Stormwind City Guard venture capitalism!

Last week I was contacted by a member of once-important guild Gnomeregan Stormtroopers (I heavily suspect their name was inspired by our guild; they first showed up shortly after we rose to prominence on the realm). It is a level 21 guild, which means its members enjoy certain benefits and which makes the guild of some value. Gnomeregan Stormtroopers has lost most of its members over the months however and now the raidleader is quitting the guild.

The member who contacted me explained the situation and was afraid the guild he had grown fond of would be lost; he would like for Stormwind City Guard to help 'ressurect' it. I suggested turning over the leadership to Stormwind City Guard and created a poll to see if our guild would want that.

(note this isn't actually a 'vote' as such, so while I kept the 7 day deadline, I suppose this wasn't necessary)

It seems we have been given a clear mandate to pursue further negotiations!


While I think it would be great to have another guild under the SWCG umbrella, I had an ulterior motive; I wanted to see some debate about expanding to a second guild and what we would do with it. And of course I'd love to export our model ;).

The debate happened for sure. Besides the rather fun suggestion that we should turn Gnomeregan Stormtroopers into a dictatorship and fight them, there were some doubts as to what a second guild could do to our guild's cohesion. The debate actually went quite far into how big a guild should be and what works and what doesn't, which leads me to Dunbar's number. This is the theoretical limit of 'social relationships' the human mind can handle and, by extension, the limit after which a group starts losing cohesion and 'management' issues start to crop up.
Dunbar's number frequently pops up in the study of internet communities, such as those in online games.

Here is an interesting blog post all the way from 2005 about Dunbar's number in WoW guilds:
http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/08/dunbar_world_of.html

Now the way WoW guilds work has changed somewhat since the introduction of 'guild levels', which would theoretically work in favour of larger guilds so I wouldn't be surprised if this 2005 data is no longer entirely accurate.

Nevertheless it's interesting to hold these numbers next to Stormwind City Guard. There are currently 25 people online and in the last 24 hours there have been about a 100 people online. A lot of people have 'alts' -secondary characters owned by the same player-, but at a guess that still means at least 75 unique players have been online in the past 24 hours. In my experience the guild has 'automatically' hovered around this size for a number of months now (invitations are always open, it's just a matter of how many people join and how many leave or stop playing altogether).

I think I'll see about getting some better census data from SWCG.


Back to the second guild! If we want to grow and/or spread democracy, is it a good time to open up a new department? I don't know!
Let me know in the comments!

Universal Suffrage has Been Withdrawn!

Well, it took less than a month.

Taking a page from the book of the Athenians, the Stormwind Guards have decided that people need to earn their place in society before being allowed to vote.

You need to be 'friendly' with the guild now, which equates to a very large amount of questing at lower levels.
I suppose women, slaves and foreigners will follow shortly.

In guildchat there was some talk of wanting a more active guildmaster; but when I inquired to what such a more active guild master would actually be active doing, no serious answers followed... I still haven't been overthrown! Yay!

Democracy only has to go wrong once...

One power that belongs to the people in a real democracy is to give their power away to someone else.

Well, the first attempt came today:

A long-time member doesn't hold with all this modern thinking and opened a vote against it!

As can be seen in the sreenshot the votes were even 3 in favour to 1 against before I came in.
The creator of the vote didn't allow for the 7 day voting period we have, so I had to remove the vote from the calendar. The system remains untested for now, but I guess it's only a matter of time before someone tries again to undo all my hard work...

Voting in Effect

Everything is set up now.

There's a constitution document which is visible to the entire guild at http://tiny.cc/swcg It details all rules that are currently in place (nearly all through votes!). This is mostly how voting takes place (at least 10 votes, 2/3rds in favour, 7 days to vote), what ranks there are (there are 7 right now) and how bank tabs work.

Apparently the voting is being discussed in the raiders' ventrilo channel. There are already plans to overthrow me (which would lead to a contradiction in the constitution as the guild leader is not elected, but has to follow the will of the voters.. constitutional crisis!) and people coming up with the strangest things to vote on. Only talk so far though.

My former 'Captains' (one of them now a bureaucrat - still pending a vote) are mostly worried about things going wrong, which is understandable, but nevertheless I'd like it if they didn't bolt everything down just yet. One glaring loophole in the current rules is that everyone can invite new characters and there's no restriction on alts (alternate characters owned by the same player). The effect is that two people, or one person on two accounts, can invite any amount of alts he likes and dominate any vote. I'd hoped this would be solved by someone else, but Talina has already created a vote to patch it up, essentially by making it necessary for people to have 'friendly' reputation and to forbid havings alts. Problem there is that there's no way to see what character belongs to what player. I'll attempt to fight that vote in guildchat.

There's also a vote from the raiders though! The raidleader they voted into that position two weeks ago has run off to play another game and is barely online anymore. A new vote has been created to remove him from the position and there's a request for new raidleaders to step forward. The system in action.

The big worry in the guild seems to be people getting very random votes through the system in some way. I'm interested to see if this will happen considering the voting rules that are in place.
I personally still have some doubts on how to implement vaguely worded votes and if I should do something to make sure they are better defined by the players.


Signing out,
Commander Gaius,
Stormwind City Guard