Types of Everquest Guilds

Everquest Guilds

Guilds typically have various life cycles and in the time frame of Everquest there’s a certain level of fragmentation, culture shifts, and paradigm shifts in overall guild structures as the game has changed over the years. This is meant as an overview into the basic structures of guilds.

Noobie Zone
All starting cities in Everquest have a noobie garden where players of old started. Everyone was equal, and as they climbed to discover other players they would unite to form groups and eventually guilds. This is where the noble savage existed in Everquest if one ever existed.

Early Years

Very early in the game there were “proto guilds” that didn’t really accomplish much that survived and died in the early years. Some early game proto guilds would go on through various phases of modernization. There were other more established guilds that came in from other games like Ultimate Online in the Original Everquest. “Proto guilds” don’t necessarily include the more organized guilds, but did co-exist with “proto guilds.”

Auction House
These were “over glorified /auction” guilds that were created as merely an auction channel. For the most part they died out relatively quickly as they never maintained an internal culture as the /auction command and early places would gravitate toward more market based zones such as East Commons or Greater Faydark to buy and sell goods.

Proto-Role Playing
These were identified by a specific faction such as “evils” or “goods.” The term “proto-role playing guild” refers to the most early guilds that proliferated and eventually died off. More successful Role Playing Guilds tended to have multiple thematic races rather than one. Only a few single race die hard “Proto-Role Playing guilds” existed up through the Shadows of Luclin era before dying off to more well organized Role Playing Guilds with more open recruitment.

Small Group Guilds
These were Proto Guilds that would exist as nuclear guilds for either small clusters of friends, boxers (people playing multiple characters), and were often casual players or players “between guilds” or leveling. Some of these guilds would go onto become very powerful raiding guilds or family guilds, this was the building block of Everquest.

Open Recruitment Guild
A “viral” recruitment type of guild that would shout out for recruitment and take anyone in, the member fluctuations in these guilds would often fluctuate according to their evangelism and ability to maintain recruits. Some had varied histories and are often remembered as “my first guild” as they seen as necessary building blocks of early server identity.

Open Raids
Not particularly a guild, but open raids were often hosted by one or more guilds to kill Nagafen or Vox. They were often done in an orderly fashion to raid the target, distribute the loot, and then call off the hunt. Loot distribution was with /random.

The First Great Wave of Organization

As the Ruins of Kunark and Scars of Velious forced guilds to adapt and revolutionized the game with increased content for raiding. The keyed zone Veeshan’s Peak required a level of organization beyond Nagafen and Vox and sparked new types of guild arrangements. The game introduced Epic Quests, Faction on a more prolific scale, and several other mechanics that required greater cooperation between players. This shifted the locus of control away from smaller subsets to greater and greater centralized authorities.

When the planes and the like were released there was alliances and even early races for the content. Servers began to either become “race” oriented or rotation oriented that scheduled who got what raid zone. Most used a hybrid system of sorts between the God Planes placed in Early Everquest to Kunark and Halls of Testing were on rotation while everything else “was open season.” Racing often encouraged either diplomacy or a Hobbesian “war of all against all” where players would train mobs and do anything to get at their coveted raid mobs. More civilized races were just a numbers game and who engaged the mob first. The fastest and most ruthless guilds often were the most successful. GM’s would broker content between guilds, or officers could share content.

Roleplaying Guild

These were often more open to select racial, class, and other such characteristics than their prototype counter parts. So evils and the like could join more easily and group within the guild and build relationships. Only a handful of “Proto-Roleplaying Guilds” existed for single races, often with a few diehard members and alternative characters rarely played.
Family Guilds
The first large scale family guilds began to rise, most out of either the Small Guild formation or transition away from the Open Recruitment Model. A few Roleplaying Guilds or Proto-Roleplaying Guilds have been known to make the jump. These had a focus on group content and raising up players from their humble beginnings. However, strains would often come as players would not keep pace with each other and want more from the game’s content. These internal divisions would often tear these guilds a part or force them to become raiding guilds with different arrangements for older players.

Raiding Guilds
The first “modern” raiding guilds were refined during the Ruins of Kunark where greater amounts of cooperation created social systems that required more central control by a select few leaders of Guild Leaders and Officers. Some still remained as “family guilds” or “casual guilds,” while others transitioned into higher playtime and more results focused groups that became the “Uber tier” or “high end” or “end game” guilds.

Guild Alliances

These were used in early Everquest, but as the need for manpower rose up higher so did the need for greater organization. Guilds develop their own political identities and cultures, and some were unwilling to forfeit or unknowing whether to abandon their identities and merge. So as a compromise guilds would align themselves together in various degrees and raid content. Some of these alliances still exist today, but they are woefully less prominent than they once were. Relationships between guilds could often become cracked and would splinter alliances from politics or internal guild conflicts that would grow into either one guild subverting the other and the like. Interguild rivalries hardened as identities and membership numbers were tied to success. Success in raiding meant bringing in loot, and bringing in loot meant racing. As there was no instanced content, guilds would vie in a Darwinian struggle or force in new systems such as guild rotations for content.

