On my initial WoW guild exodus in the summer of 2021, I did try to find a replacement guild before going back, then leaving and creating my own.

One thing struck me about the process – finding a guild, establishing you are a fit for a recruitment ad, is hard. It’s hard because the tools in World of Warcraft make it hard, it’s hard because the ways in which we communicate what a group is like to outsiders is suboptimal, and it’s hard because the expectation management process isn’t something a lot of groups think about. I certainly hadn’t before, not as an officer, and not until I founded my newest group.

It’s been discussed in comments on sites like Massively a bit now, but finding a guild in an MMO is hard. A lot of that is put on tools and interface, and I think that is fair to a point – but I think that a big part also boils down to how groups advertise themselves to new players and how time-involved and difficult the process of finding a new group can be.

Most guilds in WoW do even worse than like, Savage raid statics in FFXIV, because the community has settled on the emptiest, most meaningless vernacular to discuss what a group wants and is aiming for. You push AOTC? Cool, but what’s the timeframe? Do you do normal first? Are people expected to be gearing outside of raid through Mythic Plus and even PvP or are you guys just slamming through the raid? What kind of player skill are you working with as an average? In FFXIV, groups have these tiers to their dedication – casual, midcore, hardcore – they have hours per week, and they have a tier-clearing goal defined by time – full tier week 1, full tier by week 3, etc.

Most WoW guilds I saw in my hunt post drivel like this:

and like – what the fuck does that even mean? I mean, on some level, I have a vague idea what it means. But there are a lot of genuine things to pick at with something like this. What is a good player, anyways? Are they good at the basic mechanical premise of the game? Are they good at their chosen class/spec? Are they experts who can generally roll with almost anything in a short window of acclimation? Even worse still is the “fits our group” callout, which is funny to me because there is no real way to know, sometimes even years deep into an engagement with a group. On a trial basis, I’m not going to be hyper-active or speaking up that much. Players will often reserve letting someone new into the group until much later, after a lot of feeling out. Even then, groups can often hide and obscure the best and worst parts of their group dynamic. Do they have an officer who will demand heads roll if you are rude to their friends but will not even so much as ask their friends to apologize if the shoe is on the other foot? Is the group arranged into cliques that run content together without inviting other people in but would bristle if called out on it? Is there some tryhard asshole who will shame you for being 5.2% behind them on DPS to the point that they berate you on stream with stuff they would never say to your face?

This fits a general trend I saw in a lot of guilds I observed during my time in the wilderness. So many WoW guilds are just selling a reheated package of being “good” at the game, but being good is a spectrum that encompasses game system mastery, class mastery, spec mastery, role mastery, and skillsets that are so varied and broad I can’t be bothered to make a run-on sentence long enough to contain them. Very few WoW guilds are open and honest about their level of progression, the behaviors of the group, and what it means.

One raid team I joined, from a fairly-decent guild on Dalaran, advertised with memes. Their core game offering was “good” at the game and friendly environment, with Normal to Heroic raid progression. But good was ill-defined, and the Heroic switchover was not dated or timed out and had a vague idea about how performant a player would have to be to get accepted to run Heroic. The group was fun to play with, mostly – Discord voice was lively, progression was okay, but I also observed that the Normal group had a lot of gaps in their play quality and there sometimes wasn’t enough analysis of wipes and issues in the moment for my taste. Granted, that’s my taste – but it speaks to an issue with the “good” guild advertising, which is that everyone has a different expectation of what that means.

For me a good guild is mechanically-decent, teachable players, able to break-down and analyze wipes and issues in real time, and a group that is strongly-set on self-improvement for their own sake and not because of meter-shaming or external motivation. I had a group with this one that was socially more of what I was looking for, but also wasn’t really “good” in the way I had hoped. Our expectations were misaligned. I liked them, still have some of them on my friends list, and wouldn’t say they were bad or anything – I just had a different expectation and as a newcomer, when it was clear my expectation was out of alignment with the group norm, I left.

I think a lot of WoW guilds and raid teams aren’t always willing to think about the game in these terms, because I think it would sometimes reveal uncomfortable issues with the group, and some would even recoil if presented with such an analysis of their group. It’s a lot easier to deal with mentally in some ways if you don’t question the underlying foundation of a group, because that might lead to challenges of your perception, and as a leader, it can be deflating. If you start an expansion with 26 players and get ambitious enough to push Mythic raiding before dropping to 11 in the space of half a tier, it can be mentally less taxing to just open recruitment and push ahead instead of reckoning with what might have driven out 15 players in under 4 months, especially if at least a portion of that push out is systemic issues that someone you dismissed tried to warn you about (okay, I’m going to stop winking and tipping my hand now). But in the long term, what is the better solution? Level-setting and establishing the principles that run your group, I think.

But to come back to this topic and set forth the argument I want to make, we need to stop off for a quick diversion.

