The Game Director remains calm about the decline of the known guilds in World of Warcraft. “This has always happened,” he notes.
In recent months, more and more guilds in World of Warcraft have thrown in the towel. Many stopped for personal reasons, but a large part did so because they no longer want to invest the grind and effort needed to compete at the top – especially without receiving any incentives for it. We have already reported on the “mass extinction” of the large guilds.
In the Developer Q&A with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas and Community Manager Jost “Lore” Allen, this topic was also discussed – a user asked what they think about the cessation of large guilds. Hazzikostas responded to the question quite calmly and explained that guilds in World of Warcraft have always “died.”
Even in Classic or during the Sunwell Plateau of “The Burning Crusade,” there have always been loud voices stating: “The guilds are dying and it’s Blizzard’s fault!”
Hazzikostas attributes the “blame” more to the officers and guild leaders. They are the ones who hold a guild together and often have to invest a lot of time and nerves to keep the guild running. He refers to them as the “lifeblood” of a guild. However, when officers and guild leaders do this job for several years, there comes a time when they realize that they don’t have enough free time to lead a guild as they once could.
A significant portion of the players would then simply look for another guild and continue – just under a new name.
Some players might just want to play a different game after 10 years or generally reduce their consumption of video games. This has always existed and will always exist as long as there are guilds in World of Warcraft.
However, Hazzikostas does not dismiss the problems with grinding artifact power. “The fact that so much artifact power could be farmed through the Maw was a mistake that we will fix.”
More about the changes to artifact weapons and artifact power in Patch 7.2 can be found here:
New artifact talent with 50 upgrade levels – is that the solution?
