Retention, Part Five: Guild Tools
by Sanya Weathers
Part three in this series had to do with getting people out and meeting each other in the physical world, because it would lead to retention. There is only one thing I’ve found that is more effective than meatspace meetups when it comes to getting people to subscribe for longer than the average player, and that’s a player-run guild.
When I first measured the subscription lengths for guilded players and non-guilded players, the difference was six months. Guilded players (and by that I mean anyone belonging to a player-organized group with at least five members online every evening willing to help one another with quests and other content) subscribed for an average… average, mind you… of six months longer than non-guilded players.
That is free money. You didn’t have to patch more often, design better content, buy expensive advertisements, hire booth babes, throw swag at reporters, or upgrade your customer service. All you had to do was put in a few tools, once. Who here likes free money?
The amount of free money does vary depending on the kind of game and how dependent it is on cooperative content. But there is always free money.
And it’s more than the money. There are also positive associations with the product to be gleaned. Guilded players, when surveyed, report greater satisfaction with the product. Again, this is something totally divorced from anything you’re doing. You introduced them to someone they like, ergo they like you!
Can you beat free money and unearned satisfaction?
What can you do?
– Make it easy. Click a button, enter a guild name, and done. Guild creation shouldn’t be harder than that. Inviting people to join a guild should be equally simple.
– Make it customizable. Creating the guild should be simple, but give users dozens of options for personalizing their guild structure.
– Don’t make the formation of social bonds into a gold sink. Charge for houses, charge for tabards, charge for site hosting, but don’t charge one copper piece to users who want to create in game guilds.
– Tools are everything. Player guilds need to collect fees, have common storage areas, take polls, travel to help each other, speak in private, post messages to each other, have meetings, have officer meetings, organize raids, distribute loot, coordinate attacks, brag, run websites, set up forums, and punish rulebreakers. And more. If your guilds have to turn to third party tools to accomplish any of those things, you’ve missed an opportunity.
– Give your guild leaders love. Don’t miss the chance to thank guild leaders for giving you free money. Consider visual markers to confer recognition and status. And if the guild is big enough, consider offering special access to customer service. With guilds, helping the leader is often the same thing as helping a hundred people – and who can’t use that kind of amplification in customer service?