World of Warcraft®

I was curious about the overall feeling of people on this server when it comes down to the idea of guild cannibalism. What I mean is that a smaller guild cannibalizes another small guild to become a slight larger guild, which then eats another guild and so on.

I am just curious about this because I know we have quite a few smaller guilds out there that all seem to want the same things, and yet nobody really seems to think of the idea of just collapsing a bunch of guilds into one larger guild.

Is it that people have too much invested in a specific guild name, or is it because loot rules are too different to learn a new way, or what?

Noticed this type of thing multiple times during my "career" on this server, and really other servers I have looked at. You get just enough people to do a 10-man raid, but then people don't show up, and pretty much every week it's a "guild run" with a couple or more pugs.

Wouldn't it just make more sense to consolidate all these smaller groups into a larger one so that you can have a more regular set of people to choose form for raids? And what about guild achievements and whatnot as well..wouldn't more people help with that?

Again, just wanting to hear what people think about it.

I CAN understand RP-focused guilds not wanting to group up, because each group has it's own storyline. But for raiding groups, it's never made sense not to have a larger pool of players.

In the ideal it's a great idea. But then I have had this happen to a guild I was in while I was struggling to get to level cap.
The officers and leader of the guild wanted to get further into raiding, we had about five people close to 80, but not quite there who would easily fill the roles. Everyone in the guild was pretty close, all friends. We were about a week out from getting into raiding as a matter of fact.
One night it was announced the leader and officers were holding a meeting, and we'd all get to air any concerns and decide as a guild if we wanted a merger. Nothing was set in stone.
A day before the meeting guild message went something like; "Wer'e merging with <guild title here>, you are welcome to come, or leave. Non 80s will not be raiding though with us anytime soon."
Shocked I asked around trying to figure out what was going on, they had decided that joining a hard core raid guild was a great idea and didn't really care that the majority of the guild was now out in the cold. A lot of friendships were broken over it, mostly because our "friends" chose gear over us.
There was much drama, mostly over the fact our friendships with eachother were now pretty much left ruined. Even though I left on my own accord before the merger, I didn't leave on bad terms with anyone. However, I soon learned that I was most definatley out on my own as all but one of those officers/leader simply stopped talking to me.
The remaining members who were now guildless all transferred out, one even quit wow because she was so disillusioned with it all, and I came here.
My experience is the ugly side of a merger, and I know it's not always like that but at the same time, this is the sort of thing that can totally kill that circle of friends you have all too easily.
Personally, I have and always will value my friends over any purple coloured pixel. It's a shame so many people don't. As a result of all this, I really hate it when it happens to guilds I am part of.

Hrm, I guess that makes sense. It seems overall that the badness comes from guild leaders just deciding the merge with other guilds because of their own greed.

But does that even happen when you have things like multiple guilds usually attending the same raids anyway? Like I've been a +1 to a lot of raid groups in which there are 2 or 3 guilds making up the group (and then me), and even though these people act like a guild, they never seem to talk about a merger.

You also run into issues regarding the restructuring of previously set interpersonal relationships and expectations. You generally don't have the same rapport with new officers and members as you had with the old, and there isn't always a clear way to move forward when troubles arise.

I personally have been responsible for my guild, or previous guilds for years, and in my experience a merger that I've been a part of has never ended poorly. Having said that, it does seem that over time, some of the people tend to leave, and you're left with the people that made the effort to get to know the new folks from either side. The biggest drawback or flaw to the system is the lack of integration besides raiding, into everyday playing. I've noticed that if you merge with another guild, the friendship circles still exist from the old guilds and it seems difficult to get to know that many new people all at once. At some point, those groups of 4-6 friends that were from the old, disbanded guild, will usually leave and reform their own guild.

I've tried many times to merge with other guilds that we raid with, for the sole purpose of the benefits of the whole raiding entity. Most guilds, however big or small, would rather stick with their own guild tag, their own circle of friends, and not want to start over, or see no purpose in having to re-acclimate them to a new system, or a group of people they just don't know very well... Those are just my thoughts! I hope everyone is having an anxious pre-cata day!

It's about feelings of a propreitary nature. Folks become attached to things. The name of their guild, the people they know in that guild, the way the guid works. "I made this guild from scratch and I don't want to lose it." Or "I joined this guild of great people, worked at making it great too, and don't want that to be destroyed by joining another guild." That's what makes the 'drama' of guild mergers happen and the base reason why some guilds don't want to merge with other guilds. That general feeling of ownership.

Merging is rocking the boat. It's change. Some people will like it and some people won't. And when it comes down to it, it's a business merger. And like any business merger, all the consequences have to be considered. And I'm fairly sure not everyone in a 'simple' guild merger really looks at what those consequences are. Which do include consolidation and loss. There are alot of people who do not look at guilds like they're a business, even though that is what a good amount of them really are, especially those focused on raiding. They look at guilds as a group of friends and sometimes even family. And you can't just one day take your whole family named Jones and tell them they're now all going to be Smiths and live with the other Smiths. It would cause some issue. :)

I've seen guilds merge, and it not work out so well. (My first guild here in wow....)
I've heard tales of horror regarding "mergers"....

What I've not heard are stories about how awesome it was to "merge".

Despite their essentially transactional nature, guilds tend to, as Red says, wind up more like family units. And, as Red also says, you can't just mush two families together and hope it all works out swimmingly. Romeo and Juliet would have words with you, methinks.

To say nothing of how, during a merger, one side inevitably has to give up the reins to another, in some way, shape, or form. That's never easy for most humans.

