Do you think guild coalitions are feasible?

Hello everyone!

When Classic WoW launches, I would like to try and get the Horde guilds to work together towards several community oriented goals on a high-pop EU PvP realm, namely:

If successful though, I think it would be a one-of-a-kind thing in WoW. What do you think of this idea? Do you think it's not worth the trouble or that it's going to be doomed to fail? Too RP to be feasible for a high-pop PvP realm?

First of all this is an amazing idea and I would totally love to be a part of it. If you can get in early and bring a lot of the active players under one horde banner for world PvP it would be crazy. You could conduct some rather large raids and control a lot of areas on the map, not to mention become a household name and therefore get more people involved in your 'war efforts' :smile:

This would in turn encourage competition from Alliance side who would of course try and rally together to fend everyone off. It's a win-win for everyone on the server and I'm sure someone has had this idea before - but who actually has the balls to do it? I really want this to work but damn you're in for a lot of work. Getting people together to do stuff online can be a bit like herding cats sometimes.

That said, you already have experience organising guilds and it looks to me like you have focus and a good vision of what you'd like to achieve. This is enough to get the ball rolling and I have no doubts that the first person to do something like this successfully will make a big impact and attract a lot of players.

World PvP will be on the agenda for a lot of people when Classic releases due to the lack of BGs. It is an inherently social activity which a lot of people will be attracted to. So to conclude, yes, I think it's an excellent idea with a lot of opportunity and you should totally be the person to bring it all together and actually make it work.

(contacting the guild master, having a conversation with them, settling everything with the officers and the other players, migrating their players on a new Discord server, explaining moderation rules, etc.), and with 20+ guilds we could be looking at months of work ahead.

The basic rules I have in mind would be these:

This is however where I might offer some comments as someone who also has had experience rallying together players for organised PvP. Don't over-organise things. Can't stress this enough man - sure have one focal place to communicate like a Discord, but don't bother with rules, officers, coordinating with leaders and all of that.

Just get people raiding with you and see what happens - people will naturally organise themselves and rules will set in later. If you dump all these regulations and divisions and bureaucracy on people from the get-go it will slow things down immeasurably and a lot of people will see this straight away and leave.

Keep your message simple, keep the objective simple and keep the organisation simple.

Also
no leaders of the coalition - decisions are taken as a group but are in no way enforceable

Again, this is going to cause you issues. If I were you I would make myself the warlord/leader and that's that. You could even thread this through the 'RP' vein of your project. It's nice having democracy online but if you're trying to motivate hundreds of players to go and do stuff, and coordinating between other guilds too, you really don't want to have too many voices ringing in your ears asking for this and that.

You don't need to justify this and anyone who might call you a 'tyrant' can really get stuffed - you're organising a war effort, not a modern day city state! Sure, allow people to have a voice and share and collaborate and transfer ideas, but keep one person with overall authority, or else things will start to fall apart. Disagreements between 'leading' guilds will lead to drama and fall outs and you won't get anything done.
Any advice is more than welcome!

So my advice summarised, and I mean this because I really do want to see something like this happen:

There's a Discord currently for WoW Classic Guilds in my Signature.

Do not over organise things
Keep the message simple
Be a leader

Thank you! I'll keep these things in mind, you're probably right though - because I do tend to overthink things. The only issue I have is with the "be a leader" part. It's not that I can't do it, but I know myself and I know I wouldn't step my boundaries, but others might not see it that way.

Some new guy you've never heard of steps in and wants you to join his coalition. You make sure to point out how it's mutually beneficial and so forth.
But then you have a situation that demands some difficult decisions to be made. Without a prior structure or strategy to deal with it, that could threaten the stability of the entire coalition.

"I need you to get 1-2 people to do 2-3 hour shifts on Azuregos."
"I need you to give a message in your guild that Orgrimmar is under attack and have them log here to listen to me."
"I say we do not participate in the Devilsaur Mafia because it is immoral."
"You should kick those players because they did something bad and they're bringing a bad reputation to your guild and our coalition entirely."

This would be a tough sell. Power dynamics between Guild Masters is very delicate. I've seen people go 0-100 on the hate scale based off one misunderstood comment about waiting to finish a dungeon before speaking.

How would you sell this sort of shift in authority? Appeal to the greater good? Make no mention of it, or say that "oh, we'll definitely talk it over and take a group decision" then impose my point of view with good arguments?

There's a Discord currently for WoW Classic Guilds in my Signature.

Haha, I have joined it before joining Barrens Chat, saw your add on /r/ClassicWoW. I definitely will keep an eye out for guilds there, but until the server names are announced, I'll just be keeping an eye out for other guilds and do some recruitment once I get my website up.

There's a Discord currently for WoW Classic Guilds in my Signature.

Haha, I have joined it before joining Barrens Chat, saw your add on /r/ClassicWoW. I definitely will keep an eye out for guilds there, but until the server names are announced, I'll just be keeping an eye out for other guilds and do some recruitment once I get my website up.

Ahh haha, well glad to have you and your future guild in there then. We're considering adding in a resource section to the discord in order to direct people to communities still building such as Barrens Chat.