A video I have been meaning to talk about for literal months is Dan Olson’s “Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft.” In it, Olson breaks down player behavior and discusses the ways in which WoW’s player community is often an unforgiving and bleak place, both because of ingrained player behaviors and the ways in which the game encourages or fosters some aspects of this response.

What I found most interesting is the existing academic and psychological study of play behaviors that could loosely classify players into two categories – regular and instrumental. A regular player just plays the game – they probably have goals and things they want, but they just get there when they get there, not concerned with optimizing the journey, while instrumental players seek optimization as a means of achieving a goal. They’ll pick the meta spec, select the perfect talents, perfectly gear and enhance their equipment, and learn the optimal rotations to play. Instrumental play can also go in a direction towards non-play optimizations, like reducing graphical quality settings and creating awful, cacophonous user interfaces designed to surface the most pressing gameplay concerns and make responding to them easier and more straightforward.

I like this framework because it isn’t just loosely established by players or by feeling, but by actual academic rigor going back decades. If a form of play offers concrete goals, players will often become instrumental in order to seek the best path to those rewards.

In a single-player game, this is all fine and dandy, because the only person affected by your pursuit of goals and the methodology behind that is you. In a social game, especially one where the socialization systems are the heart of what makes it worthwhile and unique, this can become a challenge. Like Olson, I want to draw a fine line and say that instrumental play isn’t inherently bad or incentivizing of bad social interaction. A lot of us, especially at this point in the life of a game like WoW, are instrumental players. I use optimized talent builds, pursue my goals aggressively through optimized play and the fastest possible routes in front of me, and I surround myself with players that loosely align with my goals. Done respectfully, you can be an instrumental player and still have a well-worn spot in a social group and players around you that enjoy playing with you and that you enjoy playing with. Wanting to be good – wanting to achieve something in the game – does not make you a bad person or bad player.

What I will put forward is that I think there is a third type I would establish alongside the much-better established types mentioned in the video – a transactional player.

If a regular player just plays for fun and an instrumental player plays to have fun and seek goals in an optimized manner, what is transactional play? It is anyone who plays exclusively in service of their goals – they optimize more harshly and participate in social gameplay only as means to an end, and are only reasonable to deal with when their terms and goals are being met because that is the only time they are having fun.

A regular player can stop and smell the roses anytime. An instrumental player will often stop and smell the roses too, but only as long as it does not take them off their goal substantially. A transactional player will never stop to smell the roses, unless the roses are their goal. In social groups, what this functionally results in is that regular players can enjoy social environments and have fun with other people, instrumental players can do the same, but have a focus they are working towards and they may try to talk other people into playing more like them, while transactional players assume everyone is working towards their goal and will vibe with the group so long as that is the case, but should a divergence from that goal emerge, they will become difficult to deal with.

And despite this, I also want to say that in my experience, players I would categorize as transactional can still be social, can still be good group members at times, and can integrate into a variety of groups. The beauty of MMO gameplay models is that there are a lot of different parts of a game and so while a transactional player might be with your group for raid progression, they might be more loose and enjoyable in dungeon runs or open world content. However, transactional players are often the first to fold at signs of adversity, because they see their membership in a raid team as a transaction (hence the name), and if it becomes clear to their perception that they aren’t getting what they “purchased” with their time, they will (sadly often) become assholes, burning things to the ground around them.

A lot of guilds fail to recognize when they have such players because there is a desire to not account for how the group is composed and what players within it want. Doing so often asks leadership to ask hard questions about how they handle issues, about what the group is actually doing, and to determine how many players would stick with the guild/raid through issues and problems. Answering those questions can suck and feel really bad, especially if the answer on cohesion is no. A lot of groups are a venn-diagram of these 3 player types, with overlap some of the time. You might have instrumental and even transactional players who also feel some form of social bond with the group, or social players who push goals and exhibit instrumental behaviors. The core issue is not that these types cannot coexist, but that the group as a whole needs to be aligned in terms of overall goal for shared play and expectations of how that is met – how fast, how performant, and how the group is compensated for their time in terms of in-game rewards, in-group recognition, and the like. When a group is willing to look at these issues honestly and deal with them, you can harmonize a lot better. If your leadership is unwilling to look at these, well…you’ll hemorrhage players and fail to understand why. That effect is amplified if you purposefully cast your gaze away from those misalignments and deliberately choose not to act on them.

The worst players I have ever dealt with are deeply transactional and unwilling to understand their own role in a group and how they might affect things. They’ll spend hours (literal hours) complaining about how people aren’t held accountable enough, about how everyone else is failing the group (our tanks suck, our healers are bad, etc), and then leave it alone. They cannot fail themselves, but can only be failed. They drive players out by being assholes, because for them, through their eyes, they have purchased raid progression and loot with their time and players that make mistakes are not holding up their end of the transaction. Instrumental play, for me, only concerns the self – what can I do better? Transactional play is the other side of the coin – I am already good, and so everyone else in this group must meet or exceed me (to my satisfaction).

