS the game, and this is a real issue that almost every serious raiding guild in World of Warcraft has has to deal with at some point. It wasn't nearly as much of a problem in older games, where guild-hopping was frowned upon and ditching your guild could easily get you blacklisted.
It's all a matter of perspective. I think that doing mindless PvP repeatedly at max level sounds a lot more boring than defeating challenging and complex raid scenarios with your friends. Saying that one shouldn't play the raid game as a "fix" to a perceived flaw in the system is like saying that you shouldn't PvP because there's a cheap move someone can do that's unbalanced.
You don't stop playing the game you enjoy. You talk about the problem and hope the designers address it.
4-30-2008 @ 9:24PM
danarchy said...
Had this discussion recently with my guild. About half our raiders are fully geared out in t4 and some t5 now, while the other half is still signing up for kara runs trying desperately to catch up. We have all been together since about 2 days after release but some of our players are getting REALLY tired of killing lewttheridon and want to progress further into bt. Main problem is the loot that has been dropping for the last few months has been mainly plate and melee gear. We have even put a ticket in about 5 times about it. So we have half the guild antzy as hell and the other half about ready to quit all together.
The only way to fix the loot problems in wow is add truely random loot to raid bosses. There is a random loot generator in the game, we see stuff all the time with weird stats. Just add a couple peices of random purples and HEY how about a legendary once in a freaking while for those of us with full time jobs? As it stands now it can be incredibly hard to get certain classes to raid certain dungeons due to preset subpar gear for the needed classes. If you know what a boss *might* drop and you dont need any of it, why show up?
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5-01-2008 @ 12:09AM
Coherent said...
Tobold's solution is completely unworkable. I wouldn't join a guild with rules like that. If it was the game that made it so, I wouldn't play that game.
The question is, which is more important to the designers, the guilds, or the individuals? Ultimately the game designers determine who has rights to the loot. But _I_ pay monthly to play the game, as an individual. Being just a cog in an impersonal machine isn't fun, and I won't pay monthly to "enjoy" being at the mercy of the guildleader's whims.
Quite frankly, all of the solutions to fix the "problem" of people leaving guilds with their equipment are worse than the disease. Sure, it sucks when someone gears up and gquits, but presumably the cutting edge equipment will be going to the most dedicated members anyway. Guilds never give away top-end equipment to people who gquit without good reason.
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5-01-2008 @ 8:50AM
Cameron Sorden said...
That's exactly the problem, though. The most dedicated members are there attending raids the most, and they're the ones who tend to get geared up the fastest.
They're also the ones who care the most about character advancement and seeing new content. Suddenly, they're faced with the choice of either waiting for months of the same content while everyone else gets to where they are (and often it can be frustrating getting your less motivated members to show up for raids on a consistent basis), or switching immediately to a new guild that's progressed further and seeing that content today.
Immediate satisfaction is a powerful lure. Tobold's solution might be unworkable, but there has to be a way to fix it.
5-01-2008 @ 8:34AM
Ghen said...
zebra on a motorcycle
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5-01-2008 @ 8:51AM
Cameron Sorden said...
Yeah, it's supposed to be an epic'd out character zooming away from his guild. Like it?
5-02-2008 @ 12:18AM
Rational said...
So how about this: Instead of penalizing people for switching guilds, why not just indicate how many times they have been present for certain boss kills? This would show everyone that the player has paid his/her dues.
My stance is that the people who show up for every raid and get all the best equipment deserve progression, and if their guild isn't moving forward, they deserve to have the option of leaving for a better one. If everyone shows up for every raid, then they'll all get gear equally. This is the whole idea behind DKP, in fact.
So if your guild operates a DKP system and someone manages to get geared up in a shorter time than other players, that means that he has attended more total hours of raiding than the other players in that time.
Is it fair that they should be able to hold him back if he realizes that they will never catch up to his level of dedication?
DKP is a pre-existing solution to this problem, and works well enough.
