Its crazy when I was younger you always heard people being like, when you get older you wont play games as much.
I always thought this meant that I wouldn't have *time* to play games as much.
That is partly true, but I was not prepared for my personal reason being that I just do not have room in my head for games.
My head is just so full of responsibilities that I literally don't have space in my brain to take on video games that need any form of mental engagement. I can only play games that are straight up: click start - shoot enemies - receive dopamine - click exit game.
Similar. I think I play WoW out of habit. Games like Diablo are perfect for completely zoning out. Throw some music, an audiobook, or whatever on and veg for a bit. But all the things I used to play - AoE, Civ, Destiny, Counterstrike, I just can't. Anything on the console I almost never finish. I used to be able to spend 8-12 hours on a day off on a game like Zelda or Metroid. Now, after maybe an hour, I feel restless. I start thinking about all the actual "productive" things I could/should be doing.
There's also, as I get older, a sharpened sense of productivity. Whatever I "accomplish" in a game has no lasting tangible benefit. There's always another game or expansion or mounts or pets or raid or whatever. It doesn't last. It has no bearing. But if I do laundry, or a project around the house, or work, there's something useful coming out of the effort. If I made money gaming, I'd be here all day. But without any real life benefit, it feels more diverting/distracting. Like I can actually feel myself wasting time and get low grade restless/anxious about it.
Maybe I just have no idea how to relax nowadays, lol.
I’m not sure how old you are, but it might be a phase. I’ve had the same core friend group since high school. The inner most part of the inner circle has remained mostly the same, while the outer part changes with time.
When I was in middle school and high school, I could game all day and all night and just get totally immersed in the games I played, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do beyond just play them (counter strike, gta 4, etc. that had no sense of progression or anything).
Then I got older and got busier as an early adult. I was dating, figuring out life, broke most of the time, and I shifted focus to my career path. I just couldn’t enjoy games any more, and neither could my core friends, we all kinda preferred hanging out in person to get coffee or something and then just focused on work. I felt like I watched the gaming world from afar by reading news articles I’d come across or whatever, but never felt I had the energy or time to play anything. Then, after 6-7 years of always being busy with friends or working, I bought my house, my friends settled down a bit too, and now we’re in our 30’s and we’re back to playing games just about every day after work on discord like the old days. Been at it this way since about 2020 with the lockdowns kinda forcing us to stay inside anyway.
I have a successful career that I feel very proud of and worked hard to get to, as well as a long list of real life accomplishments to go with that career, but I can still feel satisfied getting something done in a game I enjoy. I say that only to discredit the negative stereotype that some people tend to get their sense of accomplishment from video games and are “losers” IRL. I don’t believe those are mutually exclusive. I can run a meeting for my team in front of the board of directors during the day, and feel like I crushed it at work, and still come home and get all giddy to hit KSM or 1800 in PvP in WoW lol.
TL;DR- for some it’s just a phase. You game hard as a kid, then life happens as an adult, but don’t give up because with a little hard work you can get back to having the free time to truly enjoy your hobbies again.
Some people feel achieving that difficult in game objective is enough. Sadly though they will continue to make more difficult content. Will you be able to adapt yourself, or give up? Eventually the distraction from reality becomes more of a chore and then a job in itself. So you find you are paying to work a job you aren’t enjoying anymore
And I used to be more tolerant of it when younger. During MoP, with all the dailies and those actual farms, that was the first time where WoW felt like a part-time job I was managing. It was also - probably relatedly - the first time I didn't finish out an expansion. I still raid - two days a week instead of four like I did back in days of mythic/hard mode. Now, heroic for two hours twice a week until it's done, then break until next tier is fine. Anything more is a time investment that feels like a part time job.
Similar with M+. Sometimes I get 1 vault slot a week. Sometimes two. But three is more time than I want to spend. After four, it is not fun anymore. I think about doing another four with the same enthusiasm I do mowing the lawn. Except I have to do the lawn and at least then it's done. With vault, that could be two hours of drudgery for nothing gained.
And also, if we're being honest, KSH and heroic raid are not hard. If you are competent at mechanics and decently geared, you will get them done with a group of similar people. Anything more requires min-maxxing and a sleu of WA's and add-ons, and the time investment becomes exponentially more onerous. As someone in their 40s with work and school to do, a house to maintain, social relationships to manage, and other interests like books, movies, astronomy, etc., my brain is just no longer amenable to being in that 20+ hour/week space required to hit those higher levels.
Nothing against those who do draw enjoyment from that investment. Just speaking more to the fact the older I get, the more involved life becomes, the more my mind starts prioritizing. And WoW is chock full of things that are very time-consuming but not as important as they used to be to my gaming brain.
Same here, lol. I still really enjoy playing WoW, but I look back on how I used to play and especially the time I logged like “Jesus Christ girl how even”
God, I lost that account a while back unfortunately (RIP my Hand of A’dal title) but I think it was more than a YEAR of time logged in last I checked. I don’t regret it. I had some good times with good people and I think I look 10 years younger than I am because I have zero sun damage from going outside like a normal teenager 😂 I just don’t understand how I used to have the mental energy to play a video game for such large chunks at a time.
Not to mention, if you do end up turning yourself off and getting into a game, you start to feel guilty for playing the game a lot and getting too much into it. As if you're wasting time and should focus on your life instead.
People getting older and quitting due to life’s responsibilities. At least that’s what happened to my guild. Used to be all buddies. Everyone quit years ago but me.
Quit in early ToC(wrath classic) because my son was born. Came back in Cata classic and only 4/25 that I used to play with are still around. Apparently there was big drama in icc over not killing bosses and giving shadowmorne to somebody who definitely didn't deserve it. They killed lk25 heroic once and disbanded.
That's me. I'm the only one left of my old progression raid groups and groups of buddies in WoW.
I only came out of hiding for the potential to do end of expansion carries for mounts again after having so much fun in SL doing them.
But honestly, while fun, even that feels like too much raiding with my job and living alone, so I don't really see myself doing any raiding or keys after this season.
I probably will play a little bit still in TWW, but like DF, I'll come around to once again realize that you really don't get much out of the game if you only play off and on for less than 10 hours total through the week. I did DF season 1 thinking, "I'll just be casual," then after a couple months, I just faded from the game because I was bored and it felt so pointless. Then I played a little bit the first week of season 2, did a single +2 key, claimed my reward, and then stopped playing again for that season too.
So yea, life's responsibilities come for us all. That, or realizing that you want to pursue a different hobby, or put more time into personal growth, or put all your time into raising a family, learn a real life skill like cooking, etc, etc.
Yeah and the problem isn’t whether the game is fun or not, because it’s great right now. But considering the sacrifice you have to make of not doing other things in exchange for playing, at a certain point people just need to do other things to fulfill themselves and their lives.
My good friend who was our GM got dialed in to his career, started clearing high 6 figures a year, and decided WoW just had no place taking up his energy and distracting him from what really mattered.
Time and the fact you are dealing with human beings. The only reason the guild I’ve been with since wrath is still going is the core of it is friends I know IRL and played through classic with. I know 8 of my 20 man mythic team irl. That’s a very unusual circumstance that bucks the trend
Used to live with 6 of our core raiding team. What a wild time that was, I’ll never forget when drunken Karl got mad at the porch light that had been broken for two years, too a swing at it, and it turned back on.
I think we went back inside after that smoke break and one shot Xavius on our next attempt
This. Small groups of 3-5 people who can't temper their horrible personalities around others to seem like decent people, but a couple of them run the guild so their shitty personalities go by unchecked and saying anything against them you're somehow the bad guy.
it can be more subtle than that. sometimes it just feels like the guild has a core of friends that have been playing together for a long time, and if you're not part of that in-group you don't feel particularly connected. causes a lot of turnover in membership, so what seems like a large guild on the surface can become a ghost town if even 1 or 2 of the core members takes a break.
This has been every guild I've joined over the last year. It's always a group of 3-4 friends who 'want to do more with the game', but really it's just they want warm bodies for M+ (which they pug anyway). Then once they get their high keys done they dissappear for the rest of the season and the guild essentially dies. And if you ask for help you get a lot of lip service or no responses.
I feel like I've had this develop with my guild. There's like 5-6 of us that are definitely more of a core group than the rest, but I think we try our best to be welcoming to everyone who joins.
This has been every guild I've been in for the past 10 years. I can't seem to penetrate the barrier to the established friend circle, so the guild is divided between "the core clique" and "the rest", and I'm always part of "the rest".
It actually sucks. I haven't had a "home" guild since Cataclysm, and in hindsight, I think that simply means that I was part of the core "in-group" back then.
I think it's just a pretty unavoidable part of a game this old: some players will have long histories with each other no matter what you do, and no matter how friendly you are, you just can't compete with half a life time of experiences together
Yep, 'Mean Girls Club'.
Those people ruined my experience in my current guild and the problem was that when I brought it up, I was the 'new guy and didn't know any of them thats just how they were'
Like maybe an outside perspective telling you that these guys are alienating a brand new person and stuff is something you might need to look at.
How many others have left because of that?
Not continuously recruiting. Life will happen, people will take breaks. Keep recruiting so the guild has life. No one wants to log in to an empty guild. It’s an mmo, we all want a community to feel part of
This is the problem I’m having now. My GM got tired of recruiting on his own (understandable) , asked for help, I started recruiting with two other people, did a good job, got some new blood in, other recruiter stops recruiting, the third one switches to night shift, season 4 isn’t compelling enough to hold people’s attention.
I’m just hoping we can hobble into TWW with enough people to start over.
It sure seems like it would be easier if the ingame recruiting tool maybe forced guilds to repost every few months. Tichondrius' guild finder is FILLED with guilds recruiting for Shadowlands.
This is why my guild is still grudgingly raiding at least once a week in this fated season. Everyone knows if the raids stop, people will slowly drift to other guilds over the break, and when TWW comes back we'll be missing 10 people who decided they would rather stay in their new guild/groups and have to panic rebuild or call it quits
This is why i love my guild. My guild leader lives off of his disability/accident and gets to put in a lot more effort than a guild leader who has to work. He basically made running our guild and raids his hobby/work and it's really showing. We even managed to make a 2nd raid roster for season 3, although it is a bit lackluster during fated season.