So if your group fails to account for these motivation sets, fails to account for expectations and make sure everyone is at least in a loose alignment, then cracks form quickly. The guild you thought was all friends and fun has a core friend group that is largely instrumental but gets along, and then the transactional players on the side will ride things out until they aren’t getting what they want and bail, becoming absolutely prickly jerks to deal with in the process, and the regular players kind of watch and make decisions based on that – and that will also often involve departures. So you burn the candle at both ends – losing transactional-first players as progression stalls and goals are not met and losing regular players who often are enjoyable to be around because the atmosphere this creates feels pretty bad. Suddenly your friend group is the only thing left and you’re not able to pursue goals anymore, because you don’t have enough players. Hard to raid Mythic when you barely have enough people online to sustain a regular raid!

To me, this is the pitiable but preventable fate of so many groups that advertise as being “good.” You need more than that, to be honest about the goals, skill-level, and tolerances of the group. You need to create an environment where everyone is in alignment, at least on the purpose of the time you spend together as a whole group. That requires some amount of intellectual honesty, a willingness to confront what is “good” play and what level your group is actually at and to ensure that everyone is on the same page, or at least in the same book. I think that the number one killer of raid teams and social groups in MMOs is nothing more than unmet expectations, and that comes about mostly when people are not aligned in goal and purpose.

In truth, one of the biggest challenges WoW specifically faces as a game is that a large amount of the social environment is built upon expecting years, even decades, of understanding of the game and its underlying systems. One thing I have learned to keep in mind quite sharply is that there is no use being mad at a player who doesn’t do something the game never teaches them and that only comes into play once in a given scenario. In Sepulcher, on the dread lords boss, hunters could be menaces with hostile pets attacking and killing players, so the solution would be to dismiss pets. However, the game doesn’t really teach players to do that in any scenario, and if you’ve never encountered a scenario where you benefit for the dismissal, then you wouldn’t know to do that. Now, to someone who has played the game for 15-18 years, this feels like an obvious thing, but to someone only 18 months into their WoW tenure, is it fair to expect them to know that and blow up at them for not knowing? I don’t think so, and I think the way forward is that you teach that player and help them grow instead of yelling at them and pushing them out of your group with hostility.

One of the guiding principles I’ve had with my new guild and raising up a new team is that I’ve focused in on learning to a high extent. We have a person with over a decade of WoW play but no prior raid experience and someone playing a new class for Dragonflight after just barely two years in the game prior to that. We’ve found success because we are explicitly a group that is learning and raising up new players, that is not just for experienced WoW veterans. As raid lead, it takes so little time for me to just slow down an explanation, open for questions, and think of how to distill things into their essential forms so that the new players can get it and execute against those mechanics. The environment is centered not on just being good at the game, but fun gameplay, self-improvement, and steady progress, and we clear those bars. Raid night is fun, people do learn and grow, and we steadily knock over new bosses.

I think that my time away from guilds in Shadowlands and my time in FFXIV have both sharpened my expectations of what comprises a good raid group and how you pitch and find players for one. I think that there is a degree of honesty you can bring forward that actually works – that being willing to admit to being a work in progress, to being willing to deal with newcomers to the game and the issues that can bring, and to be willing to confront what it is that your group wants to aim at as an objective – all of these are positives that can bring up a raid team to a level beyond what the average transactional player might expect. My raid doesn’t have anyone I would assess as transactional now, and it makes the environment better overall. We’re aligned in purpose on raid nights and do our level best to combat cliques for non-raid activities and I think it shows in the results we get. The group average skill level isn’t the highest, and yet we’re still near and in the top 50 on our server and keeping pace with a lot of guilds who advertise as being “good.”

I think as a genre, the MMO offerings we have could do a lot better at offering better recruitment and player analysis tools, and I think there is validity to challenging how threadbare and lacking tools for recruitment and group building are in these games. But at the same time, I think a lot of the issues I see with recruitment and group building in MMOs boil down to a failure of communication – what you want, what your goal is, and how you’re willing to get there. I know a lot of guilds that think of themselves as a friend group but would be hurt to understand how many members aren’t there for anything but goals of their own, and I think that players being more willing to confront these issues would be a help for groups like that. If the offer you make externally to new players is more in-line with actual outcomes and sets expectations on the correct track, everyone benefits and it makes navigating guild listings far less of a gamble.

At a certain point, you have to be willing to be honest with yourself, your group, and the players outside that you might want as to what it is you want, what you are offering, and how all of that comes together. If you are, you can accidentally gain players and have a fun raid environment that sees people genuinely enjoying the time spent playing together. If you’re not, you can drive players out in droves such that your ambitions are overshadowed by the consequences of your lack of alignment and you’re stuck seeking help from outside, whether a few new faces or a merger. Hopefully you don’t have to pull that ripcord once, burn a group, then repeat the run to the same result and not have that lifeline available to you! I imagine that would be embarrassing, but I also suppose that embarrassment requires the introspection you would lack in such a scenario. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

yes this post is partially just petty running a small victory lap but at least I can be honest about it