The Shrine

Since I play MMORPG I spend a good deal checking out homepages for guilds on the said games. One thing I noticed is that these pages really suck. Yes I realize you can't expect these to be all that much better than 'my first homepage' you might find on Facebook or whatever, but if you assume a sizable guild contains say, 50 distinct people, one would think there has to be someone with a clue amongst the 50.

Beyond just bad page design and unfunny updates, I've also seen pages that show stuff like:

Screenshots of people actively exploiting the events.
Screenshots of people using hacks.

And most recently I saw another update that basically says 'my guild tried to prove we're uber and utterly failed, but we're still really uber.' And that wasn't supposed to be funny either.

It's getting to a point where I consider a webpage that just says 'we beat this event and we're still recruiting these guys' to be a good guild webpage becuase at least it's not an embarssment to humanity.

I'm guessing it's because a generic page is 'boring' that people all try to be creative, except everyone's creativity is about the same so your great idea is the same as 1000 other guy's great idea and then it is neither original nor funny.

I have noticed this, and I can tell you from my experience, sometimes the better person suited to do a site for their guild isnt willing or "allowed" to step on the toes of the leader of the guild or their friend or whoever volunteered to do the page in the first place.

The guild Im in on LOTRO has a horrible site, and I have offered my help, but they either dont trust that I could do a better job than the person who's first language isnt even English, or they just dont want to make the person feel bad for putting all that time into what they have done already.

Well even if all your page says 'We killed blah blah blah" (that's about the only thing worth reporting for these games) and nothing else that's probably good enough. The problem is when people try to be fancy. I remember back in high school one time my English teacher made us break into groups to re-write Hamlet, and everyone come up with the same 2 or 3 dumb ideas when we have to act them out. In retrospect if we just played Hamlet as is that'd definitely make us the best group, but of course I came up with the same suggestion that everyone else thought was totally awesome, until you realized everyone else had the same 'awesome' idea you had!

Well it may be different in WoW, but most guild pages I see are for scheduling and sharing information in a forum or something similar. Any posts on "We killed so and so" were for mainly intraguild announcement rather than showing off to other guilds.

As far as I can tell if you go to the top level of wherever a guild's webpage resides it's usually some blurb about the latest and greatest thing they've killed. The tools like calendar, forums, and so on tend to be accessed at level below the main page, usually from some links from the main page.

It depends on how competitive an environment you're in but most guilds who at least think of themselves as good tend to use the main page as a place to showoff as opposed to inform your own member that you've done something already. Of course it also depends on how it's presented. If you have a picture of a dead mob and say "We killed this guy" it probably works just as a reminder of where your guild is in terms of progression. Now if you have the same picture and say "We killed this guy which makes us the greatest bunch of guys since sliced bread", that's obviously bragging, and I see a lot more guilds of the latter type than the former type. Now bragging is okay, except most people management to make an embarssment of themselves in an attempt to appear witty/uber/whatever. Not that my guild is immune to this, of course, but recently we've went with my suggestion of 'we killed this guy' and that at least limits the number of dumb things you can say!

It's actually really puzzling when you go to an EQ guildpage, knowing that it is a game with limited appeal and you won't be impressing anybody, and it makes you wonder what the heck is the webpage supposed to achieve? The local uberguild on my server just finished the expansion and like the 36 guilds before them made some post about 'OMG this expansion is so easy!' Well it wasn't even funny when the first guild that beat the expansion post it, but after 36 times, it's just plain dumb. Well, it become funny because it's some sort of self-ownage since their page basically says 'this expansion is so easy but we still can't beat it after all this time'. Now why would you want to tell people about this, I have no idea. I guess it's like the English class example I had. Everyone thought it was a cool idea to make Hamlet's father come back from the dead until you realized everyone else has the same idea.