One of the challenges I’ve been encountering in World of Warcraft is engaging players directly. My guild has been steadily gaining players both by recruitment and by referral. With such a large sized guild, one assumes there would be a lot of engagement. While there is some engagement within the game, any barrier above what is experienced in a solo play is far too much of a barrier for many of our players.
One metric we can take is the number of players in guild and the number of players in the guild Discord. Since opening Discord links incurs friction, we already lose a percentage of our population in the first step. World of Warcraft does not natively allow players to copy and paste messages or open hyperlinks, which by nature is an appropriate tool. However, because voice chat and offline organization is incredibly difficult without a third party app like Discord, the World of Warcraft experience is incredibly limited within game. For many of our casual players, the experience of Discord is a foreign one, one that is extraneous or superfluous to the core of the game. Why should I use a third party app when I get what I want out of the game natively?
This is where a large miscommunication comes from the guild organization to the guild members. Because our guild targets casual players, many players find themselves in a strange position. Why is my casual guild asking so much out of me? Therein lies the first miscommunication. Perhaps it is the assumption of a loaded trade. But the only thing the organization seeks out of its members joining Discord is to offer its members tools the game does not natively offer. Do members think that joining Discord incurs them a cost? Or is it just too much hassle for what seems like an insignificant reward?
Yesterday I was able to organize a group of all guildmates to go onto a tour of dungeons, a world tour. It took a lot of individual whispering to organize this group. No matter how many messages I put out in guild chat, the most effective method was reaching out to people individually and asking them about their individuals needs before guiding them to the scheduled tour I mentioned in guild chat. After taking a small break to prepare for the tour, I attempted to invite the four individuals I spoke to through guild chat. None of them responded. I once again had to reach out to all four of them individually before the group was assembled. I asked all of them to join Discord, which they all surprisingly did. Once in Discord, less than 20 words were exchanged amongst the four of them, despite me bringing up casual conversations and topics in game and out of game. I get that some people are shy, but these people wanted help and could not bother to socialize with people along their journey. To me that is both sad and telling of what kind of population we have.
What I believe is happening is a silent majority is growing within the guild and the guild most respond to the silent majority instead of waiting for the guild to engage with what the organization has to offer. Meeting members halfway is a guaranteed beginning, but certainly not an end. Our guild is in a special place compared to other guilds which recruit specifically for a designated raid time and raid experience, while our guild is made our social members growing together. Other guilds will face the problem of their silent majority in different ways, in the form of inactivity outside of raid night. Our guild faces the problem of organization within game, despite player activity. Even with a large number of players, our engagement can improve. This can be done both by recruiting engaging players and by lifting up members organically so they are indoctrinated to engage others.
My goal for February is to empower members to have a voice, especially when asking for help or the next horizon. Members should be able to work together and form their own ambitions, with or without management. Finding officers and creating schedules will provide the necessary framework for scalable self-reliance.
Leadership, Design, Writing 