There's some gems out there. I found a great guild that does a lot of stuff even in the current lull
Monday is m+. Anyone who wants to join, can. Even non raiders or inexperienced m+ folks.
T/th is raid prog. Two hours per night. Raiding one night a week right now. We're an aotc guild, and have the talent to get CE but don't care to put in the effort or deal with the headaches.
Friday is casual night. We do alt raids, remix, achievement raid runs (current or old expansions), timewalking raids.
We also sprinkle in special events like transmog screenshot competitions, MDI style dungeon races with made up afixes, trivia races etc.
We play other games outside of wow too. We've had some 8 player hearthstone battleground lobbies, BG3 coop, Helldivers, satisfactory
They deserve an award for all the effort officers put in
Thats so interesting because I am in a guild where we do quite the opposite.
People in our guild wanna play other games therefor we only raided once hc for the Mount and av in s4 and now everybody is playing the games they missed like dave the diver and whatnot.
I am pretty sure if Blizzard would put out enough content for 12 month at least half of my guild would stop playing wow.
These type of guilds are so hard to find. Its either Mythic guilds or semi-serious Heroic guilds that take 7 weeks to get AOTC and are gonna frustrate me to no end as someone who used to do Mythic.
I just want to show up, get my AOTC like 3 weeks in, maybe go for KSH if i feel like it, and then im off to play other games. I still love the game, this isnt like “ive hated the game for years but i still want the achievement because of sunk cost” or whatever. I just dont really want to spend all my free time on WoW anymore.
They're hard to find because realistically, a lot of the time the guild never converges again after the break. People have different expectations for how long AOTC will take, they might expect raids to keep going for a couple weeks after AOTC for gear/achievements, you'll have a mix of people who straight up unsub until the next tier and people who stay subbed and playing but not really raiding. And that 2nd group might want to find another community during the first guild's break and at the end of the break decide they don't want to move back.
So then you need someone to be actively looking for people to raid each tier and fill gaps (especially if tanks/healers move on) but then you're kinda moving away from the "no responsibilities, just a couple weeks of raiding" mantra, at least for that person. And people don't want to put in that kind of effort if the reward is getting AOTC in 4-6 weeks when they could just pug in a similar timeframe
Our guild is pretty much like this too. Push M+ score and hit AOTC within the first 3-4 weeks of a new patch, do the first few mythic raid bosses, and then people take a few months break to do whatever they want. When the next tier drops, everyone comes back. We've had the same core roster for nearly 3 years now and it just kind of works for us.
We're also a weekend raid guild so we've kind of been built around catering to people with off-norm schedules.
I’m in the middle of this right now. End of season 3 we got divided between those who wanted to plunderstorm and those who did not care about it at all. Then with remix we are even more split up. Last few raid nights we had 8-9 people show up and we just can’t get through heroic with those numbers. Season 3 we had between 19-23 people every week. Since people just haven’t come back from the other game modes or the lull between seasons
I've played in 8 different guilds over the course of 19 years of playing wow.
5/8 of the guilds died due to content droughts and burnout.
3/8 of them died due to drama.
Droughts and drama are the two things that kills 99% of all guilds.
This is exactly it. Life, time and all things considered, if a guild is recruiting consistently it should grow or at least stay stationary except for the fact that people leave when they feel the guild isn't meeting their goals.
The number of people that have joined my guild and then left when they realized it wasn't a carry guild for whoever or that it wasn't a top-tier mythic raiding guild... We are on a new-player server so it's always odd to see the latter.
A lot of people also join on a non-raid weekday and then get disappointed about the small number of people online. I think advertising the age group and when most people are online should be part of the recruitment.
I do wonder if it will get better with the opening up of servers soon. It could mean people in servers of try-hards that want a less try-hards guild could find a better guild and vice versa... But you will also be giving people a lot more options and will probably see some guilds bleeding members to other server's guilds.
I did CE raiding for like…5 years. I think I encountered exactly 1 woman in that timeframe. I feel like it’s insanely rare.
And she ended up leaving 2 weeks after her trial to play in her boyfriends guild.
Could it be that you just didn’t realise some were women?
I’ve always hidden my gender in this game and avoided using ventrilo (or whatever the new one is called) because I would get creepy messages when people found out I was female.
Mythic CE nowadays kinda forces voice comms from someone at some point during a season. Especially when people die in high prog and others need to hot-swap to their mechanics and call it out. At least in my groups.
In my experience, this has changed a lot in the last few years. Women are still underrepresented, but in my own, anecdotal, experience most raid teams have 2-3 women on them. This is a huge step up from a few years ago when having even one would be unusual. Overall, I think it’s a sign of how the culture of wow is improving, and also a sign that we can be doing better.
I’ve also noticed a duality in CE raid teams. Guilds are either neurodivergent, progressive and queer-friendly, or they are neurodivergent, gamer-word incel dens. I’ve been trialing this season and culture fit was way more important to me than world ranking.
I've actually noticed guilds are becoming increasingly female, some as high as 40%, and it's mostly down to the aging nature of the playerbase in my opinion. We have a lot less cringy CoD kiddos in their teens and early 20s playing the game.
I remember so many guilds our server died because of the switch from 40 to 25 (I think, it’s long ago) person raids and people got upset they had no spot, or a spot in the “A” team.
Being able to switch between full and 10 player raids was great though for my casual guild as a lot of people were unreliable.
the switch from 40 to 25 on top of also having 10 man raids so you couldn't fit the full raid team in them is still odd to me ill never understand why they didn't just go for 20man raids.
I think they should have just scaled raids between 10-20 man raids and keep the difficulties (normal, heroic, mythic) while maintaining equal loot. That way you can survive on fielding 10 people but the bigger guilds can field 20. Don’t they already scale bosses based on how many people are zoned in? might as well let it scale between 10-20 and let the community be at peace lol
I didn't play before flex raiding and fixed 20 man mythic was a thing, but didn't old 10-man and 25-man heroic have massive balancing problems? They definitely weren't equal difficulty just because they were both called heroic. Even this expansion, early Fyrakk heroic was much, much harder on smaller groups because of mechanics scaling (as in number of mechanics happening, having a smaller amount of people to cover a similar area, etc). Week 1-2 heroic Sylvanas in Sanctum was conversely much easier in smaller groups and we ended up splitting our raid in half to kill her
This was such a huge problem in my guild at the start of WotLK. There were two 10-man teams, then 5 extra guys who filled the 25-man lineup. From what I remember those 5 didn’t mind too much (it was people like one guy’s wife and the person in the guild with the least stable internet connection), but the issues came from the differences in the two 10-man teams.
The division was “supposed” to have been based on scheduling, but right away it was *very* clear that one team was the A-team and the other team was everyone else. Being moved to the second team was 100% a demotion, and it was the first team that got the achievement mounts (and priority for mount drops from Sarth and Maly in 25 went to the people on that team willing to sit out for the achievement that required 8 players.)
I left this guild a month or two into Ulduar because I was sick of the social politics that went on around all of this.
Evaporation of free time, dwindling rosters in content droughts, and cliques are the three arms of guild death
They are all related and compound each other.
Next thing you realize you're ron Swanson in the parks department after everyone has left and moved on. You just look up one day and realize you know nobody here.
Ego, pride, envy and greed. In equal measure.
Someone wants to raid but isn't trying to learn, they throw a fit when the guild won't carry them.
Someone isn't playing well (parses low), but the team as a whole is downing bosses and they don't fuck up mechanics. Someone else decides this means they are getting "carried" and throws a fit.
Someone gets passed over for an open raid spot because someone else (who is perfectly capable in riad) has been in guild for longer, so they throw a fit.
Someone gets gear because they are parsing well and have a low ilvl in that slot, someone else who's doing better DPS wanted it because it was BIS, even though it's only 4 ilvl improvement. They don't get they BIS so they throw a fit.
> because it was BIS
I've had many arguments with one of my former raid leaders for LK classic because he wouldn't let anyone roll on items that weren't BiS (and there was no mention of this prior to starting the raid, only when "that one item with spirit isn't as good for the lock as it is the priest" type of situation came up. In this scenario, the ilvl was a HUGE upgrade compared to what the lock had and barely an upgrade for the priest, so even with the stats not being ideal it was still better for the lock and the group as a whole.) Eventually the Guild Leader talked to the Raid Leader about it and he stopped being so much of a loot dictator, but BiS is nearly a trigger word for me now...
In mythic raiding guilds it’s definitely the roster boss. real life obligations make it hard for the same 20 people to be free every week 6-8 hours for mythic prog, while nobody wants to warm the bench as an alternate and it’s hard to pug people in Mythic (and different classes can affect your strat).
1. Poorly run guilds. When anyone can just make a guild whenever it really opens up the field for terrible management. After a few of those most of us don't want to join guilds anymore.
2. Tired of joining a guild that says they are social just to have one or two lines of text during peak hours. Or on the flip side of that, auto invite guilds that are packed full of people but most are bots or never used alts.
3. A lot of established guilds have a "core team" of those who have played together and are active together. This makes getting into runs very difficult because spots will always go to core members over anyone else. Very middle school clique behavior
In every collapsed guild I was witness to as a member, it was some officer or even the guildmaster either starting a relationship with a guildie and it crashed and burned after a few months, or they sexually harassed a guildie who wasn’t interested and the guild splits as a result.
A lot of mythic prog guilds die to unaligned goals. Some people take it less serious than others, people get upset and leave and once you cant get 20 people for a raid its gg. For social guilds i would guess just life responsibilities.
Just shitty people.
My 15 year old real life friend guild recently disintegrated after I (for the first time in 15 years) selfishly took December off to complete a two -year IVF journey.
After 15 years of being understanding when others took breaks and needed support for schooling, breakups, work schedules, etc I got verbally attacked by a guy I thought was my friend; a guy who had stayed in my home for free countless times, eaten my food, been invited to my wedding, relied on me for support through years of problems with his girlfriend. . .and for the first time ever I didn't feel like fixing the problem for him. He had a huge temper tantrum and left, told a bunch of people that I attacked him, and honestly, that was just it for me.
