If the players behaved perfectly rationally, and were seeking to maximize rewards, the top 30 players would all seek each other out and form a guild, and the next 30 would do the same, and so on. Given the difficulties of coordinating (in-game chat is terrible), the difficulties of proving performance, and the general variability of people’s performance as their interest fluctuates, or real life interferes, as well as players dropping the game, or new players joining, the field is constantly in flux, with people slowly shuffling towards the rational distribution. This is in itself surprising, because humans don’t tend to behave very rationally.
So in my mind, the questions are thus: Why are player behaving so uncharacteristically rationally? What discourages them from doing so in other contexts? Is there a compelling reason for the developers to attempt to shape this behavior?
You’ve presented it as a given that dedication and loyalty are values that should be rewarded, but given the tone of the thread, I’m not sure that’s a widely held view, at least not within the context of the game. So what inspires loyalty in other contexts? Why do people choose to form groups with other people who aren’t necessarily as capable as themselves? Locality often has something to do with it, like with sports teams generally being based on a common city or school. The Internet makes location largely irrelevant, however.
People naturally form groups around perceived similarities, but the social features of GoW are so limited, and the ways for players to express an identity so hidden, that the only similarities that stick out are their performance. The in-game chat interface is awful, player avatars are shown in very few places, and the gameplay is so asynchronous that it doesn’t really matter if members of a guild are playing at the same time or not. There’s no feeling of community within a guild unless players go way out of their way to foster one.
I think that for the game to encourage loyalty, there would need to be more player interaction within the game, more opportunities for players to express an identity. It’s surprising that there’s as much competition between the top guilds as there is, considering how trophies and the guild leaderboard have no tangible rewards attached to them. It’s fundamentally a single-player game, and it doesn’t really matter what guild you’re in, only that you’re in one, and it’s got equally active people in it. They could have implemented the same reward and progression structure on an individual player basis, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Guilds are currently just people playing alone, together. Maybe Guild Wars will change that. A lot seems to be hanging on it.
