MMO Gaming

Time for the fourth installment of the Repairing Gears on World of Warcraft’s guild system. I said this one would cover guild halls, and it will, but first a quick note that I thought I put in an earlier installment but must have missed.

Officer MOTD.

The current MOTD (Message of the Day) for the guild is nice, but I’ve always wanted to be able to set aside a second one where only officers (or those with proper permissions) can see the message.

Let’s head back to guild halls again though and recap while doing so.

In the second part of the article I talked about guild banks and what they should be, what they should have in them, this would be one feature of the guild hall, and in my mind, the most important. Two weeks ago (I missed last week’s installment) I brought out some highlights from a topic on guild halls, and I’ll use that as the jumping point to expand on a variety of things mentioned there.

The idea of a trophy case of some sort is one that interests me and something that would be fun, if not necessary to include (of course, a guild hall isn’t entirely necessary in itself so it seems kind of a ridiculous distinction in the first place.) The exact way this would work is something of a lesson in the difficulty of implementing such a large scale feature (though, I don’t see it as hindering such an inclusion in the game.) Ideally other people, outside your guild, would be able to interact with this area of your guild hall (and others) because it is a lot more fun to show off to people that weren’t there what you did, rather than just those who already know about it.

With that being said it becomes necessary to take a moment and switch to decide who gets to enter a person’s guild hall. The simple way to fix this would be to take the “trophy case” idea out of the guild hall and put it in-game somewhere else in a major city (or all of them) with a list appearing of those guilds that have completed the encounter. For instance, you go into the building, click on the head of Onyxia and a listing (think similar to what happens when you right click to read a letter or book) pops up with the guilds that have taken down that boss. I know, that actually seems to reverse the need for a guild hall if this and other things were done with me, but that isn’t a horrible thing really.

Another idea brought up last week was a sort of inter-guild arena and I like that idea. I’d also like to take that idea and stick another one along side it. I’m all for a CoH/V style ability to “raid” other groups guild halls (an option to be flagged for this, at least on normal servers, would be best obviously) and along with the ability to fight other guilds, it would be nice to see the opposite implemented, the ability to ally with other guilds to accomplish goals. The specifics of the system could be debated back and forth for a while, but at its most basic level it allows two or more guilds to effectively “share” members without losing out on the individuality of each guild. I talked about how to implement the guild system inside the LFG system a while ago and this would work in a similar fashion, except it spans all allied guilds, not just your own.

Moving on, a “crafting station” (yes I said station, we’re reverting back to our third-grade days where we had separate designations for each area) would be nice. Some people in the topic from a couple of weeks ago talked about letting us see what individuals could make, but that seems unnecessarily cumbersome. What if I just wanted to know what the Jewelcrafters in the guild could make. A list of all jewels that could be made by people in the guild with the names of people who could make them would be much better, rather than one for each person. In this way it also requires much less space. Instead of John’s jewelcrafting list and Jim’s jewelcrafting list there is just the guild jewelcrafting list. Throwing in a fun feature here, let people put in “orders” for items that they want at these stations (and, if we are feeling especially brave, let this function with the guild bank to be able to use materials from there and flag alerts for people that can make the items desired.)

The other big thing mentioned in the other topic was all the decorations and accessories people may want to throw into their guild hall and I’m all for that idea. Though my guilds hall would probably be pretty Spartan (I imagine the decorations would cost money and I’m…thrifty) other guilds would probably do a lot with this.

There is so much more that could be done, and other ideas that I have, but I want to keep a few for myself, because I don’t want to give every idea I have away. Just these features would be a great start, and many of them are not even terribly difficult to implement, perhaps not simple but certainly not so tough as to completely stop the ideas from going any further.

Next week we’ll look at a new topic in our Repairing Gears, but you’ll just have to stop by next Thursday to see what it is.

repairing gears, world of warcarft, guilds, guild system, guild hall, guild bank