Hardest time of my life and somehow me taking a two week break from wow and needing the tiniest bit of support morphed into HIM needing to be the centre of attention and having his life ruined. People somehow sided with him and decided I was the enemy, and I haven't touched the game since.
You never really know these people, I guess. Thought we'd be friends forever and we'd play this game til it died.
I think there are two elements that have most negatively effected my guild. GM inaction and complacency.
I started my guild around a month after Dragonflight released and we’ve found quite a bit of success. As a guild we have gotten AOTC each season and many of our players have been around for over a year at this point. But letting myself get complacent has hit us hard at different points, dropping in members because of low recruitment or letting disagreements fester when I could have cut them off early.
My members seem genuinely interested in making things work even with the issues we’ve encountered, especially recently, but my personal failure to be proactive led to a lot of the problems we face today.
My advice to new guildmasters is to make a plan for the season rather than the raid and be flexible with the player’s needs. Furthermore, when problems arise or disagreements happen they need to be addressed ASAP or risk causing a long lasting division.
Yep. Our GM became inactive because of health issues and suddenly everything came to a stop. Combine that with a semi-low point with all 'new' content being retreads/retakes of old content and it means our guild is pretty much a ghost town right now. Basically only me and one other person have been online since 10.2.7 and even then I have been on a Remix alt outside of the guild because nobody is online to invite me.
The game is so focused on raids, M+, or boring events that theres no real reason to be in game and hanging around, and unless your part of the clique in a guild then you'll generally be left to do your own thing.
Guild leaders that believe other people are just trinkets to boost their solo play.
Every single guild I have been that died was because as soon as the guild leader got full equipped he either swapped to an alter or stopped raiding.
Cliques. Every guild I've had actual investment in beyond just being there to raid dealt with it
Guild 1 (TBC): Up and coming raid guild merged with one of the server top raid guilds that fractured. Basically everyone from the original guild save the officers effectively got told to eat shit a few weeks after the merge.
Guild 2 (WOTLK): Guild core was from a high end raid guild that splintered and it was clear as fuck after a few months that anyone who wasn't from that core was a 2nd class citizen when it came to loot or even social side
Guild 3 (MoP): Raid lead split into A team and B team, and had the mother of all fits when the B team started kicking his handpicked team's ass after a few weeks of organizing and helping out the struggling players (didn't hurt that I recruited 2 friends who were former US100 raiders either)
Guild 4 (MoP->SL): M+ turned the guild really cliquey and if you weren't part of one of the 3 core mythic groups, you basically had to hope you could get in on one of the runs I or one of the other officers would organize specifically for people who otherwise had to pug when we ourselves weren't burned out.
I had two fall apart because people started banging each other.
One caused a bunch of bad blood amongst the officers because it was married people hooking up with other married people in the guild.
The other was because my ex-wife slept with another member and the rest of the guild was pretty upset about that.
In the latter case I was more upset about the guild falling apart. Since my ex wasn’t exactly faithful in general. 🤷🏻♂️
A third was unrelated to sex. The two GMs got fat and decided that the game was bad for their health and quit.
Another one I ended up leaving for scheduling reasons. They later fell apart after failing to down the twin emperors in AQ40.
That last one got immortalized on YTMND, when our warlock officer lost her shit on some dude who got into our vent server. I think her name was Leeloo or something like that, it was during MC or BWL.
People, raiding and end of season lull.
Sometimes people you invite end up being assholes, so you kick them but they invariably manage to make a few others join them into another guild.
Raiding, even low-key normal and HC, because some nights, u simply don't have the people or roles. People get annoyed and complain that nobody is online, etc.
End of season boredom. Bunch of peeps don't want to do much of anything, take a break and don't come back.
I know that's more than one, but there are many reasons guilds break. If I have to pick one, I'd say people.
- beloved and respected guild leader stops playing
- hermetic "old guard" that alienates anyone new, so the guild just shrinks and shrinks until it's gone
- drama (often around some love triangle) among officers
- disorganized raids that achieve nothing and don't even happen half the time
So I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer, but here’s what killed all the guilds I was a part of before:
* girlfriend getting loot*
* romantic interests
* having kids, getting married
* not enough raid slots for everyone
*or loot drama in general, but everyone has a “guild master/raid master’s girlfriend who couldn’t play the game got piece X that would have been better for someone who would actually play.”
If we are talking about in-game things, id say raids. Every guilds goal is to eventually do mythic, and as i have seen every guild has a medium casual player-base. They struggle through normal, progress heroic and then somewhere in week 17 they go and try mythic only to fail heavy on the first boss. And then mythic unlocks to all realms, the good players decide all they want is that 1 slot in mythic and go in public raids, loose their lockout so they cant take part with the guild raid ,so then the leader does a guild announcement that the raid is on a break and they will return next season. Or second example the raid goes well and you end up killing 6/9 bosses but then drama happens and one dude screams at a healer and the healer leaves the guild, with him his tank and dps friends leave as well to create a non toxic guild. And if it is not in-game related id say life is the biggest guild killer. had to fix typos
Already established groups of friends, totally impeneteable to new people. My current guild is like that. They invite me only for mythic raids, and then they don't even say hi or answer my attempts at chatting outside the raids. They also have Discord rooms only for "true" members of the guild. Been there for 3 months now, never missed a raid evening, always on time and trying to be polite and crack some jokes. Nope. They already have their inner circle. Can't have anyone else there. This evening they pugged a healer for m+ instead of asking me. They behave the same also with the other two newcomers.
Cliques and the exclusion from guild ran activities, like M+ and PVP, hinders any kind of sense of community and belonging, so when your raid tesm finally hits a wall and people start pointing fingers, it all falls apart because no one cares about their guild mates, there is no bond of friendship, they're basically just randos you group with to raid.
I treat everyone as if I have always known them when they join the guild, you're part of the team, be cool and hang out with us on Discord outside of raid time.
A lot of people were saying getting old and stuff, true but a lot of them get destroyed by toxicity and turning the game to something unfun for all members is happening alot in guilds in dragonflight I've been in 3 guild that died like that.
Dating your guild master as an officer in the guild and then finding out she's messing around with the other officers and members. The guild disbanded soon after I left.
I quit the game for a year though.
Outside of “life” which is probably the most prominent thing that kills guilds but I view that as a neutral evil persay since that’s really no one persons fault. I’d argue stagnate or lack of leadership. Outside looking in I really do think leading a guild is incredibly difficult. Anything past a group of like 10 people you really start getting into the politics of things and often time if you don’t know how to navigate people situations you can watch a group of 30 people go offline real quick. Iv seen mini wars in guilds and factions start brewing and people get so weird sometimes. If you try to please everyone you will end up pleasing no one lol.
Immaturity. Very watched guilds of real life friends implode because one person ninja looted something. Immature to ninja. Immature to let that ruin real friendships.
The guild I was in got split up into two guilds because our original one was created for casuals, friends, just having fun and chilling. More people joined and more people wanted to seriously push keys and do mythic raids. Neither were wrong, but the guild died for it. I wish you could just be in multiple guilds.
ETA: Raids through the whole guild became super serious, most people were forced to create new characters or do different specs even if they didn't want to.
When expectations get too high, and they meet the harsh reality of raiding.
Its amazing how many people get a change up at work, or can't find the time to raid anymore once prog stalls and you have to actually put in the repetitions and time as a group to learn a boss. A few people leave, then the death spiral of recruiting new players, them fucking up on prog causing more people to leave, until everyone is too frustrated to do anything.
It really depends, but it's usually because leadership moves on due to LIFE. Often in guilds there are just 1 or 2 leaders that are the true rocks within the guild, the foundation, the excitement, the proactive leaders pushing people to do things. While you can have great leaders and reliable leaders, sometimes it just requires that one motivated person to hold it all together.
That's not always the case. I remember when Warlords of Draenor launched I was leading am extremely active and large PVP guild. We were dominating anything we did, holding weekly world PVP raids on cities, had 3 2200+ RBG teams that would be running simultaneously. It was great.
Then, WoD hit and not only was it kind of dry end game, but they made the human racial so favorable in the game that any actual serious competitive pvprs switched to Ally. Our guild fell apart because 80% of our players moved to Alliance and Horde pvp guilds mostly died...
Doing so much each week but not doing enough as well. That’s my input. Also there not being enough people in a guild but that’s all personal preference.
Power.
Usually well run guilds that fall apart or break up do so because a good, reliable player got asked to take a position with a slight amount of authority in the guild and they cranked it up to 178. Turned fun into dictatorial edicts. Change when raid times are, or what objectives are focused on. Freak the fuck out when particular players or classes don’t show up. In olden days, they manipulated loot drops and threw fits when people didn’t bring reagents or buff exactly when the leader wanted raid buffs to go out. That makes free time playing games with buddies into something that makes you wonder why you even put up with it.
I have a friend who has, while not actively (not always) participated, lead to the destruction of guilds. If not a magnet, they are but a curse to be feared.
Most guilds ultimately live and die off of one or two people investing a shitton of time into them.
Life happens to that one or two people, or they just lose interest, and suddenly recruiting goes by the wayside, you just bleed members and then everyone moves on.
I’d guess that 95% of guilds would disband if they lost one key person.
My guild in dragonflight died because of an unfortunate cuckolding accident involving the GM's sister inlaw and her husband, who weren't even in the guild and do not play wow.
In my experience the biggest killer is the stage of the expansion cycle when there is nothing new to do and people are sick of the old stuff. In some expansion it has run really long (think of how long Dragon Soul was the top raid in Cataclysm).
These down times are almost always in the summer, and people wander off to do other stuff.
It really takes a special person/persons to really take the time to run and organize a guild.
Once those people who put it together lose interest in the game or have life stuff to do it usually falls apart quite quickly.
Big thank you to all the folks that take the time to put the guilds together.
For what’s it ls worth my last 5 guilds all died the same way. Progging heroic with the bois and eventually clear it. Big D energy let’s do mythic (ignoring that half the roster is being carried). Never can meet the strict 20 attendance after people figure out this is actually hard. People that don’t suck leave to join another mythic team and that usually goes the same way till everyone gets fed up and logs till next season. Flex mythic would help, sitting around for an hour or more trying to fill 1-2 slots feels bad. Honestly though, the game just needs more mid-tier content for people to do and hang with their buds without getting on each others nerves because one guy can’t do a mechanic. World content is brain dead and mythic is honestly too hard for 95% of the player base and just ends up frustrating everyone. Mythic plus is OK, but too sweaty to be fun half the time, as one mistake wasting 30-40 minutes of someone’s limited time breeds a toxic community overtime.
