How do you feel about Guilds now?

[Dylan Windwalker]

It's been about a month since Guilds released in Summer Update and I feel like it would be useful for readers who are still unsure about joining a Guild or are now just logging in for the first time in a while to get to know more about the Guild experience. How do you all feel about Guilds so far?

Other questions to consider:

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?

3) Is a Guild worth joining?

I personally have had a positive experience with Guilds because I've gotten to meet a lot of new people over here in Central and it's given me things to do rather than just hanging around (like decorating and farming Azoth through rematches/keybosses). I learned a bit about Castle Magic already too. But at the same time, our Guild has reached the point where we've unlocked all of the easier areas of our lair and the things we need to do are quite difficult so the hype is slower. Nothing has really happened in the Guild that's really made me question whether it was a good decision to invest my time in the Guilds and I really hope everybody feels similarly.

[ValdusWildheart]

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

• Yes, but that's not necessarily a good thing. My expectation was far less than the hype.
• I also didn't expect them to be a long-term integral part of the game. With the raid door closed, that's obv not helped.

2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?

• I've done what I was comfortable doing. That's been OK. Mostly farming azoth, but I have a passive setup with pet scout talent vs. actively farming rematches so less time than otherwise required.
• Even with my setup, I am now done with collecting azoth. The destruction of resources to get to the school azoth needed to continue is beyond ridiculous, so that ends. I'll keep enough for a couple of raid keys, but not sure those will be used.
• I would have liked to do raids, but without a max wizard I knew I would not get into a guild doing them.

3) Is a Guild worth joining?

• Depends on your goals and the guild.
• For me - I do think it would have been more of a positive experience if I could have done at least a few raids. I'm not into decorating though. Also, I've made some of my best in-game friends on dungeon crawls and getting hammered by difficult bosses and brainstorming strategy. I understand for others that's the LAST way they every want to make friends. YMMV.

[unicorngirl]

It's been about a month since Guilds released in Summer Update and I feel like it would be useful for readers who are still unsure about joining a Guild or are now just logging in for the first time in a while to get to know more about the Guild experience. How do you all feel about Guilds so far?

Other questions to consider:

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?

3) Is a Guild worth joining?

I personally have had a positive experience with Guilds because I've gotten to meet a lot of new people over here in Central and it's given me things to do rather than just hanging around (like decorating and farming Azoth through rematches/keybosses). I learned a bit about Castle Magic already too. But at the same time, our Guild has reached the point where we've unlocked all of the easier areas of our lair and the things we need to do are quite difficult so the hype is slower. Nothing has really happened in the Guild that's really made me question whether it was a good decision to invest my time in the Guilds and I really hope everybody feels similarly.

1. i guess they are what i expected - i didn't actually plan on joining one, but my bf has had a medical thing happen with a slow recovery. wizard is kind of our wind down at the end of the day and it's been literal years since i was on without him, so when a friend asked me to join a guild i thought "why not". i was worried about having a bossed around aspect, but so far it's ok. the messages are helpful, and you can help however and whenever you feel like it and still work towards common goals.

2. the time has been ok, i've done key boss farming and helped a lower level guild member quest some. those are both things i enjoy doing we are even kicking around the idea of a beastmoon group or two, so we've been teaching people in the guild who want to do beastmoon but haven't tried it before.

i think it's still to early to tell if guilds are worth investing a lot of time in, but the thing is you can always leave if you decide you want to. so far, the things that have been involved have been fun, and even if i eventually leave the guild i'm in i won't regret helping everyone in it. so there's nothing really lost. this is a game, after all, and if the goal is enjoying time spent, well, if you stay as long as you enjoy it, it isn't wasted time even if you eventually leave.

3. i think guilds are worth joining if you are interested in them. so far it seems like all of the goals take a while to achieve, so it's not something to do if you want instant results. you really have to put in time to get any of it done. in my guild we haven't unlocked the first thing yet. we're close though, so then we'll see what the next goal is.

[Willowdreamer]

Are Guilds what I expected? -- Not really. They seem to have been set up by some very combat-oriented folks, and I'm a more casual player, so I was hoping for more cooperative functions. For the Wizened Wizards Guild, we all seem to be pretty casual, so our lack of speed doesn't seem to bother anyone yet, and we've always been helpers of each other as a group up till now, so not much has changed except having the common space for meetings, decorating, etc. For the Central Guild, it was more Raid focused from the beginning, so the lack of Raids has pretty much brought things to a halt. I haven't seen too much helping of lower level wizards going on there, but then I joined it with a secondary wizard, so I may have missed some messages...

