Slash and Burn

Coming off the news that Funcom is consolidating its Age of Conan servers from 40 some down to 18, I pondered the status of the few people I personally know who still play a MMO. Two friends strike me in particular, a (now) married couple whom I met back when I played Everquest II. Around the time I quit EQII, they did too. Whilst I wandered back to World of Warcraft, they cranked up the then recently released Lord of the Rings Online. Some months later, I read of their heroic antics on the old EQII guild board and got inspired to try the game. At that time, both had toons in the low 40s, some ten levels shy of the cap. I ran with them and their tiny guild for a couple of weeks, but it turned out their interest was waning just as mine waxed. One day I noticed neither had logged in for a days. Days turned to weeks. Weeks to months. They never did return.

I kept following their exploits though. They continued posting on the same forum board, this time under the then newly released MMO Tabulas Rosa. They chewed through that Sci-Fi game pretty quickly, moving on to Pirates of the Burning Sea. And then Age of Conan. And then Warhammer. They threw in some WoW somewhere in the middle of that mix, I couldn't honestly tell you when. Or how. And with each new MMO, they created a matching guild or clan.

I'm not sure what my point is here. I'm not criticising them for playing multiple MMOs because I do the same thing. The difference, I guess, is I don't continually form and reform guilds. Guild management, everything from formation to maintenance, smacks too closely to that of a real world job. It puzzles me to no end that the couple never seems weary of the chore.

Scratch that.

They do weary of it, but then turn around and start the whole process anew with a brand new shiny MMO. I'm guessing they crave character creation and early leveling over end-game content; they have a blast at early to mid levels, but then grow jaded with the game (or MMO gameplay in general) toward the cap. Which is fine in and of itself. It's perfectly natural, even healthy, to play a variety of games. But constantly hammering together guilds with each flavor of the month MMO? That's not so good.

As often as they've created and abandoned guilds, I guess my advice to couple would be to continue trying the latest and greatest of the MMO genre, but forgo founding their own guilds and instead join something already established. There are plenty of casual guilds across all MMOs and most don't mind adding anonymous folk to their ranks. A fan of early to midland MMO content could play to their heart's content and then walk away when the experience sours, all without one single drop of sweat devoted to guild creation. It could be they get satisfaction from creating and running guilds, but I'll bet my highest level WoW toon that their membership likely tires of their inevitable abandonment.

Which makes MMOs some of the strangest, most frustrating social experiments of the last decade. I'd advise a budding sociologist biding to make a name for themselves to tackle this topic; I think it's ripe with critical analysis.