What size guild is better?

[Adinion]

I'm wondering what is the best size for a guild. With the guild I'm in now, my friend only wants up to 10 people, which of course is 2 groups of 5. My question is, aren't there going to be instances that require you to use a raid group?

The other reason I understand having 10-15 is due to not just picking up anyone who wants to join, and avoiding problems with certain people. Everyone in the guild is someone we know, but is having a 20-30 man guild better support? What are some of your takes on this.

[IN-QQQQ]

For the Raid Content, you will need about 40 players. So unless you want to depend on doing Pick Up Raid Groups, 40 is the number you want to hit to be able to do the Raid Instance.

[Zosimus]

Big enough so you always have members on :P

[alcaras]

No more than 150.

After 150 people, studies have shown, groups tend to fragment into subgroups.

[Havelock]

No more than 150.

After 150 people, studies have shown, groups tend to fragment into subgroups.

Yeah, and even 150 is high. We had a little over that in my SWG guild, kept it that way for maybe six months but it ended very badly and administering it was ridicul0us. I'd say 40-80 is optimal - enough people to always have what you need on, not so many that you can't keep everyone on the same page and small enough that everyone can know each other.

[hermit]

150 is a lot of people in a guild.

[Nox]

For the Raid Content, you will need about 40 players. So unless you want to depend on doing Pick Up Raid Groups, 40 is the number you want to hit to be able to do the Raid Instance.

Well if your raids need 40 people, and your attendance averages 60% then you have to recruit to fill attendance. Your guild will have to maintain ~65 a-team people to routinely perform 40 member raids with predictable manpower.

Forced attendance is not a good system - because it sets up negative scenarios like the necessity for consequence if attendance isn't met. That creates authority situations and aggravates other problems. Reward systems like DKP and attendance (IDKP) etc. encourage participation rather than enforce it. All-around a much more positive environment.

I was one of the co-founders of Balance, an EQ test server raid content testing guild. Most of my good ideas came from my buddy Steve Tsao, and my friends in Afterlife which I knew from UO beta/prealpha and from early days on MithMarr.

[kandahar]

my guild currently has 4 members, i find it fine.

[Hypa-R]

How many in nurfed atm?

[Tivoli]

about 45.

[Zosimus]

I've found that as long as there are 5 members online at most times, then the guild is big enough for me :P

In Lineage, my pledge had 7 people, but they we were all very active.

[tnarg]

At the later stages in WoW, any guild expecting to compete in end-game pve (pve more than pvp) needs to have at least 35+ members online and ready to go during normal raid times. I think that the initial question asks about the "eventual" need of numbers. Realistically a guild in WoW expecting to compete needs at least 50 skilled members. I think that 50 members should be enough to account for the random time that any 10 given persons cannot make a raid time. That is my take on it, and I hope it helps.

-kiegh

[JonChron]

You can never go wrong with 50 active members.

[tnarg]

Good call on Active. But I hope that in the first few months of release your entire guild is active.

-kiegh

[JonChron]

I think they will be active into at least the second year if hero classes and battlegrounds are done right.
You know Blizzard will continue to make money off of kick ass expansions.
Their goal is to keep us addicted.

[Saxony]

One of the factors that adjusts guild size will not be the number of members present but the number of members of certain classes. I find that in different guilds certain classes will be much more prevalent then in others because the players of those classes might have a more unpredictable schedule. So they overcompensate by recruiting more people. That's not even taking into account the prevalence of certain required classes like clerics and warriors. Hopefully that won't be as big of an issue in WoW but we'll see. One of the things that bolstered guild sizes was the number of different classes available. If you wanted to ensure that you had 2 of each of the buff classes, 8 clerics, 8 warriors, etc... etc... Well you need to have like they say a buffer of people to account for that, but some classes will have a more accurate buffer then others. If you only need 2 of 1 class for instance your buffer has to be at a minimum of 50% extra I.E. 3 people, whereas if you need 8 of a class you could have 9-12 in the guild itself. Thus ranging from 12%-50% extra. It all varies and is a bit complicated, but if the maximum raid size is 40, then I would expect 55-65 people in your guild. WoW has done an excellent job of simplifying it. Having less classes is a godsend, although I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing predominant variants of classes. Like the shadow vs holy priest debacle. They're different enough that they are very often treated like different classes.

-Saxony