like WoW - creating an organisation (party/raid/guild) where each individual has a specific role, developing connections and negociating with other individuals/organizations and power leveling or mounting a raid on a capital or an instance is nothing else than practicing for real life, where u may get in the position of doing the exact same things, with the advantage of those months of practice/experimenting in WoW.

“It’s worth noting that [the telcos] stopped promoting their broadband plans in the second quarter because that’s when students are leaving school and disconnecting … it’s a seasonal disconnect period.” - BMO Capital Markets-Canada analyst Peter Rhamey.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/08/us-broadband-sp.html

You can be sure they ramp up their advertising in August, though!

{{{{ EDITED BY MODERATOR: This was a response to my post on the poster’s blog that was about current international events. It is an interesting issue, and the poster has a very interesting blog. But since Muckbeast is about game design, I don’t want it to get derailed by potentially divisive political discussions.}}}}

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In my experience very few young players have the discipline needed to be a worth much in a raid group. Surely some 15-17 year old are OK, but even at this age most of them tend to lose focus way more often than what is seen among the older players.

Solutions I can remember we have tried were:
- Cut down on the number of raiding days since several of our members only want to raid X days a week so cutting a day or two heighten the number of people who are signed up for the remaining raids.
- If you guild has a good reputation it’s easy to recruit more members. In my experience you end up losing some people for good over the summer, so it won’t give huge problems when summer end.
- I have tried to merge guilds over the summer as well if things were looking bad to begin with.
- In my early raiding days we actually teamed up with another guild to try to take down some bosses together. After a few months we split up and handled things on our own. I believe that this was during the summer, but never thought about it like that.

I have never experienced any of the above to cause any long term problems for the guild. What I have experienced causing problems for the guilds I have been involved in is the balancing between having a place where you can invite your casual friends and they can play too and at the same time having raid progress for the hardcore players in the guild.

You also mentioned people wanting to go outside more, but I’m not sure how true this is either. Nearly two decades ago now I convinced my mother to buy me a Sega master-system (God how I miss the good old 8-bit days!) because I was just awful at football, tennis, rugby and just about any other outdoor sport you care to mention and wanted something else I could spend my leisure time doing. Sure I had other activities I enjoyed too, but reading and sketching are all-weather pursuits as they’re done primarily indoors. In my experience the old stereotype of gamers being rubbish at sports rings pretty true, although it’s a rule of thumb more then a 100% certainty, so weather shouldn’t really effect the amount a person wants to play.

Of course, this doesn’t work for games that have age-limits for players. The most common of which being the obvious 18+ limit, and the parents who play the game having to spend more of their time taking care of the kids who’re no longer in school for a good chunk of the day, but given the popularity of WoW and how many of it’s players are under 18 it’s interesting you still see this fluctuation.