Cry Havoc » Dictatorship

March 23rd, 2011 by Romy

Posted in Guilds

Recently there was a post in the Blizzard Battle.NET Website forums where somebody, let’s change the names and call him ”Bob“, was lamenting the fact that his guild reputation was reset after he had been kicked out of the guild he had been in. Aside from the original post, many of the other messages in the thread raised a variety of questions, complaints, and suggestions about the way guild reputation works. It became a popular message thread featured at the top page of the Battle.NET website. It quickly hit the post limit and was locked so no more responses could be posted.

Basically, Bob got into an argument with the guild leader and took it to the point that the guild leader finally got tired of the whole mess and kicked him out of the guild.

Bob said he was given the choice of either shutting up or having his guild reputation reset (being kicked out). It’s not clear if the guild leader actually presented those options or if that was simply Bob’s description of the situation. Bob had just hit Revered status, so obviously he didn’t want his reputation to be reset, but for whatever reason he continued to argue and eventually the guild leader kicked him.

His main complaint is that one guy should have the power to “erase all the time and work that I put into this game“.

Guilds Are Absolute Dictatorships

In the World of Warcraft, guilds are not democracies, they are dictatorships, pure and simple. Fortunately, most of them are fairly benign. There is often some degree of democratic process involved in dealing with day to day matters and usually at least some powers are delegated to the officers. However, at the end of the day there’s ONE guy at the top who really has all the power, and it’s a good idea that you not forget this.

In this situation, Bob was ultimately given the option of shutting his mouth or being kicked out. To me it sounds like the usual set of choices for the situation. Maybe what Bob really wanted is the option to argue with the guild leader as much as he wants without fear of repercussion.

Not gonna happen.

I wish I could generate some sympathy for Bob, but I really am not feeling it. We don’t know what the argument was all about or what the guild leader’s side of things might be, but the bottom line is that unless you’re brand new to the game, which Bob is not, you ought to know that getting into a big argument with your guild leader can result in getting kicked out. However, while I may not have any sympathy for Bob, I think his post does raise some interesting questions.

Alternate Forms Of Government

While he didn’t actually say it in so many words, I believe Bob’s point was that something like kicking a player out of a guild is something that should be put to a vote of some kind, rather than it being the perogative of a single player. This sounds fairly simple at first, but such a mechanism would be fundamentally different from the way things are currently done and adding it would require some big changes to the game.

For the moment, let’s forget about how much development time would be required and concentrate on the actual mechanics of doing things a different way. Suppose the game offered a second choice for guild organization where instead of an all-powerful guild leader at the top, there was a council of officers instead.

The first question is, how many council members should there be? Should it vary depending on guild size? Having 3 council members might work fine for a small guild of 20 members, but how many do you want if the guild has 300 members?

For now, let’s say that we have a council of 3 officers and that a simple majority is required to make decisions. How would that work with managing the tasks usually done by a guild leader? Do the council members have to vote on EVERYTHING? Or might we give them all some of the powers a single guild leader currently enjoys? Oh, and just so we’re clear, here are the powers of a guild leader in the current system:

Inviting players
Kick players
Control the guild bank
Setup guild ranks
Control access to certain powers for each guild rank
Design the guild tabard

In order to deal with a voting system, the game would have to have some mechanism of queueing up actions so that things can get done without requiring all council members (or even a majority) to be online at the same time. Let’s say that they add a new Guild Government window to the game for this purpose.

I debated the idea of going into Photoshop and creating a dummy graphic for this idea, or maybe creating a little dummy addon, but that would have taken way too much time.

Suppose Councilman-A decided to initiate a vote to invite a new player. Councilman-B and Councilman-C would get a notification, either immediately if they were online, or the next time they came online, telling them that there were new items in the Guild Government window awaiting their attention. Opening the Guild Government window would then allow them to register their votes on the matter.

Likewise a vote to kick someone out of the guild would do much the same. However, the situation with Bob notwithstanding, keep in mind that there’s often an immediate and important reason for kicking someone out of a guild. In order to ensure that no malicious actions are taken by the targetted player, you’d probably want them placed into a sort of “limbo” where they cannot interact with the guild bank or guild chat until the kick-vote has been resolved.

But are we going to extend that same degree of democracy to everything? Will the council members have to vote for things like changing the guild tabard? Or for changing the name of a guild rank? Or changing which guild ranks can access which bank tabs?

Maybe it would work. More likely it would take forever for things to get done. What if you wanted to invite some new player, but he ends up going to another guild because it took 3 days for enough council members to register their votes?

What happens when council members become inactive? If the council is only 3 guys and one guy goes away, it will seriously affect the balance of the decision making. If two guys go away for awhile then nothing at all gets done. Increasing the number of council members doesn’t really change the problem, either, unless you move away from requiring a majority vote.

How do people become council members in the first place? Does this require a majority vote of those already on the council? Right now if a guild leader becomes inactive, you can petition Blizzard to give the role to someone else. Would we need to do the same thing for council members who become inactive? How do you get rid of a BAD council member? Does the guild at large get to vote on anything, like maybe new council members? And how would you prevent a single player from taking more than one slot on the council? Many people have multiple accounts, so you can’t absolutely prevent it. Do you WANT to prevent it?

Obviously, with any change of this nature, there are a lot of How and What If questions to be considered. Like the current system, this new idea would probably work well for some groups of people, and not so much for others. And this is just ONE idea for an alternative form of government. There are many other possibilities. Like what about mirroring the US government, where there is a guild leader that has executive power over most things, but there’s also a parlimentary body of some kind that can overrule him if needed? Frankly I’m not sure how you would apply that idea to the sort of powers a guild leader currently has, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be done.

My guess is that if Blizzard considered anything of this nature when the game was first created, or at any time since, they probably dismissed it as too complicated. The dictatorship method of government is ultimately much easier to manage, and unlike the real world, anybody who decides their guild leader is an asshat can easily leave. And in most cases, this is something that should be obvious long before you have acquired enough guild reputation for it to be a painful decision.

Battle.net, Democracy, Dictatorship, Guild Government, Guild Leader, Guild Reputation, Guilds

Guilds Are Absolute Dictatorships

Alternate Forms Of Government

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