Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

Oh, no, I am so very sorry It’s the curse of having loved family members who happen to be furry and short-lived. I remember every pet I’ve lost in my 5 decades, and how they went.

Please take all the grieving time you need. I don’t know if you’re the hugging type (I’m not, RL), but internet hugs are their own special thing, so

/HUG

Probably mentioned before (I read about the NPCs like the asura walking around and stuff), but for other rooms, one can be the armory. I like the set up in the whispers area where the armor merchant and weapons are by forges and anvils. It Lets you know that is where the gear is. There can also.be a room for seige weaponry with the seige weapons against the walls or on the floor, being tinkered by the vendor.

As for customization, along with floors, walls, bricks, etc being chosen, the areas such as the armory should have a different look setup. One could look like an asuran forge, chart forge, etc. Same can apply to different rooms to make more unique.

And one room to really make the guild shine and show off, a trophy room, where awards are kept for perhaps completing a guild mission under a certain criteria, or by completing guild achievements (something else needing to be added).

As for unlocks, of course there should be some for every room by completing certain criteria (or achieves). Examples could be ‘beating the charr defense mission without losing a turret awards you with the charr armory look’. Another for guild only recipes could be ‘cook one of each food and donate to unlock recipe of kings’. This would be tracked by guild achievements.

And yes, of course, some looks can be put in the gemstore, I would just caution don’t do this too much.

Proposal Overview

A location that promotes the idea of guild communities participating together in various activities, primarily GvG.

Goal of Proposal

No particular problem is being solved through the inclusion of guild halls, its just a way of getting my much beloved GvG into the game. For that single reason, its definitely worth having them – having more uses for the guild hall is definitely a plus (see GW1 where vendors were added.)

Proposal Functionality

Unlocked similiarly to how they were in GW1; you pay for them either with an item purchased or obtained in the world – essentially through gold – or they could be free. Don’t make the initial purchase expensive or difficult to unlock (time based is fine, similar to how it is with current guild upgrades). Simply unlocking a guild hall isn’t the sole reward of a guilds hard work, you should want players to use them, not struggle to obtain one and then have nothing to do in it.

They are instanced locations based on different parts of the world that are accessed either through a portal or by teleporting through the guild panel, ala the mists/wvw etc. These are zones designed for combat, so any additional features (crafting spots, portals) must not factor into the design of these zones. Don’t have big empty places where the NPC’s mysteriously disappear during fights against other guilds.

An extensive upgrade system can be included, which ramps up from simple things like having NPC’s such as merchants, to crafting vendors/stations, Black Lion traders, Bank access and up to portals. The upgrade systems should be enticing, and function similarly to how guild upgrades function at the moment. Whichever form ‘GvG’ takes, either as castle seiges using seige weapons or a more traditional GW1 experience, having to spend time/resources repairing walls/gates or replace ‘lost’ NPC’s is a sure fire way of slowing down the overall progression of the guild halls – guilds would be more reluctant to use their halls for their intended purpose just to keep their little mini LA. As someone who is excited about the prospect of guild halls FOR GvG, I want as much competition as possible, which means more people using them.

Associated Risks

How do you keep players invested in their guild hall once upgrades are finished if they aren’t interested in the competitive aspects of GvG? Is that important? How can we make sure smaller guilds are able to upgrade their halls (a similar issues to how current upgrades work)?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

I’m so sorry Chris. I went through the same thing just 2 months ago. Its one of the hardest things to do.

ObsiMoth.6342:

Associated Risks

How do you keep players invested in their guild hall once upgrades are finished if they aren’t interested in the competitive aspects of GvG? Is that important? How can we make sure smaller guilds are able to upgrade their halls (a similar issues to how current upgrades work)?

This could be solved by the “complete guild missions under certain conditions” like the LS achieves (but harder). Thus, it keeps the guild working till they accomplish the task. The draw back to THIS of course, is the need for more missions.

But it should always be noted, some groups, guilds, people, will always race to the end to be the first to finish. The focus should be on the median of the speed things are completed.

Ohoni.6057:

Be fair, you answer first, why would you want one beyond wanting one?