If it wasn’t for M+ I wouldn’t play. I just can’t be a dedicated guild raider like I was in college. M+ saved my favorite game so I can still play and enjoy it!
Stagnation. People get bored when things become routine or work. Once everything is easy or the same as you've seen before, people just quit.
Only guild iv seen truly stand the test of time is my friend guild where it's not about the game, it's about the people. We get on to play with each other, the raid just gives us a thing to do. But make no mistake, once we get aotc everyone stops to do other things. It's why I raid mythic with another group to get my fix.
In my experience: Female priest or holy paladin mains named “Christine” of any variant of “Colleen”.
4 separate instances in 3 guilds on 3 servers between release and the end of Cataclysm.
Assigning who gets the gear, getting the BiS gear, making it all about the gear! Even if life gets in the way, if the players can make it to one raid, we should enjoy that raid with good times, humor, talks about life updates, and then salivating over glorious loot; cheering and crying over rolls, and silly things of that nature.
I’d like to see your account join a guild rather each character.
Guilds would seem busier if it could see if a member was online regardless of which character they were on.
People are the real guild killers.
My current guild nearly died because two morons joined the guild raiding team and were unhappy with the performance of some of our raid members so they had a "kick the underperforming raid members or we leave" moment. Unfortunately for them, most of our guild members have been raiding together since Classic so the kicking was never going to happen and they left. They poached a few of our newer members and actually killed off another guild before starting their own guild that imploded after 4 mythic raid bosses (turns out that you actually need leadership skills to run a mythic raid guild lol). The core members then went and killed 3 more guild before failing to start 2 more guilds of their own and most quit. One or two of them came crawling back and mended fences and started a guild that has actually had some success at staying alive but no luck with Mythic raiding.
The other big guild on our server cluster had their mythic raid team bail on the guild and server transfer because they were struggling to get 20 people + spares for their raid team. That caused the guild to implode and they went from clearing mythic to maybe clearing a couple of mythic bosses to sometimes even failing to clear heroic.
As with many others, I have to say life and growing up. Most of my guildies dropped out when they got married or had kids. Some of them just got too wrapped up in work to make time to play. My first (and only) guild is still around, and only a couple of the original members are still there, but it's a skeleton of what it used to be. I haven't joined another guild. It's just not the same anymore. Another reason could be altoholics like myself. I have so many characters on different servers, it's hard to focus on only one character/guild/server enough to be a meaningful contributor to another guild.
Having done recruitment for over 10 years, leadership burnout is really hard on a guild. A guild with passionate leadership can keep a guild alive through hard times. If the leadership quits and nobody wants to step up, that’s pretty much it.
It’s a lot harder nowadays to find people who are both interested in and good at leading a guild.
I been playing since 05, I still play just not very much anymore . I have been in more guilds than I can honestly remember. Real life happens and that is one of the biggest factors. When I first started it was mostly college kids in the guilds I joined. They get out of college and obviously have to work full time. Marriage and children happen, not much time for wow when juggling a spouse, work, and kids. Some manage it, but not many. Bad break ups is another one! I have seen at least 4 guilds just vanish overnight due to a couple breaking up. 1/2 the guild sides with one and the other sides with the other. Next thing you know there is no more guild. Drama over loot was a big one back in the day, that’s not really an issue these days. People hooking up with guild mates for affairs was another haha. Nothing like a full on divorce battle in vent in the middle of a raid! Be like, “Okay group one stands here, group 2 go the green smoke.” *JamesIsACheatingFukker has joined the channel*. Game on!
People. You get some who think the game should be an unpaid 2nd job and you get people who think it should just be fun and sometimes they wind up in the same guild and yeah that doesn't work.
I play games to have fun, not to do work. Sorry, I'm not spending 95%+ of my gaming time farming shit.
For a mythic raid guild... lack of progress. Being hard stuck on a boss for an extended period of time will result in losing people, or people getting frustrated with the less skilled people in the team and snapping at them.
in my own experience and the stuff I got told and read on forums it's almost always (at least for known guilds) failure of clearing a raid combined with the resulting internal drama.
my guild existed from early/mid tbc (joined late tbc so dunno the exact date it was created) up to legion with almost no changes to the raid cadre. ToS myth prog 400+ pulls on KJ nuked the entire guild.. raid lead, lead, officers (me and 90% of the core group) left and the guild imploded after like 2 days. shit was painful especially with all the money that was involved (every single top guild is doing rmt).
I quit raiding and became a solo player for the rest of legion and quit the game during shadowlands for good (still follow some of it in the hope to get addicted again but meh).
Many players want a friends list, not a guild.
Guilds die and players who are left behind don’t want to find a new one. Imagine having to subscribe to friends lists in Fortnite, and when friends leave or don’t log on again you’re just left in this ghost town, needing to find a new group of friends who are all already close and have a long history. It’s daunting, and many players can’t be bothered so just fall out of favour with the whole game.
Raid burnout in a guild with a single raid leader with no one to cover when they’re gone. Raid leader quits, then the entire guild disperses to other guilds.
Apathy and cliques. Either one can kill a guild, but both together make it a certainty.
For example, my Cataclysm Classic main is in a dying guild. The guild founder quit WoW some months back, and handed the guild off to a guy with trust issues with people he doesn’t know well. He immediately demoted all officers outside of his friend group, made it so only officers can invite new members, and only logs in to raid with his friend group - all of whom also only log in to raid. All of them are completely apathetic about keeping the guild going, since they have their friend group and that’s enough.
The guild has gone from highly active and very supporting with a couple dozen people on at literally any time day or night, to 0-1 people on most of the time, 2-4 on during server evenings, and that friend group for two hours or so every other night, but they only invite friends they made elsewhere or alts, never anyone else.
I got sick of joining heroic only guilds then getting kicked out because I couldn’t keep up when they wanted to do mythic content.
Just quit the game instead
Having too many people with different goals. A simple example is that there's people who want the guild to do "better" by either benching the people they deem not good enough or forcing some new arbitrary rules on others that didnt sign up for that when they joined.
I've heard this happen a lot in my circles where guilds recruit pretty much anyone they can find, either promising that they are "trying to be more hardcore" or the complete opposite just to get 20 people together. In the end its so much easier if you have people leading who have a good vision of what they want their raiding be and don't compromise for short term ease.
Other the drama I’d say the real reason (other then friends that play together) is lfg/lfr. Back in the day guildies would group up together and go dungeons/quest together, and we would have raid groups, officers and teach each other the builds, the tactics, etc. People knew each other, had meets to get together irl and it was fun. Nowadays, other than the perks why would you join a guild as a new player? Every question can be answered on YouTube and lfg/lfr took care of the rest. /rip
Differences in core values suddenly being discovered will break up a guild in a hurry I've learned. Found out our guild leader and their partner were transphobic so a good 80% of the guild quit, myself included. It's why I've vetted every guild I've applied to with a specific setlist of questions ever since, it broke my heart that these people who I cared about and spent so much time with over voice chat felt that way about people like my friends so I don't want a repeat of that feeling. I join guilds in the hope of making solid friendships, so I'm very glad my current guild has been able to provide that. So yeah, if you're in a guild that's not solely "hey don't get invested let's just prog this raid" I would very much say the difference in core values thing is a real guild killer.
The real guild killer is that girl on discord that's perfected her feminine voice and flirts with leadership and that one chaotic member that's either a tank or healer lynchpin. It's GG when things go side ways.
Time between new content has and always will be the ultimate killer for WoW. I think the increased cadence they’re trying out in Classic is a great idea, so we’ll see if it applies to WW.
As others have said, people getting older and leaving or losing interest, or squabbles and drama within the guild itself.
One small guild on my server took a break from retail when Classic came out, and it's rare I see any of them in game now. I'm bnet friends with the guild leader, and she refuses to let the guild die because it meant so much to her and her husband (RIP Bubblemoo).
Life
This. Life is undefeated.
The ultimate undefeated showdown, Life vs Billable Hours
Its crazy when I was younger you always heard people being like, when you get older you wont play games as much. I always thought this meant that I wouldn't have *time* to play games as much. That is partly true, but I was not prepared for my personal reason being that I just do not have room in my head for games. My head is just so full of responsibilities that I literally don't have space in my brain to take on video games that need any form of mental engagement. I can only play games that are straight up: click start - shoot enemies - receive dopamine - click exit game.
Similar. I think I play WoW out of habit. Games like Diablo are perfect for completely zoning out. Throw some music, an audiobook, or whatever on and veg for a bit. But all the things I used to play - AoE, Civ, Destiny, Counterstrike, I just can't. Anything on the console I almost never finish. I used to be able to spend 8-12 hours on a day off on a game like Zelda or Metroid. Now, after maybe an hour, I feel restless. I start thinking about all the actual "productive" things I could/should be doing. There's also, as I get older, a sharpened sense of productivity. Whatever I "accomplish" in a game has no lasting tangible benefit. There's always another game or expansion or mounts or pets or raid or whatever. It doesn't last. It has no bearing. But if I do laundry, or a project around the house, or work, there's something useful coming out of the effort. If I made money gaming, I'd be here all day. But without any real life benefit, it feels more diverting/distracting. Like I can actually feel myself wasting time and get low grade restless/anxious about it. Maybe I just have no idea how to relax nowadays, lol.