Do I think my time in the Guild has been valuable? -- Wizened Wizards, I think so. I feel it's a more cohesive group, albeit smaller than we'd like at the moment. For the Central Guild, I hope that my small contribution has been helpful, but really it feels like the frontrunners have outstripped the casuals amongst us. Once Raids return, we shall see.

Is a Guild worth joining? -- I think it can be, there is a lot of potential. Like any group in real life, much depends on one's own goals matching the needs/goals of the Guild, and the communication between individuals.

[Ravino.]

My feelings are slightly more positive than what I had expected, despite being a requirement for raids they're not as impactful as I feared they might become - you can choose not to join and be okay, at least for now - but this isn't exactly a good thing, it eases some of my fears of KI cutting off not-hyper-social players from new features (as they've done with some other player demographics) but it also means guilds aren't a very compelling addition.

But to answer each of your points: 1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

• Not as impactful or compelling of a feature as I expected. I was surprised to see how few of my in-game acquaintances were joining or engaging with guilds.
• Discovering the existence of triad and school azoths was an absolute shock to me, I wasn't expecting the system to be any harsher than it already seemed to be. I doubt players will be willing to farm for so much azoth once the hype around guilds dies down.

2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?

• I joined the Indominable Warriors with some friends and a few of the old M4H crew. We're not very active but I had some nice moments so there's definitely value to it.
• On the matter of azoth farming, I've been collecting them with the scout talents while I play other games or watch series, so I guess I could say my time is being very efficiently spent, but it doesn't feel like I'm actually playing Wiz.
  In truth my real entertainment is always on another window, so I can't credit the guild for giving me a good time in these hours - one could say I'm enjoying myself in spite of what I'm doing in the guild.

3) Is a Guild worth joining?

• There's no cost for joining so it's hard to make an argument against being in one.
• The only situation where being is a guild is a negative is (ironically) if you're interested in running raids, this way you can join your friend's or a content creator's guild when they're looking to raid. Having your character "loyal" to a single guild only limits your ability to partake in raids.
• If the question was framed as "are the guild features worth engaging in?", then my answer would be largely a negative. At the very least, it's not worth it to go out of your way for the sake of the azoth-fueled features.

[millot]

me i just stay on the outside and listen to the chat, that made up my mind not to do them.

[BaronvonWolf]

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?
for the elites and ppl who can always hang out with the best of the best gear. yep thats how i see and still feel about guilds
with no restrictions when you leave or join a guild and then you have the raid gates disabled

2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?
not really but now i dont wanna leave it just to try and find a new one

3) Is a Guild worth joining?
prob not with the main thing being raids but it can also be a nice club for side content

[XanderSilver64]

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

The way guilds were implemented in Wizard101 is very surprising to me. Not only the fact that they did it at all, but the fact that the way they implemented guilds promotes the very thing that I remember them wanting to avoid when they said they never wanted to add guilds in the past. Doing some research, there was once a line in their actual Code of Conduct stating: “Player to player item trading and guilds are not and will not be a part of Wizard101.” I don’t know whether it was the new staff or the acquisition that changed KingsIsle’s stance on this, but I never expected them to implement guilds at all, therefore guilds are not what I expected them to be, ‘cause they exist.

If we’re talking about my expectations of guilds after they were announced and I learned about them, then they’re still not at all what I expected. I never expected guilds to be so exclusive since I always thought the reason they hadn’t been added was to avoid “promoting elitism.” If that was ever the case, I guess it isn’t a concern for KingsIsle anymore, because almost every aspect of the way guilds were implemented promote exclusivity and elitism.

When I first saw the Azoth requirements to unlock things, I thought to myself: “this only looks unreasonable because guilds are new; this is something meant to be worked on over the course of weeks/months.” That impression quickly fell apart when I learned that the level requirement to create a guild was max level, and that you only get Azoth for doing very specific things in the game that you have to go out of your way to do. That was far from my first impression that a group of friends new to the game could slowly develop their guild as they leveled, eventually gaining more friends and Azoth along their travels through the spiral, until they eventually unlocked Raids and had the level/friends/gear to take them on.

I also did not expect a level limit that was as low as 50 members. Considering that to do Raids, you need 12 high level and geared up wizards who can log in at the same time and are willing to do such “hardcore” content, there’s no reason for any guild to want to accept a lower level player, an ungeared player, or a casual player, much less any player that is any combination of the three. The fact that Raids are within the guild, rather than a dungeon somewhere in the Spiral that guilds would band together to do (such as the Darkmoor runs I’ve done with my guild) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in any other MMOs I’ve tried.

