The purpose of a guild charter

The new Star Wars MMO is about to go live (Early access starts tomorrow, full access a week later).  To say my friends and I are excited would be substantial understatement.  We have a guild ready to go live at launch.  Its a small guild, only 5 individuals or so.  I expect we will be recruiting, since we expect to need 8 for a raid.


During the last year and change, I attempted to assemble a raiding guild in World of Warcraft.  While I had played in several guild before, I had become extremely frustrated with the horridly inconsistent "leadership" that I found in other guilds.  Unfortunately, my efforts were also inconsistent, I never felt the guild was really ready to recruit outsiders.


In reality, I think this was part of the problem: I was unwilling to let strangers into the guild until I felt like I could control and separate them from the guild members I knew personally. One of the reasons I felt I didn't have the appropriate control was the lack of a complete guild charter. 


In the real world, a charter lays out an organization's rules and purpose.  Due to the variation of purposes of organizations IRL compared to in a MMO, it is more important for IRL organizations to have a unity of vision to be productive.  Also, IRL, the charter is important so organizational rules are explicit for legal reasons, and provides explicit expectations of individual responsibilities and a framework within which punitive measures may be taken against organization members that fail to fulfill their responsibilities. 


Having a clear purpose for a player-created organization is important to provide focus for the guild.  However, since there is substantially less variation in purposes of organizations in an MMO.  Therefore, the the greater value of a charter for an in-game organization should follow the latter of the two purposes described above: making explicit the responsibilities and expectations of the organizational members, and the charter should strive to accomplish these goals.  With an appropriate charter in place, one that does a fair and equitable job of dividing the responsibility of running the guild, members will be informed about what is expected of them.  Furthermore, punitive measures taken by the leaders of the guild against members in violation of the charter will appear to be legitimate and measured instead of arbitrary.


As we move forward, and we refine our charter, I hope to post more about its contents and changes that are made to it.  For now, I need to get to sleep and hopefully be productive tomorrow.


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Flashpoint, in review

Well, its ended up being a busy week, but I'm finally able to post again.  As promised in my last post, I would talk about the Esseles flashpoint in TOR that me and some friends played through the last night of the server load beta.

Our group consisted of a Sage 10 (myself), a Gunslinger 19+, a Jedi Sentinel 10, and a Trooper 9-10.  I healed, the sentinel tanked.  Obviously, the difficulty of the encounters had to have been massively skewed by the high level dps from the over leveled gunslinger.

I am very, very impressed.  Overall, the tone of the flashpoint felt like it was something straight out of one of the movies (along the lines of the escape from the Death Star, or the attack on Jabba's sail barge).  There were lots of opportunities for wise cracks or serious lines from our characters, and plenty of action between social interaction scenes.  It felt that both sides of the encounter, the combat and social encounters) were important parts of the instance.

Starting the instance was a bit of a chore: it seemed that there was some glitch in the conversation to start the instance told us some members (and not which ones) were ineligible to participate in the encounter. 

I liked the flow of the instance: 

• an intro
• some combat
• a social encounter to establish the premise
• more combat
• a story path decision
• more combat
• a boss fight (Ironfist, or whatever his name is looks more intimidating WITH a beard)
• a slight change of location
• 2 big boss fights
• optional boss
• and a fInal light-side/dark-side choice to wrap things up

The combat felt pretty typical for what I would ahve expected out of an MMO "Dungeon".  Small groups of enemies with somewhat complementary abilities.  Usually it was one strong or elite enemy surrounded by a group of regular units.  I'm not sure what the other players were doing, or how aggro was being held, but as healer, my job was fairly straight-forward.  At level 10 I had exactly ONE heal: Benevolence.  I would typically start by running into combat, and downing a few of the minor enemies, while watching the parties health bars.  If anyone got to low, I would spam them up to 80-90% health.  A few times, their health bars got lower than I was comfortable with, but I don't think anyone died during an encounter. Having meditation/reload really helps to keep the pace fast between fights, and giving EVERYONE a revive prevents slowing the group down for a long corpse run.

I believe the entire flashpoint took about an hour, and I'd guess we spent about 2-3 minutes in combat to every 1 minute we spent in a social encounter, which is a good change up. I REALLY like a flashpoint/dungeon/instance of this length, it feels like you've accomplished something when you've completed it.  I really hated the "Speed run" 15 minute wrath dungeons, and I hope they don't bleed over into TOR.

THe lewt the bosses dropped seemed pretty standard "blue"/"rare" quality gear, better than random drops, close to what was produced by big group quests.  I really hope there are some more clever names for the armor in the final release, though.  Every boss drop was named "Esseles Counselor Gloves" or "Esseles Smuggler Jacket".  

Long story short, it's more than enough to keep me hopeful, as long as a they fix the few bugs at the start of the instance, and they actually give appropriate names to the gear drops.

That's all for now.  I expect my next post soon, either discussing the value of a guild charter (currently writing one for the new guild) or about some microtransaction/post-launch premium ideas I think TOR should implement.

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