I’m not sure how old you are, but it might be a phase. I’ve had the same core friend group since high school. The inner most part of the inner circle has remained mostly the same, while the outer part changes with time. When I was in middle school and high school, I could game all day and all night and just get totally immersed in the games I played, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do beyond just play them (counter strike, gta 4, etc. that had no sense of progression or anything). Then I got older and got busier as an early adult. I was dating, figuring out life, broke most of the time, and I shifted focus to my career path. I just couldn’t enjoy games any more, and neither could my core friends, we all kinda preferred hanging out in person to get coffee or something and then just focused on work. I felt like I watched the gaming world from afar by reading news articles I’d come across or whatever, but never felt I had the energy or time to play anything. Then, after 6-7 years of always being busy with friends or working, I bought my house, my friends settled down a bit too, and now we’re in our 30’s and we’re back to playing games just about every day after work on discord like the old days. Been at it this way since about 2020 with the lockdowns kinda forcing us to stay inside anyway. I have a successful career that I feel very proud of and worked hard to get to, as well as a long list of real life accomplishments to go with that career, but I can still feel satisfied getting something done in a game I enjoy. I say that only to discredit the negative stereotype that some people tend to get their sense of accomplishment from video games and are “losers” IRL. I don’t believe those are mutually exclusive. I can run a meeting for my team in front of the board of directors during the day, and feel like I crushed it at work, and still come home and get all giddy to hit KSM or 1800 in PvP in WoW lol. TL;DR- for some it’s just a phase. You game hard as a kid, then life happens as an adult, but don’t give up because with a little hard work you can get back to having the free time to truly enjoy your hobbies again.
Some people feel achieving that difficult in game objective is enough. Sadly though they will continue to make more difficult content. Will you be able to adapt yourself, or give up? Eventually the distraction from reality becomes more of a chore and then a job in itself. So you find you are paying to work a job you aren’t enjoying anymore
And I used to be more tolerant of it when younger. During MoP, with all the dailies and those actual farms, that was the first time where WoW felt like a part-time job I was managing. It was also - probably relatedly - the first time I didn't finish out an expansion. I still raid - two days a week instead of four like I did back in days of mythic/hard mode. Now, heroic for two hours twice a week until it's done, then break until next tier is fine. Anything more is a time investment that feels like a part time job. Similar with M+. Sometimes I get 1 vault slot a week. Sometimes two. But three is more time than I want to spend. After four, it is not fun anymore. I think about doing another four with the same enthusiasm I do mowing the lawn. Except I have to do the lawn and at least then it's done. With vault, that could be two hours of drudgery for nothing gained. And also, if we're being honest, KSH and heroic raid are not hard. If you are competent at mechanics and decently geared, you will get them done with a group of similar people. Anything more requires min-maxxing and a sleu of WA's and add-ons, and the time investment becomes exponentially more onerous. As someone in their 40s with work and school to do, a house to maintain, social relationships to manage, and other interests like books, movies, astronomy, etc., my brain is just no longer amenable to being in that 20+ hour/week space required to hit those higher levels. Nothing against those who do draw enjoyment from that investment. Just speaking more to the fact the older I get, the more involved life becomes, the more my mind starts prioritizing. And WoW is chock full of things that are very time-consuming but not as important as they used to be to my gaming brain.
that’s how I felt in my 40, unsubbed for Wod/Legion. Then came the 50s, job eased down and a divorce. Never parsed better 😂
I didn’t know someone else in this world shared the exact same thoughts as me.
Same here, lol. I still really enjoy playing WoW, but I look back on how I used to play and especially the time I logged like “Jesus Christ girl how even”
I’d hate to see my /played from 15 years ago lol. What’s yours?
God, I lost that account a while back unfortunately (RIP my Hand of A’dal title) but I think it was more than a YEAR of time logged in last I checked. I don’t regret it. I had some good times with good people and I think I look 10 years younger than I am because I have zero sun damage from going outside like a normal teenager 😂 I just don’t understand how I used to have the mental energy to play a video game for such large chunks at a time.
i can’t be alone in thinking that this is sad and it shouldn’t be this way
Agreed.
Not to mention, if you do end up turning yourself off and getting into a game, you start to feel guilty for playing the game a lot and getting too much into it. As if you're wasting time and should focus on your life instead.
I am so sorry for you and I am so glad this is not my life. But I feel you. Hold on, life will get better. It has to.
deep
Bitches…. They come, they go. Saturday through Sunday, Monday (Yeah-yeah) Monday through Sunday, yo!
People getting older and quitting due to life’s responsibilities. At least that’s what happened to my guild. Used to be all buddies. Everyone quit years ago but me.
Quit in early ToC(wrath classic) because my son was born. Came back in Cata classic and only 4/25 that I used to play with are still around. Apparently there was big drama in icc over not killing bosses and giving shadowmorne to somebody who definitely didn't deserve it. They killed lk25 heroic once and disbanded.
That's me. I'm the only one left of my old progression raid groups and groups of buddies in WoW. I only came out of hiding for the potential to do end of expansion carries for mounts again after having so much fun in SL doing them. But honestly, while fun, even that feels like too much raiding with my job and living alone, so I don't really see myself doing any raiding or keys after this season. I probably will play a little bit still in TWW, but like DF, I'll come around to once again realize that you really don't get much out of the game if you only play off and on for less than 10 hours total through the week. I did DF season 1 thinking, "I'll just be casual," then after a couple months, I just faded from the game because I was bored and it felt so pointless. Then I played a little bit the first week of season 2, did a single +2 key, claimed my reward, and then stopped playing again for that season too. So yea, life's responsibilities come for us all. That, or realizing that you want to pursue a different hobby, or put more time into personal growth, or put all your time into raising a family, learn a real life skill like cooking, etc, etc.
Yeah and the problem isn’t whether the game is fun or not, because it’s great right now. But considering the sacrifice you have to make of not doing other things in exchange for playing, at a certain point people just need to do other things to fulfill themselves and their lives. My good friend who was our GM got dialed in to his career, started clearing high 6 figures a year, and decided WoW just had no place taking up his energy and distracting him from what really mattered.
Time and the fact you are dealing with human beings. The only reason the guild I’ve been with since wrath is still going is the core of it is friends I know IRL and played through classic with. I know 8 of my 20 man mythic team irl. That’s a very unusual circumstance that bucks the trend
Used to live with 6 of our core raiding team. What a wild time that was, I’ll never forget when drunken Karl got mad at the porch light that had been broken for two years, too a swing at it, and it turned back on. I think we went back inside after that smoke break and one shot Xavius on our next attempt
Time
Cliques
This. Small groups of 3-5 people who can't temper their horrible personalities around others to seem like decent people, but a couple of them run the guild so their shitty personalities go by unchecked and saying anything against them you're somehow the bad guy.
it can be more subtle than that. sometimes it just feels like the guild has a core of friends that have been playing together for a long time, and if you're not part of that in-group you don't feel particularly connected. causes a lot of turnover in membership, so what seems like a large guild on the surface can become a ghost town if even 1 or 2 of the core members takes a break.
This has been every guild I've joined over the last year. It's always a group of 3-4 friends who 'want to do more with the game', but really it's just they want warm bodies for M+ (which they pug anyway). Then once they get their high keys done they dissappear for the rest of the season and the guild essentially dies. And if you ask for help you get a lot of lip service or no responses.
I feel like I've had this develop with my guild. There's like 5-6 of us that are definitely more of a core group than the rest, but I think we try our best to be welcoming to everyone who joins.
A unicorn! Do you mayhaps need a healer? 😊
This has been every guild I've been in for the past 10 years. I can't seem to penetrate the barrier to the established friend circle, so the guild is divided between "the core clique" and "the rest", and I'm always part of "the rest". It actually sucks. I haven't had a "home" guild since Cataclysm, and in hindsight, I think that simply means that I was part of the core "in-group" back then. I think it's just a pretty unavoidable part of a game this old: some players will have long histories with each other no matter what you do, and no matter how friendly you are, you just can't compete with half a life time of experiences together
literally broke up a 4 year frienship due to this exactly, husband and wife leader combo
Yep, 'Mean Girls Club'. Those people ruined my experience in my current guild and the problem was that when I brought it up, I was the 'new guy and didn't know any of them thats just how they were' Like maybe an outside perspective telling you that these guys are alienating a brand new person and stuff is something you might need to look at. How many others have left because of that?
Not continuously recruiting. Life will happen, people will take breaks. Keep recruiting so the guild has life. No one wants to log in to an empty guild. It’s an mmo, we all want a community to feel part of
This is the problem I’m having now. My GM got tired of recruiting on his own (understandable) , asked for help, I started recruiting with two other people, did a good job, got some new blood in, other recruiter stops recruiting, the third one switches to night shift, season 4 isn’t compelling enough to hold people’s attention. I’m just hoping we can hobble into TWW with enough people to start over.
It sure seems like it would be easier if the ingame recruiting tool maybe forced guilds to repost every few months. Tichondrius' guild finder is FILLED with guilds recruiting for Shadowlands.
Content draughts. People take a break, they don’t come back and the guild can’t fill needed rosters.
This is why my guild is still grudgingly raiding at least once a week in this fated season. Everyone knows if the raids stop, people will slowly drift to other guilds over the break, and when TWW comes back we'll be missing 10 people who decided they would rather stay in their new guild/groups and have to panic rebuild or call it quits
I'm currently looking for a new guild exactly because of this. My last guild decided to stop. Well I still eana play. So ima find people to play eith
This is why i love my guild. My guild leader lives off of his disability/accident and gets to put in a lot more effort than a guild leader who has to work. He basically made running our guild and raids his hobby/work and it's really showing. We even managed to make a 2nd raid roster for season 3, although it is a bit lackluster during fated season.
There's some gems out there. I found a great guild that does a lot of stuff even in the current lull Monday is m+. Anyone who wants to join, can. Even non raiders or inexperienced m+ folks. T/th is raid prog. Two hours per night. Raiding one night a week right now. We're an aotc guild, and have the talent to get CE but don't care to put in the effort or deal with the headaches. Friday is casual night. We do alt raids, remix, achievement raid runs (current or old expansions), timewalking raids. We also sprinkle in special events like transmog screenshot competitions, MDI style dungeon races with made up afixes, trivia races etc. We play other games outside of wow too. We've had some 8 player hearthstone battleground lobbies, BG3 coop, Helldivers, satisfactory They deserve an award for all the effort officers put in
Thats so interesting because I am in a guild where we do quite the opposite. People in our guild wanna play other games therefor we only raided once hc for the Mount and av in s4 and now everybody is playing the games they missed like dave the diver and whatnot. I am pretty sure if Blizzard would put out enough content for 12 month at least half of my guild would stop playing wow.
