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.