Stormwind City Guard winding down.

All good things must come to an end, and a little over a year after this experiment started that time seems to have come for the democratic guild on Magtheridon as well.

A couple of months ago, many raiders left and it was difficult to find replacements. Eventually, even more left and two months ago it was decided to disband the raid team.

This followed a period of extremely little political activity (such as votes being generated or even problems being discussed in guild chat). It's unfortunate for me that much of this happened during my graduation which means I had no time to follow what was happening up close. Nevertheless, this guild propelled itself and solved its own problems for about a year and, I think, brought up both many strengths and weaknesses of the direct democratic form of governance.

One thing that struck me was how even in a direct democracy it takes very little time for a 'political upper class' to form, and that when those people leave, at least in the case of a World of Warcraft guild, there is no guarantee that a new one will step up.

I have no intention and feel that it is counter to the spirit of this experiment to attempt to 'revive' the guild. Nevertheless I've created a final (is the intention) guild event for people to appeal against my decision to let the experiment come to an end: if it gets enough votes within a week from now, we will continue as we were.

One more time!

Democracy at work

I'm happy to say the guild seems to be rolling along just fine.
Importantly, it looks like the idea of democracy seems to have settled in with most of the guild members. Discussions on policy pop up quite regularly, there's generally one or two votes per week and if sometimes, if we're lucky, people even come up with real solutions!

The calendar for June shows quite a lot of activity in the guild.

New rules include one that bans people from running for 'bureaucrat' more than 4 times in half a year after so many attempts by a single person, who was defeated in the polls every time. There's also an interesting new rank, 'dictator'. It's not as bad as the name suggests considering the player who has that rank only has power over lower level players, but it's still a pretty undemocratic idea.
The rank is a reaction to the guild's current inability to deal effectively with 'annoying' players, who beg for in-game gold or other kinds of help. The 'dictator' rank gives one player the power to remove such players from the guild.

The Dictator needs more power.

From conversations with guild members (for which I often use a character people do not recognize) it seems that there's an unwritten assumption that only when many people feel someone should be kicked the 'dictator' should exercise his power. There are however no formal rules on this and in actuality this means that the dictator can do as he pleases. 
When such formal rules (e.g. there has to be a vote before someone is removed from the guild) are suggested most people favour this over a dictator. There seems to be a lack of constructive (creative?) thinking when problems arise.
It occurs to me that creative or lateral thinking may be the one reason we're not just appointing kings to decide everything for us anymore.

New hypothesis: there aren't that many lateral thinkers in the guild.

In defense of the Revolution!

Yesterday I had a long conversation with Dotctor in guild chat. I didn't quite understand the argument he was trying to build, but I'll do my best to represent his main concerns as fairly as I can here:

- I, as the guildleader, am not active enough in the guild. "You don't care."
- I let 'stupid' votes pass in the guild (namely the bank tab mentioned earlier), and I should block them.
- Democracy is a small elected group of smart people making all the decisions for everyone else, because voters don't know enough about policy

I tried to state my rebuttals, to wit:

- I, as the mechanism for democracy, had better NOT be too active in the guild because it would open me up to more bias. I should just make sure the system runs the way it should. And if anyone cares.. ah hell, I'm not even going to address that.
- Well, if I didn't, that would kind of defeat the whole point!
- That's a representative democracy. We're a direct democracy. Of course, should it evolve into a representative system, I'm not stopping that, but I'm not encouraging it either.

It didn't really seem to stick. But one thing did stick. I told him if he wants a representative democracy he could make a vote for it. Instead of that, he made this Vote today:

By the time I found out, a real life friend of mine and someone who cares a lot for the guild had already started to campaign against this vote, and I must admit I campaigned myself, too! (so much for the impartial researcher)

It turned out most people voting only voted because dotctor told them so. Some didn't understand the mechanism. Others responded to what I'd say were campaign promises of a more clear guild structure.

There's a whole lot of stuff happening here. Next to my own instinctive defensive reaction (while staying within the rules of the system), there's people who seem to be doing potentially damaging stuff just because someone told them to while they don't know what they're doing. There were also players who responded to promises without actually reading or at least understanding what the vote means.

That's certainly the point he's trying to prove there.

Nevertheless, his vote failed quite spectacularly, so I guess there's something to be said for our approach as well.

So... Isn't this weird?

The people of the Stormwind City Guard have in their infinite wisdom bestowed upon our single bureaucrat a whole bank tab to himself.

Ostensibly the bank tab was created so people can deposit bind-on-equip (that means they can be traded or given to other players) items into the bank. Players could then ask a bureaucrat to withdraw those items that they need for them.
The fact of the matter is that since Dotctor got auto-demoted, we only have one bureaucrat. Not to worry, though: parallel to the 'bank tab for bureaucrats' vote Maryse put herself up for that position.

Unfortunately for her, at 16 votes in favour and 11 against, she didn't get the 2/3rds majority required.

So now our lone bureaucrat Rewky has a bank tab all to himself. I sure hope he puts it to good use!

The Gain and Loss of Bureaucrats

Well, you may remember how Dotctor became a bureaucrat in my previous blogpost. Well, no more!

This vote... he actually survived

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but for some reason Dotctor no longer has his authenticator bound to his account. This meant that he was automatically demoted. To the jailed rank.

As usual I got blamed at first. What else are politicians for?

Not really that much going on lately. The guild seems to be mostly running itself right now. There has been some decrease in people coming to me and demanding that I solve things, but it seems to be less now. Though that could be just because it's relatively quiet all round.
Occasionally there are debates and people come up with possible changes, but it generally doesn't make it to a vote.

One thing did make it to a vote though! Long time player Dotctor has applied to get the 'bureaucrat' rank and gathered enough votes. There was another contender, Maryse, who wanted to become the first girl bureaucrat. Judging from the 8 votes against to 4 in favour she got, there is still a glass ceiling in the Stormwind City Guard's hierarchy. Of course, it may also have something to do with the tagline of her campaign "and I'll try not to boop soo much :D"


Anyway.. I bought Dotctor a cake which we ate in Stormwind Keep's garden.

P.s. I notice there's a story that remains untold on this blog. What Happened To Gnomeregan Stormtroopers! I still have my notes, so I'll try to write that up sometime soon.

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!