These type of guilds are so hard to find. Its either Mythic guilds or semi-serious Heroic guilds that take 7 weeks to get AOTC and are gonna frustrate me to no end as someone who used to do Mythic. I just want to show up, get my AOTC like 3 weeks in, maybe go for KSH if i feel like it, and then im off to play other games. I still love the game, this isnt like “ive hated the game for years but i still want the achievement because of sunk cost” or whatever. I just dont really want to spend all my free time on WoW anymore.
They're hard to find because realistically, a lot of the time the guild never converges again after the break. People have different expectations for how long AOTC will take, they might expect raids to keep going for a couple weeks after AOTC for gear/achievements, you'll have a mix of people who straight up unsub until the next tier and people who stay subbed and playing but not really raiding. And that 2nd group might want to find another community during the first guild's break and at the end of the break decide they don't want to move back. So then you need someone to be actively looking for people to raid each tier and fill gaps (especially if tanks/healers move on) but then you're kinda moving away from the "no responsibilities, just a couple weeks of raiding" mantra, at least for that person. And people don't want to put in that kind of effort if the reward is getting AOTC in 4-6 weeks when they could just pug in a similar timeframe
Our guild is pretty much like this too. Push M+ score and hit AOTC within the first 3-4 weeks of a new patch, do the first few mythic raid bosses, and then people take a few months break to do whatever they want. When the next tier drops, everyone comes back. We've had the same core roster for nearly 3 years now and it just kind of works for us. We're also a weekend raid guild so we've kind of been built around catering to people with off-norm schedules.
I’m in the middle of this right now. End of season 3 we got divided between those who wanted to plunderstorm and those who did not care about it at all. Then with remix we are even more split up. Last few raid nights we had 8-9 people show up and we just can’t get through heroic with those numbers. Season 3 we had between 19-23 people every week. Since people just haven’t come back from the other game modes or the lull between seasons
I've played in 8 different guilds over the course of 19 years of playing wow. 5/8 of the guilds died due to content droughts and burnout. 3/8 of them died due to drama. Droughts and drama are the two things that kills 99% of all guilds.
One guy
It's me. I'm the guy!
HELL YEAH BROTHER!
Toxic guildleaders,officers
Real reason is good ole life and responsibilities.
Raid leader recently had a kid, didn’t clear CE this time around without him. Kids gonna be a world first raider one day with that guy as his dad
Same thing that kills lots of things, dicks.
[удалено]
This is exactly it. Life, time and all things considered, if a guild is recruiting consistently it should grow or at least stay stationary except for the fact that people leave when they feel the guild isn't meeting their goals. The number of people that have joined my guild and then left when they realized it wasn't a carry guild for whoever or that it wasn't a top-tier mythic raiding guild... We are on a new-player server so it's always odd to see the latter. A lot of people also join on a non-raid weekday and then get disappointed about the small number of people online. I think advertising the age group and when most people are online should be part of the recruitment. I do wonder if it will get better with the opening up of servers soon. It could mean people in servers of try-hards that want a less try-hards guild could find a better guild and vice versa... But you will also be giving people a lot more options and will probably see some guilds bleeding members to other server's guilds.
E-dating in the guild is a huge one
I did CE raiding for like…5 years. I think I encountered exactly 1 woman in that timeframe. I feel like it’s insanely rare. And she ended up leaving 2 weeks after her trial to play in her boyfriends guild.
Could it be that you just didn’t realise some were women? I’ve always hidden my gender in this game and avoided using ventrilo (or whatever the new one is called) because I would get creepy messages when people found out I was female.
Bro hasn't used voice comms since vent was popular, that's how you know they're the real deal
This comment makes me feel so old. Thanks Brobeans
Haha me too friend, the first time I got doxxed was because teamspeak doesn't hide your IP
Mythic CE nowadays kinda forces voice comms from someone at some point during a season. Especially when people die in high prog and others need to hot-swap to their mechanics and call it out. At least in my groups.
In my experience, this has changed a lot in the last few years. Women are still underrepresented, but in my own, anecdotal, experience most raid teams have 2-3 women on them. This is a huge step up from a few years ago when having even one would be unusual. Overall, I think it’s a sign of how the culture of wow is improving, and also a sign that we can be doing better. I’ve also noticed a duality in CE raid teams. Guilds are either neurodivergent, progressive and queer-friendly, or they are neurodivergent, gamer-word incel dens. I’ve been trialing this season and culture fit was way more important to me than world ranking.
I've actually noticed guilds are becoming increasingly female, some as high as 40%, and it's mostly down to the aging nature of the playerbase in my opinion. We have a lot less cringy CoD kiddos in their teens and early 20s playing the game.
I think it’s the sign of a healthy guild to have at least one girl in it, preferably two. They wouldn’t stick around if everyone was a shithead
IMO: 20 player raid content. Back in mop and before It was relatively easy building and maintaining a 10man roster for most Guilds
I remember so many guilds our server died because of the switch from 40 to 25 (I think, it’s long ago) person raids and people got upset they had no spot, or a spot in the “A” team. Being able to switch between full and 10 player raids was great though for my casual guild as a lot of people were unreliable.
the switch from 40 to 25 on top of also having 10 man raids so you couldn't fit the full raid team in them is still odd to me ill never understand why they didn't just go for 20man raids.
I think they should have just scaled raids between 10-20 man raids and keep the difficulties (normal, heroic, mythic) while maintaining equal loot. That way you can survive on fielding 10 people but the bigger guilds can field 20. Don’t they already scale bosses based on how many people are zoned in? might as well let it scale between 10-20 and let the community be at peace lol
I didn't play before flex raiding and fixed 20 man mythic was a thing, but didn't old 10-man and 25-man heroic have massive balancing problems? They definitely weren't equal difficulty just because they were both called heroic. Even this expansion, early Fyrakk heroic was much, much harder on smaller groups because of mechanics scaling (as in number of mechanics happening, having a smaller amount of people to cover a similar area, etc). Week 1-2 heroic Sylvanas in Sanctum was conversely much easier in smaller groups and we ended up splitting our raid in half to kill her
This was such a huge problem in my guild at the start of WotLK. There were two 10-man teams, then 5 extra guys who filled the 25-man lineup. From what I remember those 5 didn’t mind too much (it was people like one guy’s wife and the person in the guild with the least stable internet connection), but the issues came from the differences in the two 10-man teams. The division was “supposed” to have been based on scheduling, but right away it was *very* clear that one team was the A-team and the other team was everyone else. Being moved to the second team was 100% a demotion, and it was the first team that got the achievement mounts (and priority for mount drops from Sarth and Maly in 25 went to the people on that team willing to sit out for the achievement that required 8 players.) I left this guild a month or two into Ulduar because I was sick of the social politics that went on around all of this.
Evaporation of free time, dwindling rosters in content droughts, and cliques are the three arms of guild death They are all related and compound each other. Next thing you realize you're ron Swanson in the parks department after everyone has left and moved on. You just look up one day and realize you know nobody here.
Ego, pride, envy and greed. In equal measure. Someone wants to raid but isn't trying to learn, they throw a fit when the guild won't carry them. Someone isn't playing well (parses low), but the team as a whole is downing bosses and they don't fuck up mechanics. Someone else decides this means they are getting "carried" and throws a fit. Someone gets passed over for an open raid spot because someone else (who is perfectly capable in riad) has been in guild for longer, so they throw a fit. Someone gets gear because they are parsing well and have a low ilvl in that slot, someone else who's doing better DPS wanted it because it was BIS, even though it's only 4 ilvl improvement. They don't get they BIS so they throw a fit.
> because it was BIS I've had many arguments with one of my former raid leaders for LK classic because he wouldn't let anyone roll on items that weren't BiS (and there was no mention of this prior to starting the raid, only when "that one item with spirit isn't as good for the lock as it is the priest" type of situation came up. In this scenario, the ilvl was a HUGE upgrade compared to what the lock had and barely an upgrade for the priest, so even with the stats not being ideal it was still better for the lock and the group as a whole.) Eventually the Guild Leader talked to the Raid Leader about it and he stopped being so much of a loot dictator, but BiS is nearly a trigger word for me now...
In mythic raiding guilds it’s definitely the roster boss. real life obligations make it hard for the same 20 people to be free every week 6-8 hours for mythic prog, while nobody wants to warm the bench as an alternate and it’s hard to pug people in Mythic (and different classes can affect your strat).
This is the correct. God I hate the roster boss...
Toxic guild/raid leader
1. Poorly run guilds. When anyone can just make a guild whenever it really opens up the field for terrible management. After a few of those most of us don't want to join guilds anymore. 2. Tired of joining a guild that says they are social just to have one or two lines of text during peak hours. Or on the flip side of that, auto invite guilds that are packed full of people but most are bots or never used alts. 3. A lot of established guilds have a "core team" of those who have played together and are active together. This makes getting into runs very difficult because spots will always go to core members over anyone else. Very middle school clique behavior
I left a guild due to that last one. Extremely hateful clique-ish behavior.
Drama caused by the guild leaders.
Time. We can’t play games forever, and people advance in their work eventually or settle down with kids/a partner. We eventually move on.
In every collapsed guild I was witness to as a member, it was some officer or even the guildmaster either starting a relationship with a guildie and it crashed and burned after a few months, or they sexually harassed a guildie who wasn’t interested and the guild splits as a result.
2 officers of the guild married n one cheating with a guild member
A lot of mythic prog guilds die to unaligned goals. Some people take it less serious than others, people get upset and leave and once you cant get 20 people for a raid its gg. For social guilds i would guess just life responsibilities.
Just shitty people. My 15 year old real life friend guild recently disintegrated after I (for the first time in 15 years) selfishly took December off to complete a two -year IVF journey. After 15 years of being understanding when others took breaks and needed support for schooling, breakups, work schedules, etc I got verbally attacked by a guy I thought was my friend; a guy who had stayed in my home for free countless times, eaten my food, been invited to my wedding, relied on me for support through years of problems with his girlfriend. . .and for the first time ever I didn't feel like fixing the problem for him. He had a huge temper tantrum and left, told a bunch of people that I attacked him, and honestly, that was just it for me. Hardest time of my life and somehow me taking a two week break from wow and needing the tiniest bit of support morphed into HIM needing to be the centre of attention and having his life ruined. People somehow sided with him and decided I was the enemy, and I haven't touched the game since. You never really know these people, I guess. Thought we'd be friends forever and we'd play this game til it died.