Barrens Chat looks like a nice place to have a forum. It's better than the official forums in my opinions, because it reminds me of how the old forums used to look like. That and the fact that there aren't that many toxic people around (at least for now).

I think this place would be a cool place to have a server forum but we'll see. I'm a big fan of the aesthetics.

Do not over organise things
Keep the message simple
Be a leader

Thank you! I'll keep these things in mind, you're probably right though - because I do tend to overthink things. The only issue I have is with the "be a leader" part. It's not that I can't do it, but I know myself and I know I wouldn't step my boundaries, but others might not see it that way.

Some new guy you've never heard of steps in and wants you to join his coalition. You make sure to point out how it's mutually beneficial and so forth.
But then you have a situation that demands some difficult decisions to be made. Without a prior structure or strategy to deal with it, that could threaten the stability of the entire coalition.

People will follow a reasonable leader - anyone who sacrifices their time and effort to bring big city raids and world pvp content will undoubtedly be someone they will listen to.

You will of course struggle with some people who think that they are more important than you but if you keep the ball rolling, organising events and
growing the community, they will follow the fun not their loyalties.

That doesn’t also mean that you are sapping all the guild leaders underneath you of their authority - rather you are strengthening their resolve. By being involved in a greater faction people in guilds will be further encouraged to bond with their guildmates and will be thankful for the activity.

Since you plan on a coalition - there is no material organisation or manifestation of your group - its all held together by an idea. That way guilds still keep their own identity without fear of their members being poached.
How would you sell this sort of shift in authority? Appeal to the greater good? Make no mention of it, or say that "oh, we'll definitely talk it over and take a group decision" then impose my point of view with good arguments?

I think you won’t need to sell it, it will just happen naturally. Your force of character will win people’s minds and keyboards. In essence what I am suggesting to you is that you don’t need to be a dictator - by all means involve guild leaders and listen to their feedback carefully but you don’t have to submit to every single request!

You are already showing that you have what it takes by what you describe as ‘over thinking’ it - this is just good leadership because it shows you are smart and experienced enough to anticipate these kind of bumps in the road and will be better prepared for them in the future.

There will be drama queens but noone likes that anyway. People are coming back to Classic because they miss the days where they could strike up a chat with someone and just go and do stuff - simple as that!

This excerpt from ctrl-alt-delete comment explains what I mean really well:

People want to just go out and stab things (ally) - be their home for that and the rest will follow in due course :smile:

Yeah I’d be down for this. Great idea.

Has it been achieved befre on retail or is it this new ground already?

Has it been achieved befre on retail or is it this new ground already?

I haven't really found any concrete evidence of such a thing existing back then. We have to keep in mind that those were the days of Ventrillo, Thottbot, poor internet connections and PCs and many, many kids and noobs playing the game.

There is, however, the infamous outdoor World Boss guide made by Cordana of Detheroc. Both the name of the server and the guild checkout with the archives, so it's very likely that guide was written during Vanilla. Reading it, you can see there were several guilds attempting world bosses back then, all of them scouting - but by the looks of it, they weren't very organized, at least not to the scale that I have in mind for retail.

No doubt that we are going to see such things on retail for World Bosses, PvP ranking, BG premades, War Effort etc. On private servers, it's not only coalitions that you have to look out for but also cross-faction collusion. Those things I hate with a passion, and I had a lot of drama taking one down on Elysium. In this time and age it's easier than ever to get in touch with people of the other faction and "work" something out.

No doubt that we are going to see such things on retail for World Bosses, PvP ranking, BG premades, War Effort etc. On private servers, it's not only coalitions that you have to look out for but also cross-faction collusion. Those things I hate with a passion, and I had a lot of drama taking one down on Elysium. In this time and age it's easier than ever to get in touch with people of the other faction and "work" something out.

So like how does this work - how could I collude with another faction to 'rig' a WSG game?

Is it as simple as all turning up at the entrance at the same time?

I think it's a bit harder to do in BGs but certainly not impossible. I can only speak for World Bosses since that is what I've seen with my own eyes, with ample proof of the inner workings behind the scenes. The way it worked was that they traded on Azuregos kill each. While the Alliance killed it, the Horde guarded them and vice-versa.

How it worked

Let's say you're the leader of a Horde guild (or group of guilds) that wants to kill Azuregos.
Let's also assume that there's an Alliance guild that shows up as well in the same time-window after Azuregos spawns.

Normally, if both guilds are equally powerful, you'd try to fight it off with the Alliance guild until they either give up or become unable to contest you (as a result of Azuregos' debuff). This is normal for an outdoor boss.

But now let's add another Horde guild that shows up and they don't want to share the loot with you.

The real problem is with people from your own faction, since you can't really kill them. Ideally, you would want the other Horde guild to start the boss, let the Alliance try to stop them, and once they get exhausted you move in to pull the boss and take it down. Yes, it's nasty, but it's still a reasonable thing to do in the game that doesn't break immersion the rules in any way.

Let's say this Horde guild has an agreement with the Alliance side to not attack each other and trade Azuregos kills.

