We should form a Geeks and Gamers guild in SWTOR

As someone who has run a successful guild in SWTOR in years past, whether I wanted the job or not, just making a suggestion like this is not the way. Even if the heart is in the right place, one cannot simply pull a ragtag group of people together just to hang out in an MMO, especially in SWTOR.

1) Even though it says SWTOR is Free to Play….playing it that way is a major gimp and totally limiting. You have to have a sub to truly play it, because without a sub you are capped on gear levels, how often you can do things, and economy, ie. you cannot really earn in game income. If logged back in this very day without a sub, my 100-200 million credits would be locked behind a wall I couldn’t get past without a full sub.

2) To form a true guild, it takes lots of time and in this case money, and asking people to sub to the game feels like a big ask to me.

Building and running a guild in an MMO requires, when starting out, a strong foundation of people who have played together for years, that means at least 5-10 people who know how to work together to run it from all aspects. This core group must be there to help organize and maintain not only a cohesive guild unit, but keep the guild focused on goals. Just creating a hang out guild never works, because without things to do, people get bored and leave.

You need a couple of people to run the day to day operations, someone to manage guild materials, a literal morale officer who constantly works with and helps just about everyone out of the goodness of their heart (a very key person in a game like SWTOR…trust me), and then you need raid leads. As someone who has had to wear most of these hats all at once, if you don’t have a good leadership set up, your officer corps burns out fast if one or two people have to do everything. I speak from experience.

SWTOR has a lot of moving pieces these days from dailies, to weeklies, upgrading the guild ship, upgrading the guild base, to monthly events, PvP, crafting, and then there is the actual raiding.

In all my experience, SWTOR has some of the best raiding in all the current MMOs when it gets it all right, and raiding is basically in the end what holds a guild together, because it is the best and truest way to form strong bonds and it is one of the most tangible goals a guild can set for itself.

Nothing builds guild cohesiveness and community like slogging through a raid and conquering said raid eventually. I still have good friends I made in my raiding days in SWTOR. But raiding takes dedication and time, and someone willing to herd cats…because that’s what raids turn into when you go from an 8 man to a 16 man in SWTOR between varied personalities and sometimes folks who refuse to listen during a raid.

And you have to not only have someone willing to do it, but willing to take the time to train people into fighting units…which takes one to two months of regular weekly runs, getting your raiding pool to the point where you can put together any combination of the group and get the win. And trust me…it takes months to do that…cuz I’ve done it. It’s not a bad thing, but it again it takes time and commitment, and people have to want to be there.

Like I said, your heart may be in the right place, but you cannot simply wish for this to happen, especially in an MMO setting. If there was a G+G guild set up in SWTOR, even though the G+G crew is filled with gamers, how many of them have history or experience running an MMO guild? How many of them with their own busy RL schedules, would be willing to do the in game work to make it a successful venture, learning on the go, not to mention understanding the ins and outs of the game itself? It would be unfair to ask anyone unprepared to undertake a job like that.

Call me Mister Rain on the Parade Grumpy Pants, but I could not let this topic slide without giving it an honest response based on years of experience.

@Megazord _Jeremy That’s basically called just having people on your friends list and hooking up with them whenever they are on. Plenty of people use the game that way, and if you choose to just play the game in that fashion, then go for it.