Comments on: Guild Websites – Are They Worth It?

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:40:57 +0000

I’d agree with the 80/20 rule. Was the same with my EQ2 guild – the core players used the guild site a lot but most of the others never bothered about from when they were forced to sign up.

By: Pindleskin

Pindleskin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:45:53 +0000

I’ve been running a wow guild for 4 years, and since the dawn of the guild we’ve had a site with forums. User adoption has been low, with only about 20% of my users making regular use of the forums, with the other 80% only going when I force them to – eg. sign this post or you will NOT raid. But even that 20% interaction makes it worthwhile, helping to build a bond between those that use it. Funnily enough it’s usually those that actively use the forums that have the biggest guild presence too, and generally become officers in the guild.

Our guild has always used Joomla for the main page (Awesome CMS, with plenty addons for wow and other mmo’s) and phpBB2/3 as the forums. Last year unfortunately our phpBB3 database crashed on backup, causing a loss of over 50000 posts and 200 active users. Since then we’ve used Fireboard (Kunena mod) because of the compatibility of users between Fireboard and Joomla.

By: Fredrik0

Fredrik0 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:31:05 +0000

If you are serious about organisation and want to take it to it’s competitive edge you need one. My alliance in EVE has both very active forums, google group for sharing documents, our own TS servers, Jabber server etc. And all these are heavily used, much so that we have over 50k topics on the forums. 100+ concurrent users on the jabber and surely 3-400 on the TS when bigger ops happen.

It would be absolutely impossible to achieve our organisation without having all these OOG tools and having them handled by people who do this as a profession. Or atleast I think so.

By: Inficant

Inficant — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:26:59 +0000

Our guild uses Guild Launch http://www.guildlaunch.com/. Awesome hosting, awesome support, awesome features. A guild site is fun and can help you build community for your guild.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:58:41 +0000

Sounds cool, thanks for the info. I’ll check it out. And yeah, it maybe something the guild doesn’t use… I love gadgets though

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:48:23 +0000

In my opinion, most of the features of a guild website – message boards, announcements for members, etc – should get integrated into the game. Forming a guild should create boards that can be viewed in game, as well as outside of game after logging in to the game website. There could even be a publicly viewable news feed for each guild.

As for cross game stuff… if your group is more a social group and not a game specific guild, then you would benefit from having your own site and forums, of which there are many places on the net to make free ones.

By: SmakenDahed

SmakenDahed — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:32:34 +0000

The guild I’m in is using wowstead.com. I have no idea what the customization is like since I don’t actually control it. It ties into WoWArmory for characters and what not. Has built in mechanisms for including gear links in posts.

We have very few people actually making use of it though.

If it is something your guild wants, make sure it’s something the whole guild wants and not just a few people want.

By: Wednesday MMO Reader « Epic Slant – MMO and guild commentary from veteran players

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:54:14 +0000

[...] from We Fly Spitfires asks are Guild Websites Worth It in MMOs? I said that they somewhat add legitimacy but aren’t necessary for the casual [...]

By: Gordon

Gordon — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:43:54 +0000

My WoW guild just setup a site using webs.com – it looks pretty cool and apparently it was very easy to get going. It seems to be enough for now.

What I’d really love to see is this of feature provided by developers but with added automation i.e. it automatically enrolls your guild members, shows their ranks and levels, displays your guild calendar etc.

By: Flex

Flex — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:58:41 +0000

I agree that it’s a mixed bag. My old guild forum has 30,000 posts and forms a great way to not only educate and organise, but a great place to socialise out-of-game. A requirement for written applications and signing up to raids through the website keeps people using it (and ensures that people who won’t, find another guild). But I see plenty of forums out there with maybe 3 posts total.

Now that’s just embarrassing.

Oh for the day when blizzard supplies a bulletin board in-game that’s also accessible out-of-game via something like your-guild-name.realm.worldofwarcraft.com. No more annoying setup required.