Are guilds disbanding now more than ever?

[Cyanu]

imo it's inevitable that guilds will eventually struggle even if they don't right now

generally the 'hardcore vs casual: a tale of two worlds' era for wow is gone, playing a game hardcore is not something many people can do for very long, eventually other responsibilities take place of progression raiding or it simply gets old: so you climbed to the peak, you liked it, it now takes double the effort to stay there, so why not just let someone else have it and move on with your life?

imo wow needs to adapt to the new reality and strive for maintaining the challenge but reducing the comitement requirement of the endgame content, for PvE it might as well be impossible but for pvp it's almost obvious: solo ranked queues...

generally guilds are a bit outdated imo we need to move past guild exclusive content and towards more flexible content (but no less challenging)

[McNeil]

I don't have any numbers, but random guesses are that interest in raiding is declining a lot with all the grind that comes with it. And personally I'm not a fan with having to many difficulties, you just end up raiding the exact same place over and over with different numbers and some extra mechanics. The game is just not fun to raid for me, and from what I've seen in Nighthold it doesn't live up to the quality of the questing experience in Suramar City. But ofcourse guilds are disbanding a lot all the time in every expansion, so unless there are any numbers to be shown its not plausible to just guess there's a decline or not judging by your personal perspective.

[mysticx]

Not sure that it's happening more now that it has in previous expansions, but it's definitely more known now.

I think this is what we're seeing, guilds used to hit roadblocks and disband all the time, but nowadays every one of them feels this need to tell the world about the horrible loss inflicted upon the world by the momentous event of their disbanding and of course a medium-sized essay about the reason.

And when you see a bunch of those "We're chucking it in and here's why"-threads on WoW-related forums, it suddenly feels like guilds are dying out.

[chronia]

Legion has been the shittiest expansion for Mythic raiding ever. (It's worse than TBC, imo, and that's a fucking accomplishment.)

It's a casual player's wet dream, though, so I doubt Blizzard gives a fuck.

How can Mythic raiding be worse now than in TBC, TBC didn't even have Mythic raiding, TBC also had one of the most alive raiding scenes out of all expansions, atleast on the realm i was on back then. you had the hardcore guilds (where i was in back then, i quit hardcore raiding at the start of Wrath when i got out of uni and got a fulltime job) raiding the latest content, but nearly every guild back then was raiding in some form troughout the whole expansion, small guilds did only the 10 mans (Kara and Zul'Aman), while other guilds raided the 25 mans the whole expansion, some never came past SSC/TK, some never came past MH/BT, some got stuck in Sunwell and some made it all the way to Kil'Jaeden in Sunwell but all guilds had some form of raiding content for them to do at their skill / gear level, as new tiers didn't instantly invalidate the old tiers as there was only one difficulty level so guilds could progress the whole expansion through. This made it quite easy for every player that wanted to get into raiding to find a guild suiting their plans.

Back to now, i dont see alot of guilds disbanding on my realm, there are about the same number guilds active now in NH killing Heroic / Mythic bosses than in WoD where active in Blackrock Foundry. Now i do play on a backwater realm since Cata to play with friends, so this is probably not the best realm to make conclusion about WoW overall.

[Morae]

There have been 3-4 people leave after NH opened in my guild. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but I have had the general feeling people are getting unhappy. My guild can still raid mythic NH so my personal playing likely is unaffected, but not sure about lot of other people.

Blizz has had some pretty strange design choices for legion. It is almost like they intended to breed rage, disapointment and frustration then also remove existing enjoyment and desire to do things that already existed.

These things would be the entire RNG system. AP grind. Legendaries.
Mythic dungeons being more worthwhile content than mythic raiding. Why go trough the effort to have raiding team when you can just grind dungeons and get better stuff? Ect.


I wouldnt be surprised if guilds are dying. Once they cant do the content anymore the people in it want to do after too many left due to frustration and burnout, they will break apart.

[Doffen]

Yeah TBC had the best raiding content so far in the game.

There is alot less players now than lets say WotLK. And its for one reason: WoW does not attract alot of new people. Majority of the people playing WoW has played it for years. After 10-13 years, is it strange that people get burned out? No. Do they perhaps have more stuff going on irl now? Yes.

These two are obvious reasons of the declining subs and less raiding guild, not because Legion is bad.We can also thank WoD for that. They should've maybe focused more on WoD when it was current, it might have cost them some subs, more than Legion do.

For myself, I stopped playing after heroic BWD in Cataclysm. I was bored. 4 years later I came back, to WoD wich was fun, until the last 8 months of HfC. Then Legion came, and I am having a blast.

[Mlz]

The skill gap, imho, is larger now than previously so players basically need to keep finding their way to whatever guild doesn't drive them nuts as far as their fellow players.

What? There's so much RNG involved with so many classes and so few buttons to press - you really can't go wrong unless you use aoe spells on ST or vice versa. Now snapshotting was something that drove shitters crazy. Inb4 'you could've download an addon that did everything for you' - yeah, it made things easier to follow but not to execute. You can head over to pvp forums aswell and see that one of the biggest complaints is that classes are so dull to play now with everything removed (hint: pvp is pmuch dead).

