Need Moar Guild

My wife and I had an interesting discussion the other day about the nature of guilds and the needs they fill for different people. It should be said here that my wife after being in a fairly decent raiding guild for a while, has moved up in the world and now belongs to the #2 raiding guild on the server, while I continue to piddle along in my very social, occasionally-pretends-like-they're-going-to-get-some-raiding done guild. Here's the funny bit : for a brief period of time, my wife was a member of my guild before their lack of raiding drove her to distraction and she left for greener pastures. And yet, she's still friends with most of the people there and occasionally opines about wishing she could be there, if only they would actually raid (which, as mentioned, they don't, though we're in the middle of a new year's resolution to raid more which hasn't died yet. I expect it any day though.). And I would like to raid more, also, if not on my wife's level, but I guess I'm too sociable to cut the cord. I like the word "loyal", here, because it sounds better without some of the stigma now attached to the word "social", and also because I think it better describes me -- I've never /gquit, always hung on despite various dissatisfactions until the guild imploded around me (twice, now). Anyway,

What if you could be in two guilds at once?

They wouldn't both be *called* guilds, mind you. We didn't really come up with a good name for it, but for lack of a better phrase, call one (the social one) your "guild" and the other (the serious-bizniz-get-things-done one) your "raid team". /g triggers your guild chat, /rt (or something similar) triggers your raid chat. Different /who rosters as well, obviously. It's not so much that I would miss my friends if I left guild, because they're still on my friends list, but the peripheral almost-friends who aren't there because I'm used to just looking for them on the guild tab.

What would you gain?

I think you would gain a certain clarity of purpose that is sometimes missing, and to bad effect on guilds occasionally. I think everyone wants to see raid content, on some level, even if it's one day a week running naxx. Too often people fall into traps where they join a social guild, are frustrated by its lack of raid progress, and then leave. Sometimes they leave after several months of general complaints about how the guild needs to do more, but the guild doesn't really want to, b/c different people have different expectations. Tension and drama is created.

On the smaller side of that coin, I suspect that many people in raiding guilds are hurt by the soulless, machine-driven nature of high-end, hardcore entities like that. Would they be helped by having a social outlet where they weren't expected to be totally l33t and professional all the time? I rather suspect that they would be.

But I like my guild for both!

Congratulations on your rare find. But I don't think the system would necessarily screw you. If you wanted to make a social guild composed of mostly members from your raid team, you could. If I wanted to make a raid team composed around the nucleus of people in my social guild who can actually raid, I could do that too. There's room for overlap. Or not even overlap, if your raid team likes to be social and has that happy mix, you could do everything in one group like you currently do now. Splitting the two up would merely help achieve clarity of purpose, which I think is sometimes lacking.

Who loses?

There are negatives here, primarily for PvPers, though it is well known that hardcore pvpers are a very small minority compared to hardcore raiders. You can't organize pvp events very well in a social guild (believe me, I've tried), and they don't really classify as a raid team.

Levelling guilds would also be hurt a little by that classification, though it seems obvious to me that they'd fall more into the "Guild" category. Hard to tell though, sometimes.

And in the end?

It's not something I think that will ever be realized, but it was an interesting idea to toy around with. As my wife so cannily observed, when cataclysm hits with guild talent trees and such it's going to imbue more guild loyalty, not less, which might make a system like this more difficult to implement. On the other hand, maybe they would jive together well, since I have to think giving people the option to be in (essentially) two guilds at once would encourage more loyalty to those. More needs are being met, less frustration about guild Progress leading to less drama-quitting...*shrug*. Who knows?