Guild projects

If you ask people that stay with one game longer than the average player why they are still playing, they inevitably answer that it is because of the friends they made in the game, their guild. But guilds being such a strong point of attraction to players, it is curious that game developers do so little to support them.

Blizzard doesn't even seem to be trying, their guild tools and activities are identical to games from 5 years ago. SOE had some nice ideas in EQ2, but EQ2 is such a jumble of good and bad ideas that every good idea is usually neutralized by a bad idea and two bugs. City of Villains has PvP based on guild headquarters, but I have my doubts about some of the concepts there. The game which has the best guild projects is A Tale in the Desert, but that one isn't really a MMORPG, it is a social experiment.

What I would like to have is guilds being able to work all together on a project, and all the guild members feeling part of that project. And no, I don't mean raids, because for a raid the guild members have to be of the same level, at the same time, at the same place, and those requirements already exclude a lot of people. The City of Villain bases come close in that all the members continually contribute points to the base, but there are two major disadvantages: One, points are level-based, and one hour contributed by a lower-level character is worth much less than one hour contributed by a higher-level character. Two, everybody contributes points, but only the guildmaster, and maybe some selected officers, can spend those points. Well, theoretically you can enable everybody in your 100-player guild to be able to edit the base, but that is just increasing the chaos. And it wouldn't solve the problem that one guy could spend the points gathered by somebody else.

A better approach would be to require the guild to gather materials for their guild hall, with a good part of the materials being stuff which a high-level character could collect at the same speed as a low-level character. For example in WoW mining copper takes the same time for a level 20 than for a level 60. And the reason that the level 20 can't mine iron is not lack of mining skill or anything, but just the fact that iron spawns in areas with level 30ish mobs, which are too dangerous for the level 20 character. Now if a WoW guild hall would need lots of copper, lots of tin, a bit less iron and mithril, and just a bit of thorium, all the miners in the guild could contribute equally.

Games which don't have levels, or in which resource gathering is not restricted by level, like ATITD or SWG, have it easier to implement guild projects. But most players seem to prefer level-based gameplay, and guild interaction in those building games isn't perfectly either. For example in ATITD lots of guild times is spent on doing repetitive, unproductive work, like growing onions to feed the sheep. And it is up to the guild themselves to organize the gathering of resources for a project. Often players are asked to gather resources in some chest, and when the chest contains all the necessary materials, the guild master comes and builds the building with one click. That doesn't really give the guy who contributed several hours making bricks the feeling that he was working on a collaborative project. And often you run into problems of people taking materials from the community chests to work on their own pet projects. It would be a lot nicer if the project planning phase came first, the game would erect a building site, and everybody who unloaded bricks into that site would A) see the project grow a bit, and B) have his contribution to this particular building recorded for eternity in some list permanently attached to the building.

It is fun to achieve something together with friends, and common projects could be the social ties that hold a guild together. It is time that games give guilds more to do than going on a raid together.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link