Well it was specifically aimed towards zenleto.6179 who described having a small guild filled with relatively inactive members, who stated that he wouldn’t agree with any barrier to entry such as a size limit or requirements toward activity. Given the inactive nature of his guild I couldn’t really imagine what benefit he’s guild would have in owning a guild hall, given the characteristics of the guild there wouldn’t be much need for logistics (for things such as guild missions), possibly RP (but he didn’t give any indication of this), simple access to crafting station and guild bank wouldn’t be that beneficial since you could just jump into WvW and achieve the same. In fact the question was more or less me trying to understand what a 4 member guild (which I image don’t even do guild missions) would need with a guild hall?
Although from his response its seems more that the disagreement about minimum requirements is based on the possibility that guild halls could have some as yet unknown benefit which he might miss out of.

But to answer you’re question, I see the possibility of guild halls being a mechanism for delivery additional gameplay and content.

Devata.6589:

You see I am all for also giving access to small guilds and letting them make just as much use of the guild-hall as big guilds. The only element I disagree with is that it would have to be an even playing-field. Bigger guilds have more and can do more. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s even how it should be imho.

At the very least attempting to put a small and large guild on equal footing would inherently lead to larger guilds having to be penalized in some way for being larger. Even if a completely fair mechanic could be created, larger guilds would still possibly perceive this as being unfair.

Ohoni.6057:

I think the key would just be to make it so that the unlocking mechanism maxes out at a certain point, such that 5 players can unlock it in a certain amount of time, 10 players can unlock it slightly faster, but 20, 30, 40 can’t unlock it any faster than 10 can.

Time-gating. It would be an effective solution, although probably not perceived that way by the players.

Ohoni.6057:

Speaking of, it would be kind of nice if smaller guilds weren’t forced to choose function over form, that is, if there are options to customize appearance, and options to make the hall more useful, they should not be draining from the same limited resource pools, where if a small guild has a harder time filling theirs, they may take weeks or months between functional upgrades, and if changing the drapes comes from the same pool then it means either taking forever to bring the hall up to full function, or just completely ignoring decoration.

I would prefer some mechanics in place to allow you to pursue both at once without slowing either down, such as limiting how much you can put into each at a time to a level where you should have points left over each week, or having them use completely different resource pools that a guild raises simultaneously.

So essentially aesthetic upgrades and functional upgrades would use different resources. I guess aesthetics could then be a bit more grindly (hunting blue prints, specific material etc.) while functional upgrades could probably run off of influence or merit.

Dashwood.3215:

Just do it like in GW 1. Was simple, effective, and it just worked. And yeah, bring back GvG the same way too.

Eh, I guess. Although I like sky’s-the-limit mindset we currently have going.

Conski Deshan.2057:

You guys don’t seem to be considering methods that don’t use resources, if you have unlock mechanisms as opposed to gather x resources it solves your problem of scalability while also preventing it being a horrific gold grind.

I think blue-prints have been mentioned a couple of times. I guess the idea is that by doing a certain activity or series of activities a blue-print can be unlocked and then placed in the guild hall (whether this would take the shape of Wildstars personal housing where you can place whatever you’ve unlocked, or if there would be a resource or space limit).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

I’m very sorry for your loss. It’s tough losing a beloved pet. They become members of the family.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

Hi Chris so sorry for youre loss had my staffie kitten put down earlier this year , sad times hope you n family are ok bro

/hugs to Chris

Take all the time you need, Chris! I’m sure we’ll help you get back on track here once you’re back.

I’m sorry to read that Mr. Whiteside, please don’t worry about us, take your time and as others have said, we’ll help you get back on track once you’re back.

My condolences. Gentle hugs.

~c

AlienMenace.7516:

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

If they just made it so a housing instance could be accessed from within the Guild Hall (maybe a door you could use to be transported to the customizable interior of your home) space would not be an issue. Just like using a doorway that took guild members to their specific guild hall instance (if they had their instance at that location) would work.

All of this could use the already-existing technology that sends people to their Home Instance (remember those?) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_instance

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

Your suggestion is likely to be the one incorporated if they do housing b/c it is a bit easier to incorporate into the game as it is now.