I also didn’t expect the guild UI to be so lacking. I think that overall, KingsIsle has some of the best UI out there. I’ve watched my friends quickly learn how to use this game’s UI with little to no coaching/direction on my part, which is an oft overlooked feature of MMOs, but an exceptionally important one. The guild UI (and honestly, the whole social menu) however, leaves a lot to be desired. Interacting with other members of the guild is cumbersome and awkward. It’s hard/impossible to quickly tell who is all online in the guild. There’s no in-game guild chat, which just encourages people to go to external places such as Discord to communicate with their guildmates, which is strange for a game meant to be safe for children as those interactions can’t be monitored by KingsIsle. I was hoping it would be less necessary to add all of your friend’s wizards because you’d be able to interact with them via the guild, but that just isn’t what guilds turned out to be.


2) Do you think your time in your Guild has been valuable?

Yes. I did a majority of the heavy lifting for organizing the creation of my guild, and it’s certainly been worthwhile. I’ve met several new wonderful people who I met because of my guild, and that’s more than I ever hoped to accomplish when I decided to make one.


3) Is a Guild worth joining?

Sure, if you like interacting with other people and/or you're part of the target audience for guilds. The new friends I met in my guild are nice, but the only thing I really wanted/needed a guild for was so that my friend group could easily add each other’s wizards. At the moment, my guild is simply an excuse to build a little community that includes more than just the friend group I returned to the game with. The heart of my guild is in our Discord server rather than the actual in-game structure, and I say that because the only thing that would change if KingsIsle deleted guilds tomorrow is that my new-to-the-game friends wouldn’t have access to the tapestries I left in the guild house for them.

To give a definitive “yes” to this one, I’d need to see some changes such as:

• Increasing the guild member limit
  
• Improving the guild UI to make it easier to interact with your online guildmates
  
• Adding more ways to gain Azoth
  
  • Adding Azoth as a drop from any fight you do with a guildmate
    
  • Adding Azoth as just random drops in general
  
  
• More appealing benefits to being in a guild

However, I suspect that KingsIsle doesn’t necessarily want everyone to be a part of a guild, and just added them to serve the people who have their new maxed out gearsets within a month after new worlds drop. It doesn’t seem to be designed as a feature for the wider playerbase, even though I think they can still develop it to be a very positive addition to the game for everyone.

[Sierra SeaSong]

Personally, I think the biggest problem with the way KI implemented guilds is allowing people to join multiple guilds.

Everyone is making a guild, because hey I want to be in charge, then going elsewhere to do raids, not growing or training their own guilds.

Divided loyalty and resources is not helping the cause imo.

I would be curious as to how many guilds are already basically dead. I know the last one I was in is, no one has said a work in weeks.

[Ravino.]

1) Is Guilds what you expected them to be?

The way guilds were implemented in Wizard101 is very surprising to me. Not only the fact that they did it at all, but the fact that the way they implemented guilds promotes the very thing that I remember them wanting to avoid when they said they never wanted to add guilds in the past. Doing some research, there was once a line in their actual Code of Conduct stating: “Player to player item trading and guilds are not and will not be a part of Wizard101.” I don’t know whether it was the new staff or the acquisition that changed KingsIsle’s stance on this, but I never expected them to implement guilds at all, therefore guilds are not what I expected them to be, ‘cause they exist.

If we’re talking about my expectations of guilds after they were announced and I learned about them, then they’re still not at all what I expected. I never expected guilds to be so exclusive since I always thought the reason they hadn’t been added was to avoid “promoting elitism.” If that was ever the case, I guess it isn’t a concern for KingsIsle anymore, because almost every aspect of the way guilds were implemented promote exclusivity and elitism.

I remember this too, though their announcement of guilds didn't come as a surprise, it's already been several years since KI abandoned much of the design policies of those times to target a more selective audience. I started suspect this when they began releasing new systems without help pages or tutorials.

Once upon a time I remember J. Todd Coleman saying a key feature of Wizard101's success was it being playable on any computer and by anyone whatever they were 8 or 80, accessibility was important to them, everything they created for years made sure to account for kids, busy adults and grandparents who never played a videogame.

And then they stopped, by now KI has largely quit trying to appeal and accommodate kids and elders in new content, the new design policy seems to be that not every new content needs to accessible to everybody and this group should just stick to questing.

But now they're also starting to abandon college students and working adults with events, spellements and raids that require such high commitment they're not accessible/"worth it" to players who don't have an abundance of time and/or social resources. What's worse is a lot of players in this group WANT to engage and succeed in the new stuff but KI is basically rejecting them with either huge entry barriers and by failing to deliver an enjoyable progress rate.

To be honest this is my biggest concern about Wiz right now, I can't even guess if they're doing this in purpose or they simply don't realize how overtuned their effort-reward model is in these last updates, but either way I'm seeing too many people stuck as metaphoric "zero-heroes" of the deckathalon, BM, spellements and raids despite their interest and engagement in these systems. And I can't see anything good coming out of it.

~R