Greetings Everyone,
I've been meaning to write this post for a while. A simple question gets asked a lot "What makes a game a Gaiscioch Chapter?"
The answer however is much much much more complex than most imagine. There are a few things we're looking for when we decide to make an official chapter. This process of evaluation usually begins a year to two years before the game ever reaches our desktop machines.
What Gaiscioch Is and What it isn't
Before I break down what we look for in a game we need to explain what we're after. What is our End Game goal of the Gaiscioch Social Gaming Community. The Gaiscioch were formed to be a Celtic Themed Social Gaming Community focused on creating large scale server wide activities in Fantasy Based MMORPG's. We have traveled through 4 games in search of a place to call home.
Our ideal home would include:
- An avenue for hosting large scale public community events
- Exciting Realm Wars between 3 or more realms featuring castle sieges, trebuchets, siege rams, catapults, and ballista in an open world with capturable objectives on a large frontier
- Breathtaking dungeons and raids that are not only challenging and fun but offer a memorable experience not easilly forgotten.
- A rich storyline that offers roleplayers a chance to engage in interactive tales and adventures
- A large explorable map with secrets and treasures to be found in the far off reaches of the world
- A Crafting system that allows sharing of resources and recipes to allow our community to provide crafted goods to both server and community members with ease.
Games that offer us a Celtic/Medieval style world to exist within are our focus. We have stepped into steampunk style handguns and cannons in the past to survive but this is not where we are trying to go. We are actively looking for titles without guns, without airships, without phasers and starships. If you were to create a scale on one side would be Lord of the Rings and Dark Age of Camelot, on the other would be Star Wars and Star Trek. The closer to Dark Age of Camelot we get the better. That is what we are after and why we will pass up games like Star Wars, Star Trek, Wildstar, Firefall, Planetside, and so many others. That is not the direction we are taking Gaiscioch. A celtic themed realm in a game is optimal.
I know that this isn't on par with a lot of your desires but Gaiscioch is not like most other guilds. We specialize in one game at a time and do our best to give everything we have to the community within that game. We do not want to dilute our potency by spreading across dozens of games at a time and splitting our attention. We want to build a strong server and gaming community within the games we play. Most of all I never want to be a stranger to anyone that calls our family home. I want to be on the front lines welcoming them into our house and helping them along in their adventures. While Gaiscioch is strengthened by it's members who make our house a home, it's architecture is built by me. Without me there is no roof over the communities head, without community we're just an empty building. The game must allow us as a community to thrive and also allow me to tell the Gaiscioch story in a setting that both excites and engulfs me.
Step 1: Evaluation
We start the process by giving it a quick once over against our criteria laid out in our Potential Chapter Criteria Scorecard. The primary items we look for are:
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Fantasy Based (Swords & Shields)
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Responsive Developers
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Guild Size Limit / Large Guild Friendly
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Alliance System or Custom Chat Channels
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Progressive Gearing & Raiding
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Dungeons (5-10)
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Multi-Group UI
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Need / Greed Loot or Individual Based Rewards
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RvR Casual Friendly (Drop in / Drop out 24/7)
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RvR Zone Cap
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RvR Accessible at 90% of levels
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Siege Gameplay (Rams, Castles, Trebs)
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Zone Limit (Players per Zone) for Community Event Potential
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Community Forums
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Loggable Recipes
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Crafting Professions
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Customizable Items (Visual)
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Drop In/Drop Out Content
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Objectives Able To Complete In Under An Hour.
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Emotes
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Local Chat Channels (say)
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Backstory Available out of Game
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Opt-In PvP
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Leveling through PvP
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Kid Friendly - E-T rating
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International Friendly
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No Casual Punishment (mandatory play)
If a game appears to clear these base requirements we then make contact with their development team.
Step 2: Networking
If we are well received we begin building a network of contacts within the development studio starting with the community team and working our way up to the management of the studio building business relationships. This allows us to interact with the studio on a much more intimate level than your standard guild or player. This also gives us opportunities to get into the early development stages which allows us to help custom tailor a game to our needs and the needs of the community at large. Developer interaction is essential to choosing where to call home.
