… a staging area and audition space for more specific and more demanding subcultures …
Here is a thng I wrote some years ago (this is a slightly cleaned up chat log, apologies for the roughness of exposition):
There was an analogue to this in WoW as well, where, as I think I’ve mentioned, there often was such a thing as “within this raid guild, there are multiple raid groups, including some that are more ‘elite’/exclusive than the main one”; such groups usually did not use the EPGP or other allocation system of the main group, but had their own thing.
(I should note that such smaller, more elite/exclusive groups, typically skewed closer to “managed communism” than to “regulated capitalism” on the spectrum of loot systems, which I do not think is a coincidence.)
“Higher internal trust” is true, but not where I’d locate the cause. I’d say “higher degree of sublimation of personal interest to group interest”.
[name_redacted]: Ah. … More dedicated?
Yes, and more willing to sacrifice for the good of the raid. Like, if you’re trying to maintain a raiding guild of 100 people, keep it functioning and healthy over the course of months or years, new content, people joining and leaving, schedules and life circumstances changing, different personalities and background, etc., then it’s important to maintain member satisfaction; it’s important to ensure that people feel in control and rewarded and appreciated; that they don’t burn out or develop resentments; that no one feels slighted, and no one feels that anyone is favored; you have to recruit, also...
All of these things are more important than being maximally effective at downing this boss right now and then the next five bosses this week.
If you focus on the latter and ignore the former, your guild will break and explode, and people on WoW-related news websites will place stories about your public meltdowns in the Drama section, and laugh at you.
On the other hand… if you get 10 guys together and you go “ok dudes, we, these particular 10 people, are going to show up every single Sunday for several months, play for 6 hours straight each time, and we will push through absolutely the most challenging content in the game, which only a small handful [or sometimes: none at all] of people in the world have done”… that is a different scenario. There’s no room for “I’m not the tank but I want that piece of tank gear”, because if you do that you will fail.
What a group like that promises (which a larger, more skill-diverse, less elite/exclusive, group cannot promise) is the incredible rush of pushing yourself—your concentration, your skill, your endurance, your coordination, your ingenuity—to the maximum, and succeeding at something really really hard as a result.
That is the intrinsic motivation which takes the place of the extrinsic motivation of getting loot. As a result, the extrinsic motivation is no longer a resource which it is vitally important to allocate.
In that scenario, your needs are the group’s needs; the group’s successes are your successes; there is no separation between you and the group, and consequently the need for equity in loot allocation falls away, and everything is allocated strictly by group-level optimization.
Of course, that sort of thing doesn’t scale, and neither can it last, just as you cannot build a whole country like a kibbutz. But it may be entirely possible, and perfectly healthy, to occasionally cleave off subgroups who follow that model, then to meld back into the overgroup at the completion of a project (and never having really separated from it, their members continuing to participate in the overgroup even as they throw themselves into the subproject).
Here is a thng I wrote some years ago (this is a slightly cleaned up chat log, apologies for the roughness of exposition):
Yeah! This is great. This is the kind of detailed grounded cooperative reality that really happens sometimes :-)