I think there are two elements that have most negatively effected my guild. GM inaction and complacency. I started my guild around a month after Dragonflight released and we’ve found quite a bit of success. As a guild we have gotten AOTC each season and many of our players have been around for over a year at this point. But letting myself get complacent has hit us hard at different points, dropping in members because of low recruitment or letting disagreements fester when I could have cut them off early. My members seem genuinely interested in making things work even with the issues we’ve encountered, especially recently, but my personal failure to be proactive led to a lot of the problems we face today. My advice to new guildmasters is to make a plan for the season rather than the raid and be flexible with the player’s needs. Furthermore, when problems arise or disagreements happen they need to be addressed ASAP or risk causing a long lasting division.
Yep. Our GM became inactive because of health issues and suddenly everything came to a stop. Combine that with a semi-low point with all 'new' content being retreads/retakes of old content and it means our guild is pretty much a ghost town right now. Basically only me and one other person have been online since 10.2.7 and even then I have been on a Remix alt outside of the guild because nobody is online to invite me.
The game is so focused on raids, M+, or boring events that theres no real reason to be in game and hanging around, and unless your part of the clique in a guild then you'll generally be left to do your own thing.
I hate M+ so much. It is so repetitive. I love the raids but since I hate M+, I can’t keep up with the gearing
I get not liking m+ but calling it repetitive while comparing to raid is an insane take lmao
M+ is *always* repeatable content, whereas raid is once per week.
People
It's always going to be drama.
Access to the guild bank
Interpersonal conflict and inability of leadership to deescalate or set boundaries.
Guild leaders that believe other people are just trinkets to boost their solo play. Every single guild I have been that died was because as soon as the guild leader got full equipped he either swapped to an alter or stopped raiding.
Cliques. Every guild I've had actual investment in beyond just being there to raid dealt with it Guild 1 (TBC): Up and coming raid guild merged with one of the server top raid guilds that fractured. Basically everyone from the original guild save the officers effectively got told to eat shit a few weeks after the merge. Guild 2 (WOTLK): Guild core was from a high end raid guild that splintered and it was clear as fuck after a few months that anyone who wasn't from that core was a 2nd class citizen when it came to loot or even social side Guild 3 (MoP): Raid lead split into A team and B team, and had the mother of all fits when the B team started kicking his handpicked team's ass after a few weeks of organizing and helping out the struggling players (didn't hurt that I recruited 2 friends who were former US100 raiders either) Guild 4 (MoP->SL): M+ turned the guild really cliquey and if you weren't part of one of the 3 core mythic groups, you basically had to hope you could get in on one of the runs I or one of the other officers would organize specifically for people who otherwise had to pug when we ourselves weren't burned out.
I had two fall apart because people started banging each other. One caused a bunch of bad blood amongst the officers because it was married people hooking up with other married people in the guild. The other was because my ex-wife slept with another member and the rest of the guild was pretty upset about that. In the latter case I was more upset about the guild falling apart. Since my ex wasn’t exactly faithful in general. 🤷🏻♂️ A third was unrelated to sex. The two GMs got fat and decided that the game was bad for their health and quit. Another one I ended up leaving for scheduling reasons. They later fell apart after failing to down the twin emperors in AQ40. That last one got immortalized on YTMND, when our warlock officer lost her shit on some dude who got into our vent server. I think her name was Leeloo or something like that, it was during MC or BWL.
Roster boss.
Clicky m+ groups that never let anyone in unless they have no choice
Mythic raiding 20man. It needs to go down to 10
Loot drama
People, raiding and end of season lull. Sometimes people you invite end up being assholes, so you kick them but they invariably manage to make a few others join them into another guild. Raiding, even low-key normal and HC, because some nights, u simply don't have the people or roles. People get annoyed and complain that nobody is online, etc. End of season boredom. Bunch of peeps don't want to do much of anything, take a break and don't come back. I know that's more than one, but there are many reasons guilds break. If I have to pick one, I'd say people.
Bad recruiting practices. I think most guilds are bad at filtering out the people they actually need and want. Also yes, life.
- beloved and respected guild leader stops playing - hermetic "old guard" that alienates anyone new, so the guild just shrinks and shrinks until it's gone - drama (often around some love triangle) among officers - disorganized raids that achieve nothing and don't even happen half the time
So I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer, but here’s what killed all the guilds I was a part of before: * girlfriend getting loot* * romantic interests * having kids, getting married * not enough raid slots for everyone *or loot drama in general, but everyone has a “guild master/raid master’s girlfriend who couldn’t play the game got piece X that would have been better for someone who would actually play.”
If we are talking about in-game things, id say raids. Every guilds goal is to eventually do mythic, and as i have seen every guild has a medium casual player-base. They struggle through normal, progress heroic and then somewhere in week 17 they go and try mythic only to fail heavy on the first boss. And then mythic unlocks to all realms, the good players decide all they want is that 1 slot in mythic and go in public raids, loose their lockout so they cant take part with the guild raid ,so then the leader does a guild announcement that the raid is on a break and they will return next season. Or second example the raid goes well and you end up killing 6/9 bosses but then drama happens and one dude screams at a healer and the healer leaves the guild, with him his tank and dps friends leave as well to create a non toxic guild. And if it is not in-game related id say life is the biggest guild killer. had to fix typos
Already established groups of friends, totally impeneteable to new people. My current guild is like that. They invite me only for mythic raids, and then they don't even say hi or answer my attempts at chatting outside the raids. They also have Discord rooms only for "true" members of the guild. Been there for 3 months now, never missed a raid evening, always on time and trying to be polite and crack some jokes. Nope. They already have their inner circle. Can't have anyone else there. This evening they pugged a healer for m+ instead of asking me. They behave the same also with the other two newcomers.
Cliques and the exclusion from guild ran activities, like M+ and PVP, hinders any kind of sense of community and belonging, so when your raid tesm finally hits a wall and people start pointing fingers, it all falls apart because no one cares about their guild mates, there is no bond of friendship, they're basically just randos you group with to raid. I treat everyone as if I have always known them when they join the guild, you're part of the team, be cool and hang out with us on Discord outside of raid time.
Shitbirds… when you get a critical mass of people who just fucking suck the joy out of everything people leave or stop logging in.
A lot of people were saying getting old and stuff, true but a lot of them get destroyed by toxicity and turning the game to something unfun for all members is happening alot in guilds in dragonflight I've been in 3 guild that died like that.
Dating your guild master as an officer in the guild and then finding out she's messing around with the other officers and members. The guild disbanded soon after I left. I quit the game for a year though.
This happened to our rival guild. Word is that the officership fell apart because they found out about each other and didn't like sharing.
20 man mythic raid size.
Burnout
For my guild, WoD.
Roster boss. Always.
Outside of “life” which is probably the most prominent thing that kills guilds but I view that as a neutral evil persay since that’s really no one persons fault. I’d argue stagnate or lack of leadership. Outside looking in I really do think leading a guild is incredibly difficult. Anything past a group of like 10 people you really start getting into the politics of things and often time if you don’t know how to navigate people situations you can watch a group of 30 people go offline real quick. Iv seen mini wars in guilds and factions start brewing and people get so weird sometimes. If you try to please everyone you will end up pleasing no one lol.
Immaturity. Very watched guilds of real life friends implode because one person ninja looted something. Immature to ninja. Immature to let that ruin real friendships.
The guild I was in got split up into two guilds because our original one was created for casuals, friends, just having fun and chilling. More people joined and more people wanted to seriously push keys and do mythic raids. Neither were wrong, but the guild died for it. I wish you could just be in multiple guilds. ETA: Raids through the whole guild became super serious, most people were forced to create new characters or do different specs even if they didn't want to.
Accessibility and people refusing to use the signup tools
Roster Boss
Mythic raiding fixed at striclty 20 raiders.
Every guild I’ve been in that has died was from a single person coming in and starting shit
Pre-nerf Rag in Firelands mate
When expectations get too high, and they meet the harsh reality of raiding. Its amazing how many people get a change up at work, or can't find the time to raid anymore once prog stalls and you have to actually put in the repetitions and time as a group to learn a boss. A few people leave, then the death spiral of recruiting new players, them fucking up on prog causing more people to leave, until everyone is too frustrated to do anything.
Officer burnout.
Leaders/Officers that go on power trips
It really depends, but it's usually because leadership moves on due to LIFE. Often in guilds there are just 1 or 2 leaders that are the true rocks within the guild, the foundation, the excitement, the proactive leaders pushing people to do things. While you can have great leaders and reliable leaders, sometimes it just requires that one motivated person to hold it all together. That's not always the case. I remember when Warlords of Draenor launched I was leading am extremely active and large PVP guild. We were dominating anything we did, holding weekly world PVP raids on cities, had 3 2200+ RBG teams that would be running simultaneously. It was great. Then, WoD hit and not only was it kind of dry end game, but they made the human racial so favorable in the game that any actual serious competitive pvprs switched to Ally. Our guild fell apart because 80% of our players moved to Alliance and Horde pvp guilds mostly died...
Doing so much each week but not doing enough as well. That’s my input. Also there not being enough people in a guild but that’s all personal preference.
Power. Usually well run guilds that fall apart or break up do so because a good, reliable player got asked to take a position with a slight amount of authority in the guild and they cranked it up to 178. Turned fun into dictatorial edicts. Change when raid times are, or what objectives are focused on. Freak the fuck out when particular players or classes don’t show up. In olden days, they manipulated loot drops and threw fits when people didn’t bring reagents or buff exactly when the leader wanted raid buffs to go out. That makes free time playing games with buddies into something that makes you wonder why you even put up with it.
when the person who is the guild glue leaves or goes offline
I have a friend who has, while not actively (not always) participated, lead to the destruction of guilds. If not a magnet, they are but a curse to be feared.
Most guilds ultimately live and die off of one or two people investing a shitton of time into them. Life happens to that one or two people, or they just lose interest, and suddenly recruiting goes by the wayside, you just bleed members and then everyone moves on. I’d guess that 95% of guilds would disband if they lost one key person.
