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March 03, 2006
Guild Churn
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
Posted at March 3, 2006 12:20 PM
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Comments
What would be very interesting is to see the correlation between RL contacts and guild loyalty. As a guild leader (EQ2) with a guild that is mostly friends in RL we have had a very low churn rate.
Posted by: Kevin Mentzer at March 28, 2006 09:11 AM
guilds break up because they suck or are doing good. or because of drama, and many are made because they want to start a fad with a funny name...
Posted by: changed at June 19, 2006 07:54 PM
I agree with Kevin's comment about real life contacts, but will also extend it to the level of "genuine" interaction between guild members.
That is, if you get to know your fellow guildmembers as real people through dialogue about non-game topics (real life), then it might be that there is more of a barrier to leaving.
Posted by: Gerret Peters at July 19, 2006 11:35 AM
I suspect a parralel may be drawn between staff turnover observed by real world firms and turnover observed in guilds. I would also suspect that it is more than just real world social bonds - a combination of policy, leadership, rewards, collective activities, humour, and the ability of the organization to promote the agenda of the members. The same personal reasons individual leave firms.
Posted by: Matt at September 3, 2006 11:45 AM