Inevitably a number of circumstances will lead to guilds faltering, and in some cases even falling apart. How should such an experience be handled? How can a guild fall into metaphorical ruin and manage to pick itself back up again? The answer always lies in the mindset and desires of those who remain to work on rebuilding.

As with any MMO, keeping the interest of a group of players is crucial to long-term success and survival. World of Warcraft, for all of its faults, does this extremely well compared to the vast majority of online games. With time, though, it becomes more about the people who play together than the game itself. If only a handful of people log on the incentive simply goes away yet, on the other hand, if a consistent showing of people log on even the most mundane tasks remain interesting.

The simple fact is, no game will ever hold a person’s sole interest for the rest of their gaming lives. It falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who play together to generate and maintain interest when the content has become, for all intents and purpose, the “same thing each day.”

This is why most guilds see such things as recruitment drives, burnout, members that disappear for extended durations, and sometimes even complete disbanding of the guild itself. Unfortunately, there really are not many things available to guild leaders to attempt to change these thoughts, and often the only thing keeping an apathetic player tied to a game is simply the friendships and loyalties formed over time.

In “the old days” many random events were held that generated interest ranging from lowbie hogger raids to naked battlegrounds, unlikely party groupings for instances (such as all rogues stealth’ing to bosses) to groups of druids running in a pack throughout the lands and seeing what happened in various circumstances. These types of events work well, but if the initial interest has faded in even trying what more can be done?

Guild leaders hate to see members leave, plain and simple. Sometimes, however, it is better to accept losses and start fresh in order to get new, interested faces in on whatever content the guild wants to pursue. A word of caution, however: raiding will take its toll on anyone over time.

Back to the original question, then: how can a guild cope with waning interest? In most cases, simply taking a break will work wonders. Although not really fair to those who still want, desperately so, to make progress with the guild’s goals (and in this instance I generally refer to raiding, given that it is the end-game for most guilds), taking a break allows guild members to not feel as though they are betraying the guild by not being available, allows the members to refocus their thoughts and energies, and (normally) brings a desire to come back to a game as rich and robust as WoW after some time has passed. After all, there is a reason so many of us have taken breaks over the course of WoW’s life and still returned to the game repeatedly.

In the end, every group will handle such a situation differently. What kinds of ways have you devised for maintaining interest, or in dealing with a seemingly huge lack of interest on the part of your guildmates?