Open Raiding System
These had less organization as semi-alliance systems where anyone could participate, but they often had their own identities as systems. Specific servers would maintain for many years an Open Raiding System, other servers would have various start up organizations. Some raiding guilds and family guilds would continue to run Open Raids in a nonsystematized manner.

The First Wave of Reorganization and Integration

Between the period of Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious, and Shadows of Luclin there was a rise in the first wave of Reorganization and Integration. The vast movement was a spike in the population between “uber” and “casual” that would rend guilds a part. The first targets were often the family guilds that would want to transition into raiding, some would succeed, other guilds would die. Smaller guilds died out as their members joined larger organizations. Family guilds would persist through, but many of the strongest would die. The raiding game also splintered and weaved more and more into tiers as more expansions were released.

Rotations on some servers like Rathe were built into the system as a type of social democracy that
enabled weaker guilds to co-exist along side stronger guilds. The more “racing” oriented guilds where a guild had to get their numbers to the particular mob had more guilds die from external conflict than internal conflict. There have been cases known of “Griefer Guilds” that would use training to the extreme and such a vile culture would create a system where Game Masters would disband guilds or in case on Luclin a vigilante raiding system was orchestrated to deny Ancient Crusade mobs to raid. This led to the destruction of Ancient Crusade by external factors.

Family Guilds

Known as “family guilds” or casual guilds, these were places where starting players would come in to learn the game, get quests done, and ect. Epic Quests and Halls of Testing armor from Scars of Velious were often necessary to transition into raiding guilds. The main locus of problems that arose with Halls of Testing was the three faction split in Velious where guilds would shift from Claws of Veeshan and Coldain factions against the Giants to pro-Giant and against the Claws of Veeshan and sometimes Coldain. The guilds would focus away from Kunark to keying for Sleeper’s tomb, held by dragons, to raid Sleeper’s Tomb for Avatar Weapons and then transition to raiding North Temple of Veeshan. Depending on player’s playtime, this created two factions in guilds with the haves and the have nots.

As the guild would have a greater amount of people that wanted to raid “other content” while others “felt unprepared” to go into the new content would form factions in a guild and tear them to shreds and leave few guilds. Guild leadership would often have a choice, to transition out of Epic Farming and HoT Farming and go to Sleeper’s Tomb and North Temple of Veeshan or remaining a “middle tier” guild and continue a slow crawl upward. This created the reorganization and reintegration of guilds as they began to split into new tiers and different guilds or remake the old guild into a raiding guild.

“Low Tier Raiding Guild”
A low tier guild was often a Family Guild, small Guild Alliance, or very early start-up raiding guild that would remain in the lowest possible content necessary to raid that had rewards available. These were seen as recruiting grounds for the Middle Tier Raiding Guilds and sometimes the High End Raiding Guilds.

“Middle Tier Raiding Guild”

This is commonly a “family guild that raided” or a “start up guild” that wasn’t up to end game tier. This was the “great middle class” of the game, the expanse where the “rest of raiding society” was a part of. These guilds were robust enough to maintain cycles in recruitment, and some would fall by the wayside through internal strife or external strife.  These guilds maintained order in their own ranks, and were tiered by content. The “Uber” or “High End Tier” would set the pace for the rest of the server, since they were more organized, better equipped, and more speedy to “open content” they would quickly pace through the middle end and force the middle end often to wait until they were done with content. This furthermore reinforced the pecking order on servers, and to a degree “choked up” the line of progression.

Their cultures often varied as did their looting systems. Some were “family oriented” by maintaining a “casual” structure with no required raid time, others maintained hard raid times. Often the harsher recruitment requirements such as “requiring Epic 1.0” was determined by past guild experiences that destroyed previous guilds. Middle Tier guild recruitment policy was not “open end” and would require more often longer app periods, more sponsors, and other requirements to keep guilds from becoming too large.

“Uber” or “End Game Tier Raiding”

These were cutting edge guilds that were on the brink of the latest content available to players. These were the best of the best. Their guild cultures were as varied as their recruitment policies and required raiding times. Some required 6pm-12am raiding 7 days a week.  The raiders would push hard into the nights to raid, while Middle Tier would push into the wee hours of the morning, these people did it more often and built an identity around it. The guilds would take in membership from the Middle Tier and more rarely the Lower Tier, depending on the sentiment of the guild’s culture and the particular applicant. However, the cycle to “poach” or recruit actively inactively was set there by both self-interest of the individual and the guilds involved. Some guilds would even try and poach members from each other’s guilds by offering incentives.
 The allure to be and remain number one was strong as was their pride. These became the first true aristocracy of the game, where reputations were won and lost on the battlefield. Guild identities were the strongest. Some of these guilds were loved, others hated, and all were feared and respected.

“Griefer Guilds”

These were guilds that had a reputation for “do anything to get ahead” and the monicker could be applied to any guild in the spectrum. What they did have was a focus on “getting ahead by any means” and often would face political backlash ranging from board wars in server Flames and Rants sections to even outright vigilantism in the case of Ancient Crusade on Luclin. While they have always existed in one form or another, they took greater importance during this time period and developed as a part of the reputation and culture of specific guilds. Even in the virtual world “Axis of Evil” existed to which no form of “Shock and Awe” would stop especially the more hermetic and chimerical of these guilds. It was either crush them or force them into a negotiating position.