[Thoridal]

The Diablo style gearing scheme is partly to blame for this. It is not easy to find people pulling the numbers you need for the gear check bosses when you have RNG legendaries that make or break so many specs as well as artifact weapons which require a huge time sink to max out. My DH is a good example right now of that issue. I have an iLvl 900 DPS set that I built while tanking, my tank set is 904. Right now my guild needs solid dps and we seem to be getting tank apps left and right. So we pick up a tank and I go dps. I am playing the spec well, I am pulling ahead of my sims on single target and my numbers are not terrible but they are not high enough to meet the gear checks. We have another havoc DH who pulls consistent 660k-720k ST pulls while I am pulling anywhere from 550k to 680k. The only difference between our gear is legendaries. He has the ring and belt where as I have radons and boots as well as a bunch of tank legendaries. Without the ring my fury generation is more likely to piddle out during burst phases which can cut the damage in half of a good burst. Factor in the belt as well which allows a DH to pile on 30% more damage during their initial burst phase and those legendaries can add 100k dps to a pull. In any other expansion the gear I picked up for my off spec would have been adequate to switch roles. This expansion though has far greater requirements to hit the tuning for bosses and worse yet some of them are pure RNG instead of just time sinks.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Well you got a lot of assholes out there that demand their people play 80+ hours a week to chase the dream of getting a 4th mythic kill a couple weeks after the race is over. Who would want to play with people like that? The answer appears to be not as many as those people thought.

[IceMan1763]

I don't think you're looking at the same numbers I'm looking at.

32k killed heroic xavius, 6k killed mythic xavius

25k killed normal normal lei shen, 5k killed heroic lei shen and Ra'den.

I'm not sure why you're comparing numbers from nighthold to expansions from years ago. People are still progressing through nighthold.

The more important comparison is comparing the first tier to the last tier of, let's say MOP versus the number of guilds killing bosses in EN versus NH (because that's the last tier we have to compare to at the moment). Examining that, you see that MOP grew raiding while Legion is killing it with a vengeance.

[kamuimac]

I heard it here and there, that guilds disband. I've joined 2 that disbanded, just in the past 2 weeks, all having cleared 3/10 M.

Is it just me or guilds are really struggling?

its quite normal during each expansion - those who returned to game are taking a break again till 8.0 so guilds who were depending on them are dying out.

it happens every expansion . most guilds who survive consist of the same veterans playing non stop for years now - those who dont are destined to vanish sooner or later .

partly to blame for is is blizzard for sucking at tuning their game properly and catering only to seasoned veterans not to new players.
they should have never tuned NH with anything more then 35 traits and 2 non bis legendaries - on any bosses even gul dan mythic . paragon levels should have been disabled untill mythic would be open so it woudl work as over time nerfs. they simply fucked up tunign again to cater to world top guilds. nothing new or surprising there - the same happens nearly each tier.

[cFortyfive]

I heard it here and there, that guilds disband. I've joined 2 that disbanded, just in the past 2 weeks, all having cleared 3/10 M.

Is it just me or guilds are really struggling?

Well being stuck at content is rarely easy so I wouldn't be astonished at all if a lot of those guilds in those positions are disbanding.

[Aeula]

Haven't noticed. I've got all my characters dumped in bank guilds. In WoD guild disbanding was pretty heavy, no clue what it's like these days.

[Moggie]

Every xpac has a ton of guilds disband. Some more than others. Personally, I'd say TBC had more guilds disband than any others whereas another person might say it was Wotlk. It happens. But I agree that it's more public nowadays so it may seem like every guild is dying whereas in tbc it was never as public, if that makes sense.

[Xetenor]

If you check wowprogress and compare number of guilds who kill the bosses on the hardest difficulty from the very first tier to the last, it's quite evident that xpacs like MOP did excellent at retaining guilds while Legion is killing them.

Reasons (not necessarily in this order)
1) AP Grind
2) RNG gone way too far with gear
3) An extension of #2... legiondaries

Very true. I for example got on the fire mage band wagon and still do not have the good legendaries (bracers/helm) to help me be more competitive in ST fights and am just burned out from AP grind and also the legendary RNG which absolutely destroyed my experience (and sadly for many more players). Sadly this expansion is a casuals wet dream as mentioned earlier.

We are right now going to 4th mythic boss in NH and we are hitting a wall sort of where people just don't have the right legendaries and are swapping mains, halting our progress and also we have people who quit raiding all together or the game to what was mentioned earlier. Right now I am trying out my luck with my frost DK to see if I can get a good first legendary because if I don't I am just going to stick to my mage most likely till I get the god damn RNG gods to please me near the end of the damn expansion. It's really frustrating.

When WOD came out my guild died immediately since we couldn't stick to our main 10 man roster and go into mythics. Recruiting people are just too much work I guess.

