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!