It becomes impossible for you to contest that world boss. It is no longer a 3-way fight - actually, it's no longer a fight at all, because if they're doing the boss the Alliance isn't going to do anything about it and chances are, you won't be able to do anything much either.

If another Alliance guild shows up, they might be able to stop it - but even so, they would not be able to distinguish between my guild and his, so they would still be under a massive advantage. So from my perspective, I'm against 2 Alliance guilds - from their perspective they're against 2 Horde guilds, but from this cross-faction group's perspective, they're individually only against 1 guild each since they're working together. Our only chance is to do what they're doing or try to grossly outnumber them somehow.

I had to look far and wide for a blue-post back in the day highlighting that cross-faction collusion is against the spirit of the game and would be punished.

I made a convincing case for the Guild Masters (other blue posts from back in the day, screenshots of their conversations and Discord server, various members admitting it etc.) and they outright banned any form of cross-faction collusion (which, funnily enough, also involved the Devilsaur Mafia on that server). Even idiots like Alexsensual made a video saying that this was not Blizzlike and therefore wrong without any consideration of the facts, for the record.

I very much think a coalition like this is possible, though it will require a lot of work, and probably most importantly, you really shouldn't try to do it all alone. You will need help.

Personally, I do not think I would want to take part in something grand scale like this, because I prefer when guilds are their own groups with their own goals, not pressured to follow a bigger scheme with pressure from many other guilds around them.

Just to clarify, I do not dislike alliances between guilds, I think that is something that can be good too.

Even if inevitable, I do dislike the idea of mafia, with controlling markets, world boss kills and whatnot, buit it's certainly to happen unless Blizzard put their hand into it and 'fixes' it, which is not something I want to happen either.

I wish you the best of luck with this nonetheless, I could be lots of fun. But just be ready for clashing ideas and ideals, drama, and whatnot.

I pledge my guild to be part of this and I will stand my guild beside you against the alliance. Pre-Made mass world PvP against the unprepared Ally scum, we have the opportunity here to prepare for war and rally together well in advance. Sol In Noctem will answer the call, we hear the drums beating! This thread needs to stay alive, we need to go firm on a server choice as soon as possible. How can we keep in touch?

I really like the war part, but not so much the rules part. The elite (coalition) guilds deciding who can and can't kill world bosses etc is not a good idea. World events/bosses are a free for all IMHO. However co-ordination to prevent the alliance from completing such tasks is something I can get behind. I am also a big fan of the Black List. I can see it getting very big with all the retail kids coming over though.

Definitely keen to be involved, would be happy to assist with the organisation of the war effort too. But that's it, litteraly just the war effort, the ganking part. I've read this entire thread and I pretty much agree with the general consensus. Stabby Stabby, pew pew.

Arrange the wars via liaison with participating Horde guild leaders. Synchronised attacks on vital Alliance sites accross Azeroth. There doesn't need to be rules, just a plan with a goal that everyone can get behind. Let the fog of war cover the land and await its dispersal before viewing the outcome.

Soupoftheday Hey, thanks for the confidence in this!
The elite (coalition) guilds deciding who can and can't kill world bosses etc is not a good idea

I did not mean it that way, no way! The thing about world bosses is that, according to data we've had from live, the spawn time for them was a random timer between 3-7 days, so in order to get to them and even have a chance to contest them (against other hardcore guilds at least) you needed:

* a handful of players willing and able to scout the spawn area for the world boss once the spawn window was active
* another handful of players willing to level Warlocks to 20, stack a tone of shards on them and hide them in the spawn areas
* a good number of level 60 players able and willing to drop everything and show up for the raid (at least 20-40)

The more hardcore guilds can manage this on their own, but anyone who's not lifeless can't even hope to contest it. On private servers it was a bit more feasible due to the fact that there were players from all-around the world, so the scouting duties could be evenly divided. With Classic, not so much - so I think it will be even more crucial to try to secure this advantage.

I don't honestly care that much about my guild getting the loot, I care more about the Alliance not getting it - part pride, and part "the less gear they have in general, the better it will be for us in WPvP". I'm also mostly interested in the PvP part to be honest, the gear those dragons drop isn't all that great as you might think. Discussing how to split the loot (if we do manage to get the kill) will be a bit tricky, it's not as straight forward as "MS>OS roll" because it will be an effort distributed among many - but I'm sure it's something we can sort it out. Even if there will be guilds who'll want to put in solo effort, so long the Alliance isn't getting it I'm fine.
Synchronised attacks on vital Alliance sites accross Azeroth.

Yeah, from my part it's all the same - we are going to get into Stormwind, we are going to have shards for summoning, etc. so it's all a matter of guild masters agreeing on a day with us and accepting a "fun" raid once in a while where they just get in Stormwind and go to town.

The only issue is that whenever we'd raid we wouldn't get that many people willing to join. I mean, being summoned across the continent in a place you will surely die with no loot reward in sight isn't something very appealing for most people who are used to doing things for loot and gold on top of fun. And I totally get them. But I'm still going to try to coordinate them and have a "Fuck the Alliance" day where we just hit Stormwind with 6-7 raid groups of assholes and just kill everything until the GMs ban us from the game or we get bored.