[Deleted]

It looks like there are WAY less guilds raiding now.

What the hell are you looking at? The numbers you are posted above show the exact opposite.

T11 N: Magmaw: 28479
T14 N: Stone Guard: 20049

T17A: H: Kargath Bladefist 14631 (62.20%)
T17B: H: Oregorger 9213 (39.17%)

T19A: H: Nythendra 39401 (71.49%)
T19B: H: Skorpyron 20877 (37.88%)

It was stable from cata to MoP, took a big dip in WoD and is back numbers higher then ever before, at least for Nythendra, and equally high as in MoP for Skorpyron.

Sadly WoWProgress does not show nhc numbers, but I bet nhc raiding re-invirogated the lower spectrum of the raiding scene and theres more people then before raiding now.

And if you look at HC/mythic numbers:

H: Magmaw: 4306
H: Stone Guard 5893
M: Kargath Bladefist 4846 (20.60%)
M: Oregorger 2162 (9.19%)
M: Nythendra 15199 (27.58%)
M: Skorpyron 5804 (10.53%)

Again, back to MoP times and better then Cata times.

And, as a special:
H: Lord Marrowgar (25): 5193

The final tier of Wrath, where a lot of people played, was somehwre in between Cata and MoP numbers and slightly below current kill numbers.

Even the numbers for the last boss are somewhat stable:

H: The Lich King (25): 318
H: Sinestra: 609
H: Sha of Fear 582
M: Blackhand 706
M: Helya 719

I don't count Gul'dan (yet) since the tier isn't over. But one can easily see that 10m raiding brought a lot of kills for the last bosses, and that after 10m raiding was discontinued, people formed more Mythic guilds and brought back stable numbers for end-boss kills. And no, they aren't easier today, on the contrary.

[dark666105]

The grind and legendaries mainly. with content being balanced around them. A grind is not meaningful content. Blizz seems to think otherwise.

[Nuba]

8/10 of the 100~ players from my RBG guild (in Azralon, which is like the 7th pvp realm in the US) quit the game in the last 2 months, was kinda dissapointing (most of them were arena focused though, and didn't really RBGed) and the guild disbanded yesterday.

People don't understand when I say the game is dying and deny it with their hearts, but when 2/3 of your (200/200) friend lists personally tell you they're not playing WoW anymore in the last 2-3 months, things aren't really going that well.

[IceMan1763]

What the hell are you looking at? The numbers you are posted above show the exact opposite.

T11 N: Magmaw: 28479
T14 N: Stone Guard: 20049

T17A: H: Kargath Bladefist 14631 (62.20%)
T17B: H: Oregorger 9213 (39.17%)

T19A: H: Nythendra 39401 (71.49%)
T19B: H: Skorpyron 20877 (37.88%)

It was stable from cata to MoP, took a big dip in WoD and is back numbers higher then ever before, at least for Nythendra, and equally high as in MoP for Skorpyron.

Sadly WoWProgress does not show nhc numbers, but I bet nhc raiding re-invirogated the lower spectrum of the raiding scene and theres more people then before raiding now.

And if you look at HC/mythic numbers:

H: Magmaw: 4306
H: Stone Guard 5893
M: Kargath Bladefist 4846 (20.60%)
M: Oregorger 2162 (9.19%)
M: Nythendra 15199 (27.58%)
M: Skorpyron 5804 (10.53%)

Again, back to MoP times and better then Cata times.

And, as a special:
H: Lord Marrowgar (25): 5193

The final tier of Wrath, where a lot of people played, was somehwre in between Cata and MoP numbers and slightly below current kill numbers.

Even the numbers for the last boss are somewhat stable:

H: The Lich King (25): 318
H: Sinestra: 609
H: Sha of Fear 582
M: Blackhand 706
M: Helya 719

I don't count Gul'dan (yet) since the tier isn't over. But one can easily see that 10m raiding brought a lot of kills for the last bosses, and that after 10m raiding was discontinued, people formed more Mythic guilds and brought back stable numbers for end-boss kills. And no, they aren't easier today, on the contrary.

Please ignore every number here... classic cherry picker... must be a WOW dev. For a proper comparison, you need to compare Heroic to Mythic for xpacs before WOD. Complicating things further is the former choice between 10 and 25 man. For example, 59k killed Marrowgar on 25m normal while 84k killed him on 10m normal. Also, 16103 for 25m heroic marrowgar and 50k for 10m heroic.

Also, comparing a fight like LK which was hard to outgear, was at the end of the xpac, and people often don't go back to complete to a mid first tier raid boss is absurd. Also, I have no idea where the 318 comes from... wowprogress says 1101 for 25 heroic and 5664 for 10 heroic. Sinestra is 2147 combining 25m and 10m.

Keep those rose colored glasses on though if it makes you feel better though buddy.

[Mafic]

7.2 will make or break this expansion.

Right now based on what I am seeing of 7.2 it is not looking good. Lets hope patch 7.2.5 breathes new life into the game, because patch 7.2 is going to fail to do that.