MMO Gaming

It fascinates me that such a very social game (and one that seems to pride itself on this fact) seems to have such a poorly designed setup for creating and maintaining guilds. Much like the LFG system I don’t expect to see much action happening with a better guilds system until it becomes horribly apparent that things need to change. For the most part the facets of the system that don’t work out well are purely affecting those with power in a guild (Guild leaders/officers), simply being a member isn’t nearly as bad as trying to work around the awful design they have put into the system as it stand now.

As seems to always be the case, as I am writing I realize how long things will be, and this will again be a multi-part series on the system. I haven’t yet planned exactly how many parts I will end up having (here’s a hint, at least 2) but be warned, we’ll be covering this topic for at least one more week.

Let’s forgo talking about a Guild Hall and better guild banking system in this first part, because there is so much to do (and so much that has been said via the official forums already, that I don’t want to intimidate people by starting with that. Instead, let’s talk about basic guild management in this first article.

What is needed to properly manage a guild system? I’ve broken it down into two main things.

• Control over individuals
• Control over groups

Let’s start with control over individuals. I don’t mean evil, dictatorial control I mean the ability to assign privileges to an individual. For instance, say I want certain player’s alts (the alts of officers perhaps) to have the ability to invite, but I don’t want to add in another rank just for alts of officers and I don’t want it to look like the guild has 12 different officers, I want to assign this privilege to certain members only. Individually assigned privileges go a long way into making the system better. The same idea could be applied to officer/special chat rooms set up for certain members only, this way not everyone has to share a rank, but they can share a similar privilege. In this way, of course, individual privileges have to override group privileges (a special note here for the privilege that this is most important (to me) for, a way for people other than the guild master to have access to the guild control tab and the things it allows (enhanced of course in the system as I will explain it.))

Switching focus now to group control. If you’ve ever messed with the ranking structure in the WoW guild system you already know how poor it is, there’s no real way to add a rank without messing everything up you already have in place. This is just sloppy and, though I try hard, I can’t find a reason it was designed this way. Adding ranks shouldn’t be like pulling teeth, it should be a simple process. You input a rank name in a box, you then select where the rank should be placed (above or below) and then in the third option you select which rank to base it off of. So, when complete, it may look like the graphic below:

Now as shockingly simple as that is, it is vastly more effective than what is currently implemented.

Next, let’s do one final, little thing to the current “Guild Information” tab. Let’s make a header before all the other text that may be input. In this header, let’s stick some information that has been in every guild info I’ve ever seen. Website address and voice chat info. I’ll throw in another graphic of what this header would look like to the guild info tab.

All of this seems very simple, just small changes, but these changes would make the interface cleaner and more effective, to me it is a surprise something like this wasn’t already done.

There is a lot left to still be done in just the guild tab, including an enhanced “Guild Information” section and some other nifty features I thought of, but many of them rely on further detail of my ideas of guild halls and guild banks, all of which I will cover in the week (or weeks) to come. So for now, let’s leave it with the very basic changes I’ve recommended here.

World of warcraft, guild, repairing gears, guild system, blizzard