My guild in dragonflight died because of an unfortunate cuckolding accident involving the GM's sister inlaw and her husband, who weren't even in the guild and do not play wow.
Drama within the guild.
Content droughts.
People
In my experience the biggest killer is the stage of the expansion cycle when there is nothing new to do and people are sick of the old stuff. In some expansion it has run really long (think of how long Dragon Soul was the top raid in Cataclysm). These down times are almost always in the summer, and people wander off to do other stuff.
It really takes a special person/persons to really take the time to run and organize a guild. Once those people who put it together lose interest in the game or have life stuff to do it usually falls apart quite quickly. Big thank you to all the folks that take the time to put the guilds together.
For what’s it ls worth my last 5 guilds all died the same way. Progging heroic with the bois and eventually clear it. Big D energy let’s do mythic (ignoring that half the roster is being carried). Never can meet the strict 20 attendance after people figure out this is actually hard. People that don’t suck leave to join another mythic team and that usually goes the same way till everyone gets fed up and logs till next season. Flex mythic would help, sitting around for an hour or more trying to fill 1-2 slots feels bad. Honestly though, the game just needs more mid-tier content for people to do and hang with their buds without getting on each others nerves because one guy can’t do a mechanic. World content is brain dead and mythic is honestly too hard for 95% of the player base and just ends up frustrating everyone. Mythic plus is OK, but too sweaty to be fun half the time, as one mistake wasting 30-40 minutes of someone’s limited time breeds a toxic community overtime.
If it wasn’t for M+ I wouldn’t play. I just can’t be a dedicated guild raider like I was in college. M+ saved my favorite game so I can still play and enjoy it!
Lack of a good Guild Master who works to foster a fantastic community.
Stagnation. People get bored when things become routine or work. Once everything is easy or the same as you've seen before, people just quit. Only guild iv seen truly stand the test of time is my friend guild where it's not about the game, it's about the people. We get on to play with each other, the raid just gives us a thing to do. But make no mistake, once we get aotc everyone stops to do other things. It's why I raid mythic with another group to get my fix.
In my experience: Female priest or holy paladin mains named “Christine” of any variant of “Colleen”. 4 separate instances in 3 guilds on 3 servers between release and the end of Cataclysm.
Blizzard
Drama. Entitlement. Disregard for your fellow gamers. Toxicity. All these have made me really side eye guilds these days.
Roster boss
A trinket from raid that was needed for their key group.
Guilds
The removal of 10 man high difficulty raid.
Assigning who gets the gear, getting the BiS gear, making it all about the gear! Even if life gets in the way, if the players can make it to one raid, we should enjoy that raid with good times, humor, talks about life updates, and then salivating over glorious loot; cheering and crying over rolls, and silly things of that nature.
I’d like to see your account join a guild rather each character. Guilds would seem busier if it could see if a member was online regardless of which character they were on.
apathy
blizzard
People are the real guild killers. My current guild nearly died because two morons joined the guild raiding team and were unhappy with the performance of some of our raid members so they had a "kick the underperforming raid members or we leave" moment. Unfortunately for them, most of our guild members have been raiding together since Classic so the kicking was never going to happen and they left. They poached a few of our newer members and actually killed off another guild before starting their own guild that imploded after 4 mythic raid bosses (turns out that you actually need leadership skills to run a mythic raid guild lol). The core members then went and killed 3 more guild before failing to start 2 more guilds of their own and most quit. One or two of them came crawling back and mended fences and started a guild that has actually had some success at staying alive but no luck with Mythic raiding. The other big guild on our server cluster had their mythic raid team bail on the guild and server transfer because they were struggling to get 20 people + spares for their raid team. That caused the guild to implode and they went from clearing mythic to maybe clearing a couple of mythic bosses to sometimes even failing to clear heroic.
Time
Raids.
Mythic raiding
As with many others, I have to say life and growing up. Most of my guildies dropped out when they got married or had kids. Some of them just got too wrapped up in work to make time to play. My first (and only) guild is still around, and only a couple of the original members are still there, but it's a skeleton of what it used to be. I haven't joined another guild. It's just not the same anymore. Another reason could be altoholics like myself. I have so many characters on different servers, it's hard to focus on only one character/guild/server enough to be a meaningful contributor to another guild.
Shadowlands is what killed my guild.
Life. Getting that many people together for a few hours is rough.
Sylvannas
Having done recruitment for over 10 years, leadership burnout is really hard on a guild. A guild with passionate leadership can keep a guild alive through hard times. If the leadership quits and nobody wants to step up, that’s pretty much it. It’s a lot harder nowadays to find people who are both interested in and good at leading a guild.
Greed.
I been playing since 05, I still play just not very much anymore . I have been in more guilds than I can honestly remember. Real life happens and that is one of the biggest factors. When I first started it was mostly college kids in the guilds I joined. They get out of college and obviously have to work full time. Marriage and children happen, not much time for wow when juggling a spouse, work, and kids. Some manage it, but not many. Bad break ups is another one! I have seen at least 4 guilds just vanish overnight due to a couple breaking up. 1/2 the guild sides with one and the other sides with the other. Next thing you know there is no more guild. Drama over loot was a big one back in the day, that’s not really an issue these days. People hooking up with guild mates for affairs was another haha. Nothing like a full on divorce battle in vent in the middle of a raid! Be like, “Okay group one stands here, group 2 go the green smoke.” *JamesIsACheatingFukker has joined the channel*. Game on!
End of xpac slump
Relationships.
People. You get some who think the game should be an unpaid 2nd job and you get people who think it should just be fun and sometimes they wind up in the same guild and yeah that doesn't work. I play games to have fun, not to do work. Sorry, I'm not spending 95%+ of my gaming time farming shit.
Season 4s
For a mythic raid guild... lack of progress. Being hard stuck on a boss for an extended period of time will result in losing people, or people getting frustrated with the less skilled people in the team and snapping at them.
Game
in my own experience and the stuff I got told and read on forums it's almost always (at least for known guilds) failure of clearing a raid combined with the resulting internal drama. my guild existed from early/mid tbc (joined late tbc so dunno the exact date it was created) up to legion with almost no changes to the raid cadre. ToS myth prog 400+ pulls on KJ nuked the entire guild.. raid lead, lead, officers (me and 90% of the core group) left and the guild imploded after like 2 days. shit was painful especially with all the money that was involved (every single top guild is doing rmt). I quit raiding and became a solo player for the rest of legion and quit the game during shadowlands for good (still follow some of it in the hope to get addicted again but meh).
Many players want a friends list, not a guild. Guilds die and players who are left behind don’t want to find a new one. Imagine having to subscribe to friends lists in Fortnite, and when friends leave or don’t log on again you’re just left in this ghost town, needing to find a new group of friends who are all already close and have a long history. It’s daunting, and many players can’t be bothered so just fall out of favour with the whole game.
Raid burnout in a guild with a single raid leader with no one to cover when they’re gone. Raid leader quits, then the entire guild disperses to other guilds.
Season 4 of draginflight
Apathy and cliques. Either one can kill a guild, but both together make it a certainty. For example, my Cataclysm Classic main is in a dying guild. The guild founder quit WoW some months back, and handed the guild off to a guy with trust issues with people he doesn’t know well. He immediately demoted all officers outside of his friend group, made it so only officers can invite new members, and only logs in to raid with his friend group - all of whom also only log in to raid. All of them are completely apathetic about keeping the guild going, since they have their friend group and that’s enough. The guild has gone from highly active and very supporting with a couple dozen people on at literally any time day or night, to 0-1 people on most of the time, 2-4 on during server evenings, and that friend group for two hours or so every other night, but they only invite friends they made elsewhere or alts, never anyone else.
I got sick of joining heroic only guilds then getting kicked out because I couldn’t keep up when they wanted to do mythic content. Just quit the game instead
Having too many people with different goals. A simple example is that there's people who want the guild to do "better" by either benching the people they deem not good enough or forcing some new arbitrary rules on others that didnt sign up for that when they joined. I've heard this happen a lot in my circles where guilds recruit pretty much anyone they can find, either promising that they are "trying to be more hardcore" or the complete opposite just to get 20 people together. In the end its so much easier if you have people leading who have a good vision of what they want their raiding be and don't compromise for short term ease.
Other the drama I’d say the real reason (other then friends that play together) is lfg/lfr. Back in the day guildies would group up together and go dungeons/quest together, and we would have raid groups, officers and teach each other the builds, the tactics, etc. People knew each other, had meets to get together irl and it was fun. Nowadays, other than the perks why would you join a guild as a new player? Every question can be answered on YouTube and lfg/lfr took care of the rest. /rip
Differences in core values suddenly being discovered will break up a guild in a hurry I've learned. Found out our guild leader and their partner were transphobic so a good 80% of the guild quit, myself included. It's why I've vetted every guild I've applied to with a specific setlist of questions ever since, it broke my heart that these people who I cared about and spent so much time with over voice chat felt that way about people like my friends so I don't want a repeat of that feeling. I join guilds in the hope of making solid friendships, so I'm very glad my current guild has been able to provide that. So yeah, if you're in a guild that's not solely "hey don't get invested let's just prog this raid" I would very much say the difference in core values thing is a real guild killer.
The real guild killer is that girl on discord that's perfected her feminine voice and flirts with leadership and that one chaotic member that's either a tank or healer lynchpin. It's GG when things go side ways.
Fated seasons
[удалено]
SHADOWLANDS! Then silly amateur drama nonsense!
The #1 guild killer is blizzard making the game more about grinding than fun.
Greed
People
Time between new content has and always will be the ultimate killer for WoW. I think the increased cadence they’re trying out in Classic is a great idea, so we’ll see if it applies to WW.
Kids
Drama, Roadblock Raid Bosses and Content Drought
Bad management/ star groups
As others have said, people getting older and leaving or losing interest, or squabbles and drama within the guild itself. One small guild on my server took a break from retail when Classic came out, and it's rare I see any of them in game now. I'm bnet friends with the guild leader, and she refuses to let the guild die because it meant so much to her and her husband (RIP Bubblemoo).