Step 3: Assessment
Once we are able to go hands on with a product we begin the assessment phase. During this phase we work with the development team to make sure as many of our needs are taken care of as possible. We work with the team to suggest features to help make their titles more community friendly and engage large audiences. Our Chapter Assessment Checklist is made available to the studio and a score is created based on the number of items the game possesses. There are currently more than 150 line items weighing between 50 pts for critical items and 1pt for wishlist items totalling over 2,250 pts overall. These features are placed into these categories:
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Guild System
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Alliance / Cross Guild Communication
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PvE & Raiding
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Siege Warfare (RvR)
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Structured PvP
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Community Events Potential
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Crafting & Gathering
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Casual Friendliness
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Exploration & Cartography
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Roleplay
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Game System
If the score is greater than 65% we consider it as a "Chapter Potential". At this point we continue to assist developers on making the best possible product. The last stage of this comes when the game goes into beta. This is where we measure if this game is "Fun" and "Enjoyable" to a wide range of players. During development it is very hard to measure this as usually you are playing a in progress game. Things haven't been plugged in, things are turned off, features and encounters are limited, and it's really hard to get immersed in the environment.
By the time the game goes public beta it's considered ready for market and is usually placed in open beta to spur social media and press circulation. At this point we can invest our time in immersing ourselves in the game and getting a feel for if it's something we can see ourselves hosting community events in, playing for years on end, and building fun and positive memories in.
As the entire Gaiscioch Social Gaming Community is built off of the idea of running large scale public community events, and this serves as our primary method of recruitment, it is absolutely critical that we are able to host these events. A game that prevents it, will not likely ever make it to our board of potentials.
Step 4: Measuring Interest
Once we began the assessment phase, we will start polling interest levels. Before a game launches we want to make sure that we have between 250 - 500 interested people. At launch we typically see a giant surge of population bringing another 250-500 people however within the first 2 months that will decline back to a more manageable level. It is very important that we have enough existing Gaiscioch interested in the title to establish our culture within the game and help teach the new people who we are, what we do, and how we do it. Without that it is near impossible to encourage the Gaiscioch way of life.
Our Endgame Target:
At the end of the day what we want to have happen is to build an environment that encourages people to play together, have fun together, and make memories together. We are in the game of making friendships and memories. If we can find a channel to be able to encourage these things we're happy. Population wise, we have a pretty simple scale:
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1-250 People: Social Adventure / Legacy Chapter (GSCH)
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250+ People: Chapter Minimum (Gaiscioch)
- 500+: Optimal for Chapter health
The fact is that we recruit through our activities, and people encountering our lifestyle. We have chosen not to be one of those guilds that spam chat channels or forums to beg people to join us. If people are interested they will ask to join us. We allow them to come to us. We are a casual based community so while 1,000 people sounds like a lot of people many of them play once or twice a week for a few hours a play session. We are demographically targeting the parents, grandparents, and casual gamers with our lifestyle and this in turn leads to smaller playtimes and availability. While our 1,000 people may log 5,000 hours of gametime a week, a hard core raiding guild of 200 will usually require a 5 hour a day minimum and bring in over 7,000 hours of player playtime. We aim big so that we can ensure that when you log in each and every day you have someone to play with. Below 500 people we usually see only a handful of people online at any given time. With 1,000 we see between 50-100 people on through the primetime and 30-50 people on during off peak times. It's a fine balance between availability and chaos and we do our best to keep it between 500-1500 people.
Legacy Chapters:
Over the years we've tried many things to try to persevere through chapters that dry up. Originally our site was not setup to handle more than one game at a time. However with the launch of Elder Scrolls Online we began doing things a little differently. We've now rebuilt the vast majority of the site to be able to handle multiple games at the same time and thus we've launched our Legacy Chapters concept.
Now when a chapter drops below 250 active members we will move it to the Legacy Chapter system. This allows full use of the Leadership, Fellowship, and Marketplace while reducing the amount of maintenance work needed to keep the chapter running. By stripping out the objectives and moving to a time based claiming system we can avoid having to update the site every time there is a major patch or expansion.
Legacy chapters will stay active until they drop below 50 active members at which time it will be toggled to be a Social Adventure. This will allow people to continue working together however the marketplace will be put on ice, and instead of leadership and fellowship points, members will earn Social points for activities.
This process was put in place to minimize the workload on the Eldership team while allowing people to continue to play the games they love with the community. If a game generates a second life and exceeds 250 active players it can be considered for Full Chapter reinstatement.
In Closing:
Our system isn't perfect, it has it's flaws and we constantly adjust it to better fit the communities needs. We do our best to focus the community towards the products that have higher populations and have the most potential for community event success.
So to answer a simple question... there is no simple answer. Thank you for enduring this wall of text and hopefully this gives you some insight as to what we look for in a future chapter. I do hope someday we can find that mythical unicorn called a 5-10 year game, but for now we continue to be a traveling circus looking for a place to call home.