I have been a part of my guild for some two and a half years now, and I speak often about it – but my guild relationships keep me invested in the game.

For much of the last three months I have not felt invested at all in game content. This is not to say I have not been having fun because I absolutely have been – but it is my guild life that has kept me logging on. Just last week I arranged a guild gathering out of game with some 15-20 of my guildmates and their significant others. We had a wonderful time having dinner and a few drinks.

Over the last couple of years, as well as the adventuring side of the game, I have leveled 9 crafters in EQ2 to max level – one character of each crafter class. Why did I do this? So that my guildmates know that they have someone who can help them with most everything they might need.

I am not the best player in the world. Knowing how to play different character classes well does not come intuitively to me – so my tradeskillers are my contribution to my guild community.

In life you can only please some of the people some of the time. My experience is that guild life is no different. Guild leadership is certainly not for the faint hearted!.

To me, a guild is no different in purpose to things such as a Drama Ensemble, sporting team, photography group – it is a collection of different individuals bonded in a similar interest. Different guilds will have different focus – raiding, casual, tradeskilling, questing or whatever. People will come and go. Those who do not “fit” with the aims of any one guild will soon move on.

The relationships we build within guilds are no less real than any other relationships we have in life – and it is DEFINITELY what keeps me logging back on day after day.

I went to the WFP tavern to see what kind of roleplay went on and all I saw was a lone horny froglok trying to flirt with my female character; he shut up as soon as I typed MANGINA in my profile. We had amazingly cultured plat pharmers who would write poetry in their profiles, fight back in open channel, and try to bribe me to fight other plat pharmers even after I harassed them to oblivion.

I wasn’t entirely impressed with the player base. While grinding an alt warlock the tank looted a fabled item I needed so he could give it to a healer that wasn’t high enough level to wear it. Why? Because I wasn’t “being nice”. That was pretty much the last straw for me. Fortunately for him this was pre-eq2flames.

I’m sure all of this has changed since I left. I’m content with Blackburrow finally.

From presonnal experience, I can say my Guild kept me playing more than the game itself sometimes. I mean, how often did I log in with an objective in mind, and was completely sidetracked right off the bat by a guildmate needing help, or another needing to chat about personnal stuff?

Guild leaders and Guild officers need alot ingame tools to help them keep track of various aspects of Guild managing. One thing that guild members keep forgetting sometime (and that Kendricke doesn’t remind them often enough) is that guild managing is a fulltime job in itself sometime, when you are truly dedicated to running a serious Guild.

The more tools available to automate the tasks, the more time the leaders will play, while still having the same quality of management. And a well managed Guild attracts serious players, creates better member relations, and keep players playing…

Does not compute.

Using EQ2 as an example I have quit and been pulled back into it at least 3 or 4 times now. What keeps bringing me back? Remembering all the good friends and good times I have had with my guild there.

Truthfully, while I admit it IS a complication — a lot of it has to do with your own hardware – or perhaps I should say that many people throw the word “lag” around when referring to completely different problems. You are talking about server lag/latency/ping issues, which is valid and at times does occur. However, many people just see their machines crawling inside a Tier 3 guildhall, and then crash out — that can very well be a local client hardware issue that has nothing to do with server-side load at all, but rather the amount of particle-based geometry and polygonal frames present within a fully loaded guild hall that the user’s machine is simply not equipped to handle. I can speak firsthand because since having upgraded my computer 9 months ago, I have not had a single spot of that particular type of “lag,” at all. My guild’s hall is fully loaded T3 and, although it is now and then jittery to run through, I do not crash out, etc. Prior to upgrading, I faced the same issues as everyone else.

But to get back on the point … a lot of the humdrum on the SOE board is just that. Truthfully, AB has been the highest population server for most of this game’s lifetime, and the actual latency, for the vast majority of that, has been perfectly fine.

As for the fantasy of coming to a full server. Well, any server is what you make of it, isn’t it? I find that a certain type of player is unwilling to create groups or take a proactive role in finding them, and that type is never happy, no matter what.

You do realize that, right? Right?