Ever wondered how political alignment shows itself in gaming guilds? Chapter three of my guild memoir goes over this specific comparison, read the full story at https://docs.google.com/document/d/19INsv8xt7gnrY7kD5d8db88KtuJ26uNnGxrv0acHTV4.
The Birthplace of an Idea
LexLife would serve to be the birthplace of the idea that I might create my own guild. I had to accept that Brian would continue with Virtuous where he had existing friendships and also stay on the other side of what was a growing rift between Virtuous and the friends that I had made.
One major difference between Virtuous at the time and Invictus was their approach to war. As I had perceived it, Virtuous was being built based on the size of their force and the numbers game. Invictus on the other hand was focused on keeping a tightly knit, smaller squad. This difference in core ideals extended to:
Guild A: Virtuous
- Minimal controls on gear progression
- Support all players, share gear
- Socially driven voice chat
- Member-benefiting events
Guild B: Invictus
- Tight controls on gear progression
- Support the strong, inner circle
- Argumentative voice chat re: min/max
- Guild-benefiting events
Two Ideologies Emerge
There are pros/cons to each but the delineation of ideologies was very clear and subjected each guild to a public image/brand. There were members within Virtuous who would feel that they were being disadvantaged by the less committed members and members within Invictus who were conversely finding it difficult to break into the inner circle.
It dawned on me the possibility that we were seeing two political ideologies at play: socialism and capitalism.
Just a theory, of course. This is where I started to draw parallels to IRL.
The Critical Juncture
Where the ideology hit the road for me was through knowing some members from each who were disgruntled and also playing with me in the neutral PvM group LexLife. These players wanted something different.
We reached a critical juncture when the leader of Invictus was banned from the game and there was a drastic reduction in treasure/reward for participating in war. It was time.
My creative ability does not go far; Dric proposes one name to my many and it gets picked
4Glory's Ideological Position
Where did 4Glory sit in terms of ideology? We based the guild on having strict gear requirements and a battle-ready theme. With reduced rewards for GvG, it also made a lot of sense to align to a fight for "glory" attitude and providing a space for recruits to set goals and improve themselves.
When additional rewards were later added to the spoils of war, the distribution of rewards to members would follow the high-transparency, distribution by contribution model built in LexLife.
Dreams of grandeur and a tribal solidarity gave the core team enough confidence to take the leap. Members of the original team were formed from Virtuous, Invictus and SQ. The largest exodus came from Virtuous as our message spread to potential defectors quickly.
Almost immediately, the leaders of Virtuous made a surprising and hurried decision to back down from future wars.
A Tough Choice
This was a highly turbulent week, which gave me some tough choices right off the bat.
My inner ruthless brain thought to crush the competition and take all their members in their moment of weakness. It would have been irrational to do so — wiping out the competition's leadership would have led to a migration of the same members into the newly created guild.
My rational brain did take over and instead encouraged the competition to overcome the defeatist response by freezing all requests to join from Virtuous and giving their leaders another week to recoup.
The Personal Factor
I believe a major reason I was able to act rationally and with some empathy was because I considered the impact on my brother on the other side. Brian was a senior member and on the leadership team of Virtuous at this stage.
We had already discovered our opposing ideologies for guild leading but both still wanted to play together. I had not been an active member of any guild to that point and it was Brian's wish that I would simply join him in war and my own wish to run a guild with Brian by my side.
My wife came up with an apt analogy — that Brian and I were like Professor X and Magneto. We would go our separate ways for now.
The Competition Lives On
In the following week, Virtuous leadership made changes and rebranded to Full Moon under new leadership and direction. We had been a catalyst for change and ultimately I was happier that the competition was still around.