Logically, it sounds great, but guilds, and wow players, are most assuredly not made of logic. No, not even the mixmax spreadsheet junkies. We're all obsessive weirdos, in our own ways.

Also, this has been bugging me for a week now, when did Rukentuts turn into a girliemoo?

In general guild mergers, I've found, tend not to work very well. At least, not if it's an actual "merger". Inevitably, one guild is larger than the other, and the newcomers feel like newcomers the entire time, until people start to slowly drift away in ones and twos until they wind up scattered to the four winds as part of other, longer-established guilds.

Another issue is often the issue of leadership. Guild members are typically fine continuing to be guild members, but officers and guildmasters are used to not only taking some responsibility for the overall game experience for their guildmembers, but also to having some authority and ability to direct things. They choose loot systems for raiding, choose bank accessibility gateways, etc. They wind up in another guild as part of a "merger", and all of a sudden the guildmaster and officers of the smaller guild are just members, and they haven't merged, they've been assimilated. I liken it to the old AT&T Wireless/Cingular "merger" from several years ago: they called it a merger, but the reality was it was an acquisition. They kept the Cingular name, they moved to using Cingular's proprietary customer service computer systems, and AT&T Wireless employees were slowly transitioned over to the Cingular benefits package.

The same thing happened to a guild I was running on my old realm. I wanted us to be a casual raiding guild, and things were getting started very slowly; raid guilds are hard to start up period, moreso when most of the raiders on a small-population realm are already attached to existing guilds and are nearly done, or are moving into hard modes, with Icecrown Citadel. I wound up talking with some people who had a smaller raid guild formed, and it was concluded that we'd be a merger of the two guilds.

What happened? My guild was assimilated, we didn't "merge". I and my officers were just low-ranking guild members with no real ability to have any say in the game experience of people who had been enjoying themselves in our previous guild aside from not being able to raid. On top of that, the guild we were "merged" with just fell apart anyway, and disbanded three weeks later. I had kept my old guild via an alt, so I could at least keep the bank space, and wound up selling it to someone for 1000g before I did my realm transfer back home to Cenarion Circle.

Smaller guilds might take awhile to get things done, but it's going to be rare that a merger of them into a larger guild will go well. Guildmasters and their initial officers set the entire tone of a guild, a tone the guild members get used to. When you throw in people who were previously used to doing things a different way, tensions result. Most often, you log out one night, and when you log in the next day, you check the guild activity log and find two or three people quietly slipped off into the night, and get the satisfaction of watching your recruitment posts in Trade while you're trying to replace them to insure your guild doesn't hemorrhage itself into oblivion. Once people start seeing guild members slip away, this mandates the guildmaster being on every night whether they want to or not, because if the guildmaster starts being on even semi-irregularly in the face of such departures, people conclude the guild is being left to die, and they leave on their own. Four weeks down the line, the guildmaster logs in to find that they have mail from two or three of their more considerate ex-members describing why they left, and otherwise have a roster that's dropped to them, their officers, and their alts.

I've tried the guild merger thing before, never again. I'd rather keep a small guild of 3 or 4 people who run stuff together than try to get a jump on content by merging in with someone else. I would never in a million years consider poaching from someone else's guild, but if people want to leave their guild and join mine, I won't say "no" unless I can see they aren't going to be a good fit.

Well, another issue I see with guild "mergers", is that in this environment, it isn't realistic, because a true merger would consist of guilds coming up with a new guild name, new tabard, new everything to share together, but you can't just rename your guild on here..and making a new combined guild means you lose all the bank tabs that you paid for in the previous guilds.

With the addition of guild levels and guild reputations I think mergers will start to become less and less common. Granted neither really matter at this point because we are all level 1 guilds, but later on not only will we have our bank tabs to consider but our guild achievements, guild rewards and our own personal guild reputations to consider. Giving all of those up will be a tough sell indeed.

So fine, here's an awesome story of successful mergers. Grim Maw has more or less successfully joined forces with: Clan Ghost Bear, Herd of Cats, Far Travellers, Freelancers, and Midnight Syndicate. All were great guilds, and have been a solid core of our guild. In fact, a Syndicate went on to be our 3rd guildmaster (Gothmaug), and a Ghost Bear is our current GM (Demonseed). I want to say we also took on Blackfathom Corsairs as well, but we may have just picked up survivors after it dissolved; don't recall exactly. We have had only one period of defection in our history and they formed Mogoth's Marauders. We raided closely with them throughout TBC and LK. They just recently rejoined us, much to our joy.

And Grim Maw turns 6 this Saturday.

In my experience, few people dissolve the original guild, and it is common for people (especially alts) to remain behind - Trsanti has kept the Far Traveller name alive, several Grims have alts that keep Freelancers and Mogoth's names alive. It'd be sad to see those names disappear. Merges were rarely 100%, there will always be people that simply have closer friends elsewhere, or a strong attachment to the old guild and want to keep it alive, and that's fine. Successful mergers I think are based on knowing closely the people you're merging with and having had really strong ingame ties with them. When they're the people you've already been gaming with, the tabard and guild name become secondary.

Frankly, I don't like seeing the small guilds absorbed into the larger ones. I hated it back in vanilla when all the small RP guilds Hordeside crumbled from the pressure of raiding and raiding guilds; I'm deeply impressed with the RP guilds that managed to stay strong and survive.

Yeah, most mergers I hear of end up well for the select few in the smaller guild, and end up being the start of guildlessness for the majority.
But I am sure there are some great mergers that happened, there is not ying without yang.