Tobold's solution basically rewards sloth and incompetence. It is the DKP version of communism, saying "No matter how badly your guild performs, the best players will never be able to advance beyond the worst players in the guild."
Tobold's solution would end up making guilds huge, bloated 500-person entities, big enough to contain both competent and incompetent players, where players never switch guilds ever.
Cliques would form of elite players where only certain guildmembers would be allowed in certain raids. Raid Leaders would demand the ability to form subguilds inside of the main guild where they would only take members of certain ranks.
Ironically, so we come full circle.
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5-02-2008 @ 12:21AM
Cameron Sorden said...
You're assuming the equal amounts of gear drop for the equal amounts of classes that need that gear in the raid, which is almost never the case.
Even with the fairest DKP system in the world, if you have 5 priests and 2 rogues that you bring to raids, the rogues will probably get geared out faster than the priests just because there's fewer of them to divvy up the leather.
Also, since there's also no guarantee that equal amounts of each gear type drop, it's possible that you'd get nothing but plate for weeks. The result there is that all of your plate classes get lots of gear while everyone else gets nothing, just because that's what happened to drop. Everyone putting the same amount of time in is meaningless if there's no gear to bid on.
5-06-2008 @ 10:05AM
Kieran said...
It strikes me that guild-hopping isn't really a bad thing, it's a solution to the unequal loot distribution problem. It may be a little hard to bear for those left behind, but if your tank is geared up then why not let them move on and bring a tank that still needs gearing instead? If you don't, you're only going to end up sharding gear that a lesser-geared tank could do with.
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5-06-2008 @ 8:20PM
arcady0 said...
Its not a viable solution because that person who moves on leave the people who put in all the work for her gear behind, often without the ability to continue working to get the same gear for themselves.
One person gets a jump ahead off the backs of several others, who are then cut out of the loop and knocked off the ladder of the system of progression by losing a member who's role they cannot fill from the remaining ranks.
equal efffort results in vastly unequal reward.
5-06-2008 @ 10:05AM
Zaaz said...
What if badge loot was purchasable with shards at a high price? That way, if you keep looting plate, you can shard it and buy clothie gear. It adresses the guild hopping issue by adressing the progression stalling issue.
One way to do this could also be to give loot masters the power to "disempower" loot into badges of justice even if they're not enchanters. One piece of epic gear = one badge of justice. Loot enough useless gear and you'll have a nice free piece of purple awesomeness.
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5-06-2008 @ 11:23AM
Dakira said...
I've always thought placing a cool down on joining a guild after leaving another would ultimately lead to more loyalty.
Under the current system a player can change guilds as often as they like with no reason to stop them. I think that if guild membership had a cool down, so once leaving a guild you couldn't join another for X amount of days people would be much more inclined to stick with a guild and see the guilds they are in through progression.
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5-06-2008 @ 5:14PM
gnoop said...
Thus far, the badges and token + sunmote have been the best systems seen. DKP is decent but requires a lot of restrictions to be in place if you don't want to discourage new members.
With the badge system, it's much like the PVP system. You know that you'll get your new item after X runs of Y. Not as glamorous as random drops, but it at least eliminates you having run the same instance for weeks, only to lose the roll each time to someone that's either never or on respecs the next week.
I admit, I love seeing a boss drop something I need, but if collecting 100 badges nets me the same result, I'll take it as well. Considering in some cases, the 100 badges is faster, I'm not really complaining.
We could be even less glamorous about it and tweak the Sunwell system further. Just have it drop boss tokens. You get X tokens per boss which, with a Sunmote, can be exchanged for anything on that bosses loot table. No more random drops outside super-special things. Here's your token. Use it. The one nice plus here is that it fixes the tier token issue that was especially prevalent in the T4/5 tokens (Defender, anyone?).
In the end, we've got a few loot systems in place to help the problem. They're not sexy or overly interesting, but they do provide the end result of loot.
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