Why build a venue to facilitate coordination between guilds for joint events, projects, etc?
We believe this endeavour is worthwhile to the extent that it differentates itself from existing avenues in the ways that follow.
Why coordinate at all?#
Large guilds have some overlapping goals.
Portions of guilds are competitive gameplay (i.e. wars), and the utility of cooperation in thoses areas is debatable. But more broadly, guilds are subcommunities of dedicated players on Wynncraft; some goals align:
Activities#
Coordination makes large events easier.
Although not selling points of all guilds, frequently, guilds organise events. There are many factors that limit what is possible when it comes to activities, key among them are resources, organiser time, and expected turnout.
Inter-guild events offer one of many solutions to all of these and therefore allow for larger and more interesting activities/events to take place. A common place for those responsible for all major guilds’ events to converse is therefore productive in that regard.
Communications#
Communication draws insights from similar circumstances.
Every guild has things that make them unique, but ultimately, we are all subgroups of the Wynncraft server existing in similar systems.
Although not 1:1 applicable to your guild, others have likely experienced similar challenges and addressed them in their own unique ways. Chatting with those running other guilds at a similar scale can lead to insightful conversations; conversations a shared venue can productively facilitate.
Services#
Pooling allows for use case amortisation.
Every guild has similar needs when it comes to external-to-game services. Websites. Bots. Staging. Some of these infrastructures (bots and websites especially) scale nicely to the size of your playerbase. Other infrastructures (especially game/staging servers and high-scope event servers) do not.
Since there are many overlapping needs within the community, sharing infrastructure can be more cost effective. This is, of course, in addition to services offered by the hall itself that leverage and share technologies and stacks built to host this place.
Isn’t this just an alliance GM?#
Automation eases maintenance and ubiquity fosters otherwise improbable connections.
There currently exist clusters of guild ownerships, events contacts, etc. in a scattering of discord group messages. These are wonderful, but have their own problems: maintaining active membership in such conversations is difficult in the long-term as guilds and people come and go.
But more importantly, they are also smaller in scope. For large ambitions, a conversation with several guilds is likely to be less productive than one with all of the major ones. There have been attempts to combine all guild leaders in one place in the past, but they failed the test of time due to the high maintenance load.
Automating and decentralising a shared space allows for longer term sustainability of a more broad crossection.
Isn’t this place just guild_community?#
Speaking with the leadership of ~35 major guilds is different from speaking with the membership of tens of thousands of guilds.
Although guild_community is a great place to catch a pulse of the community more broadly, its strengths are also its challenges.
Guild_community is simply too active and dillute for conversations to follow, facilitate, or sustain long-term, effective, coordination or organisation.
Nobody goes to guild_community to organise something, and likewise, very few people follow that channel religiously. The sampling also skews war-heavy with minimal representation of the community side of things.
This place is more concentrated.#
Instead of having a channel with everyone in it (representing the membership of Wynncraft’s tens of thousands of guilds), a more selective approach allows for 1-4 representatives from guilds notable in various metrics. It is more manageable in the density of interactions.
Moreover, keeping everyone in more specific channels has controlling interests in specific domains. A channel of events contacts is likely to have the most sway in inter-guild events, etc.
This place is more focused.#
Another benefit of combining exclusively senior leadership in one place is that element of focus. Potentially notwithstanding wars, conversations in guild_community generally spawn a wide range of things and formats. Following an open channel is hard for the reason that not every conversation is potentially relevant: this place hopes to help address that.