Vision’s Incentive Systems: A Case Study

Every World of Warcraft raiding guild aspires to progress through raid content in a timely pace. Most members of the raiding corps focus on attaining gear and other goals, and so cannot be expected to directly satisfy the guild’s purpose. Thus, the guild must facilitate this indirectly by setting compatible goals, and then motivate raiding members to achieve them.

Human Resources (HR) departments of real-life companies handle these issues regularly, and the officerships of ingame guilds are no more exempt. I will introduce the theories associated with incentive systems, then apply them to analyse the incentive systems of my current guild, Vision of Frostmourne US.

Responsible Guild Leadership

Government is a human institution that exists to exact order on an otherwise chaotic society. Its citizens willingly surrender some amount of freedom to be able to take some solace in a sense of security.

Because government is conceived by the people, it must uphold the interests of the people, lest its purpose be defeated. Responsible government is a principle that attempts to achieve this by giving the people a direct say, or at least allow them to elect representatives. Under this framework, the government becomes directly responsible or accountable to the citizens it governs.

This widely accepted (by many democratic countries) principle can readily be applied to guild leadership in World of Warcraft. The guild's officers simply need to act in the best interests of the membership.

Dilemmas in Guild Matchmaking and Promotion

In the ideal world, prospective guild members would quickly find the guild of their dreams, and the guild would swiftly recruit them. However, in reality, asymmetric information exists, and this hampers the guild matchmaking process.

Asymmetric information occurs when one party (in this case, the person or guild) knows something that the other does not, and such knowledge cannot easily transfer from one to the other. This may be because of significant distance between the two, or one does not quite believe what the other claims.