Originally posted by Kyleran

So, just like the US post office,  is the importance of guild websites and forums gradually diminishing? Heck, would it even bother you to be part of a guild that didn't have a website/forums, as long as they had proper voice chats and what not? 

Why do you suppose this is happening, what's really changed. Is people's attention focused on other communication vehicles or is the written word just falling out of favor.

I think it really depends on the guild.

For most guilds, there's just not a lot of reason to frequent the forums. Most guilds aren't based around building a community, and are more a tight knit group of members that want to play the same games / tackle the same challenging content.

As such for most guilds the website gets used primarily as a recruitment tool, a calendar, and as a place where people post suggestions every now and then for future events. It's basically a tool for organizing guild events, but nothing more.

Then you have some of the larger guilds, that are built more around building a community, and their forums are still very much active. This is because they do more than just talk guild bs. There's theorycrafting, suggestions, podcasts, all kinds of stuff that bring people together to socialize more often.

Maybe it just seems that way because there are so many more guilds these days?  While I do see see some empty forums for some guilds, others are pretty busy.  And sometimes it boils down to the type of guild and how much activity the guild leader and officers put into the forums.  They set the example and can help get others posting.

Our guild's site is extremely valuable to us and personally I wouldn't join a guild if they didn't have a website.

Originally posted by Quizzical

Official game forums and later wikis ended up taking a lot of the traffic that would previously have gone to guild forums.

There's also the issue that in most games, guilds don't really serve any purpose for most players other than as a chat channel.

and also keep in mind the growing trend of hackers in the MMO genre. MMOs are what made me look into Antivirus and stuff like that.

I dont want to be forced to go to somebody's strange URL website. I dont care if its guild related or not. Thats another chance for hackers to get to your account with virus.

I'm not a real forum troll *looks the the post count for confirmation*, but our kinship/guild (yes originating from LotRo) still has it's website & forum up & running and it's quite active (50+ new posts a day). Well, we're with 200+ members on 4 MMORPG's and a couple of semi-real guild-devisions (LoL, D3 and a couple of those). I myself hop by every other day to see what's new and reply from time to time on the kin/guild forum, but am not real active (anymore).

On the other side, I've been in a few EQ2 & VG guilds, all with their own forum, and if those had 1 message a week it was almost considered SPAM ;)

Guild communications will continue to evolve into newer types of uses, making websites within the games themselves accesable inside or ourtside the game.

I believe within a few years many new games will have guild and player "social media" places built in. SO everything a website is currently used for will actually get more use in the near future due to increased ease of accesability within the games themselves. This should coincide with the increase of virtual world type open enviroments to game in and thru.

You don't really need a website or forum to organize your guild for something like you use to. Raids and rare spawns are a lot more accessible today due to instancing and short respawn settings. Most dungeons/raids limit the amount of people you can bring anyways, so you can't get the whole guild together to do the kind of 100+ man raids you would see in EQ and such.

Some games are also just incorporating pretty decent guild/raid tools ingame, like in EQ2. 

Some good points made in the thread. 

One regarding the need for coordinated communication.  Many titles are more solo experiences, so there's no real need to keep in sync with other players all that much.  I recall in EVE almost every corporation from large to small heavily relied on their website to keep players informed of the daily situation, particularly with regards to hostile actions and even coordinated manufacturing.  Most MMO's today just don't require this much.

Another of course is the many new tools available to communicate with, lots of it happens through voice coms now and there's no need to read a forum.

As someone else mentioned, time spent reading/posting in forums is time spent away from playing their favorite game and I had sort of forgotten not everyone get's to do the bulk of their posting during working hours like I do.     But I actually post during my free time as well, but I enjoy it more so that makes sense.  But I do most of here rather than on guild forums, never enough active conversations  there and guild forums tend to stifle any spirited discussions quite quickly. (for good reason, peace and harmony you know)

     OP..  great observaton and something I have notice over the years..  I grew up on EQ1 since 1999 and have notice the decline in true guild involvement and social fun..  Back in the day, we always had a rather busy guild forum rather it be about game stuff, or people just chatting about nonscense..  You would think with today's facebook/twitter, that it would actually help the guild into building a community.. but that doesn't seem to be the case..  In general people just "use" the guild tag for raiding purposes, and this shows in their lack of guild website involvement or desire to build it..  I'd probably say I haven't been in a true social guild since my SWG days (2005?)

I think the answer might be obvious as to why it is dwindling>>>longevity.

The latest run of games over the last 5 years have started to die out in mere months after release and there has been no sign that trend will change.

This almost ties in to the Wow thread that is going right now.WHen you have a large majority of the entire player base come from one game [WOW] you have the make up and reason why games die off so fast.Gamers tend to have a very hard time to let go of their old game.This means you get a few million trying every new game that comes out and if that game can't hold a large player base they quickly jump ship and go back to Wow.

Create a solo game and there is no need for a guild or any interaction,really it is a contradiction to the term MMO.

I think it depends on the game.  In some games, guilds are not useful like they were.  In others, communications and management tools are built-in to the client.

Mostly i've found Guild websites to be a bit of a waste of time, often boring and lacking in any kind of useful content, i think most games now have managed to 'do away' with the need for those kinds of things,  in Eve for instance, you have an ingame calendar for future events etc, a corp/alliance message board, in game, and, for all else, there is either Ventrilo or Teamspeak, which for fleet ops etc, is a necessity, external websites really are mostly just for killboards. I don't know of any games currently that guild websites actually provide a worthwhile function.

Originally posted by MindTrigger

Originally posted by Dibdabs

Guilds just aren't needed these days, given the soloability of present-day MMOs.  Thank god, too!  Guilds seem to be full of people constantly whining for someone to power-level them, and pleading for someone to give them gear.  Then there's the little cliques and the never-ending, trivial dramas that plague guilds.  It's bloody annoying just watching it in Guild Chat, never mind going to a website and having to read all the mindless babble and posturing.  Thanks, but no thanks.

The Guild game mechanic is not the reason for these problems.  If you ever get a chance to play an MMORPG that has emphasis on community and teamwork, you will quickly notice something.  In games like this, you get more mature, intelligent and cooperative players who are looking for a community and team gameplay

I know - I was there, 12 years ago or more.  It was indeed a very nice time to be gaming, but then it all went rapidly downhill.  Those days are long gone, and they're never coming back.

I stopped using guild forums because they're a prime target for hackers.