ESO Trade Guilds

I'm currently doing some interview-survey work on large trade guilds in The Elder Scrolls Online, and it is only working thanks to the awesomeness of the guild leaders I have approached digitally so far. I'm pinging 2-3 each week, and so far so good.

Some work in the past suggested that guilds of about 35 members were the maximum sustainable size in an MMO (specifically, this work was from WoW), but with ESO trade guilds we quite often see 400-500 members sustained over time. (500 is the maximum number of accounts allowed in a guild, ESO does guild membership differently, I have a paper in-progress about that too.)

So, how are guild leaders building and maintaining such large groups over time? Can these lessons be applied more broadly?

If you have played ESO, you'll be familiar with guild recruiting messages in general/zone chat, and a lot of them mention a few common elements, like weekly minimums or fees, events, auctions or raffles, or an inactive policy. Poking around on the web in various places you can get a bit more data about these methods, but I need to actually see what the guild leaders think about it all.

Guild leaders are usually busy enough as it is--running the guild, auctions, bidding on their favorite trader, and maybe actually having time to play the game!--so I feel badly bugging people for their help, but thankfully people often like talking about the things they like, and guild leaders for a guild of 400-500 people had better like it or else they wouldn't be doing it!

I don't play ESO anymore, well not currently. I love the TES single player series, though. ESO is amazingly beautiful, and vast--so vast I felt fairly lost for a while (if you are a long time player, I joined after One Tamriel, if you aren't, the world was leveled like in WoW and EQ2 but they did away with that). I had a hard time accepting dolmen farming/grinding, since that is not at all like in TES, but it makes sense in an MMO and I certainly did it for my 2nd and 3rd characters. I also, in TES, usually made a sneaking ranger-type character (sneak, medium armor, some sword and board, some magic, maybe a bow but aiming in TES is serious business), but sneaking the way it is in TES is completely gone in ESO. You sneak into a delve (small public dungeon), and there are a half dozen other characters in there running around and pulling everything and trains back up to the door until they leash. However, the game certainly does a lot of things right, although some players I've spoken too feel it is too monetized recently.

PAX Game Writeup List

PAX East 2018 was great fun! Dice (plastic, stone, wood), wooden gaming tables, indie games, big names, tons of non-digital games, t-shirts, hats, plushies, other collectables, a string quartet, eSports, cosplay, just awesome.

I like the indie games, and snagged a few photos and cards for a few. I thought I'd make a post with them for others to see. Some of these might not be overly indie, depends on how you want to define that, but they looked interesting to me (one is definitely not indie). Many are on Steam, some are still in development. I played one that was still in alpha and couldn't figure out how to feed the goats. Here are the ones I noted, in alphabetical order. Alas, some are Windows-only but not like I code actual apps, so, I don't expect every little dev house to make the same thing across massively different platforms. I don't guarantee I got all the OS/platforms correct.

I'm not sure I'll have the time to add visuals to each of these, but keep in mind it was how the games looked that drew me in each time.

Action Squad (Killhouse Games)
     Ok maybe it's "Doorkickers: Action Squad". Steam: Windows.

Airships: Conquer the Skies (Zarkonnen/David Stark)
     Airships! Steampunk! On Steam: Windows, OSX.

Anamorphine (Artifact5)
     Looks beautiful. Landscape as emotion. Steam: Windows, PS, Oculus...

Ancestors Legacy (Destructive Creations / 1C Company)
     Vikings! Squad based. Steam: Windows, XB1

Below (Capybara Games)
     Well, cutest company logo winner. Game looks cool too. XB1

Deep Sky Derelicts (Snowhound / 1C Company)
     No idea, but I love the art, reminds me of an ancient story from Heavy Metal Magazine. Steam: Windows.

Graveyard Keeper (Lazy Bear / Tiny Build)
     MUST HAVE. Steam: Windows, OSX, SteamOS, XB1.
     (They also make Pathologic2 which looked cool. Steam: Windows.)

Omensight (Spearhead Games)
     Cool graphics! Steam: Windows, PS4

Phantom Doctrine (Good Shepard)
     Reminds me of a Tom Clancy game I liked on the Xbox360. Steam: Windows.

Projection (Blowfish / Shadowplay)
     Looks VERY COOL. "Projection: First Light follows the adventures of Greta, a girl living in a mythological shadow puppet world..." Steam: Windows and consoles.

Qube2 (Toxic Games)
     The graphics look cool. Steam: Windows, XB1, PS4.

Semblance (Good Shepherd / Nyamakop)
     Cool graphics, cool physics. Windows, OSX, Switch. (Not Steam?)

The Shrouded Isle: Sunken Sins (Kitfox Games)
     Ok I guess Sunken Sins is DLC for the game, but it looked cool, Lovecraftian. Steam: Windows, OSX.

The Stillness of the Wind (Surprise Attack)
     Wow, the art! Story-based, I think. I actually played some. Steam: Windows, OSX.

Addendum: People have also mentioned...
Boyfriend Dungeon (Kitfox)
Stay (Appnormals / PQube)

Game Homage: Star Wars in Stellaris

People love to play with things, including culture, so we play games and in them we play with culture, especially cultural objects and references we like. I love pointing out in-game homage, here are two from Stellaris.

First, a system named Lando, I'm guessing after Lando Calrissian, from Star Wars.

Next, a quote from the original film (now rebranded as Episode IV), a "hive of scum and villainy," famous word uttered by Obi Wan Kenobi.