Guild Churn

3 March 2006 | PlayOn authors archive

It’s easy to talk about guilds as somewhat stable entities over a one month period, and by and large, most guilds with more than 10 members do survive from one month to the next. But we were interested in exploring the amount of guild member churn that occurs. For example, given the guilds with 30 members, how many characters were in that guild at some point during the month but are no longer in that guild?

To do this analysis, we tabulated two guild rosters:

Full Guild Roster: For each guild, note down all characters who have been observed to bear this guild tag at any point during the logging period.
Current Guild Roster: For each guild, note down only those characters who actually still bear this guild tag.

A character who is in the full guild roster but not the current guild roster is not simply a character who was not observed towards the end of the month. For this difference to occur, they must have deguilded (not bearing any guild tag) or joined another guild (bearing a new guild tag).
Thus for each guild, the difference between those two roster sizes is the member churn – the number of characters who were at one point in the guild but aren’t there any longer. Below is the average churn for guilds of different sizes. The churn percentage was around 25% and was fairly stable across guilds of all sizes. In other words, if we see a guild that currently has 20 members, then over the past month, there were 5 members who have left the guild.

Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (High), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: Month of January
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is each unique guild with a guild size greater than 1.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 5,285 guilds

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