However, I would love to see full “Guild Zones” with that many homes in it. It would be beautiful. Full of NPCs and special guild merchants. Making all those instance portals shouldn’t be too much trouble. As far as home variety goes it could be kept to a pretty minimal palette with a more robust texture and asset placement options.

Guild Farms
Personalized Guild Enemies
Guild NPCs
etc, etc, etc

It would end up being a lot of work but the end result would be a place I think people would love to spend time in.

My most sincere condolences for you and your family Chris. I had to have my cat put down a few years ago and it was literally the worst day of my life.

Sorry for your loss Chris. Condolences to you and your family.

this is a great point. I have not explicitly said what the box is on purpose but I’m happy next week to take an idea and really ask all the hard questions to try to boil it down more so that you can all see how this works more clearly on our end. One thing is the constraints we have are rarely what you all imagine they might be so I think it will be good to break down an actual problem that way.

Jon

Just so long as you keep us updated as to what you take away from the thread at the end of it, so that we won’t have a repeat of the disastrous Spring Trait system overhaul. Let us know what you end up thinking we want, so we’ll be able to tell you if you’ve got it all wrong before you start working on it.

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

Aw. My sympathies. Take your time.

Well it was specifically aimed towards zenleto.6179 who described having a small guild filled with relatively inactive members, who stated that he wouldn’t agree with any barrier to entry such as a size limit or requirements toward activity. Given the inactive nature of his guild I couldn’t really imagine what benefit he’s guild would have in owning a guild hall, given the characteristics of the guild there wouldn’t be much need for logistics (for things such as guild missions), possibly RP (but he didn’t give any indication of this), simple access to crafting station and guild bank wouldn’t be that beneficial since you could just jump into WvW and achieve the same. In fact the question was more or less me trying to understand what a 4 member guild (which I image don’t even do guild missions) would need with a guild hall?
Although from his response its seems more that the disagreement about minimum requirements is based on the possibility that guild halls could have some as yet unknown benefit which he might miss out of.

But to answer you’re question, I see the possibility of guild halls being a mechanism for delivery additional gameplay and content.

While I agree that a lot of the guild functions being discussed could be found in WvW borderlands, I do think that having a guild hall could be fun to have, whether you have 4 members or 400. I think in a game, “fun” is a good enough reason. Any practical advantages a guild hall might give you are just icing.

So essentially aesthetic upgrades and functional upgrades would use different resources. I guess aesthetics could then be a bit more grindly (hunting blue prints, specific material etc.) while functional upgrades could probably run off of influence or merit.

Right. It would still be tricky to balance though, as if it were all RNG, then a large guild would have a huge advantage with dozens of people “rolling” constantly for them vs. a handful of people, if you could sell them on TP then it would just become a gold cost, which again favors the larger guilds, and if it were “event” based, like you unlock a design by completing a boss or minidungeon, I think it would be most fair, but even then it would favor larger guilds if some of the unlocks were rarely farmed large scale events. I still think that would probably be the best though.

Maybe they could kill two birds with one stone, by resetting the trait system back to how it used to be, but taking all the current trait unlock events and shifting them over to unlocking Hall decorations!

I would like to ask if it would be possible for the community to suggest how the funding of Guild Halls would occur? If it would be possible to discuss what would be distressing about purchasing with in game gold, gem store purchases, etc. If this topic is a problem feel free to delete this. I am not wanting to derail the issue, but it might lead to better releases of this if you have ideas on what we find upsetting.

Alethia.3597:

Donari.5237:

What resources are saved if all the data is still there? Are you assuming open world halls? With instancing, the data is there, but no instance is created unless a guild member goes to it. Thus there’s no need to “decay” the hall, your proposed function is seamlessly integrated already without anyone having to redeploy anything.

Think big on customisation until we are told otherwise. A guild could choose to invest in a three storey 40 room main hall with 6 outlying smaller buildings each with their own orientation, colour channels, decorations on all surfaces, lighting colour scheme (I love that idea for whomever brought that up several pages back). My guild might choose to invest in 50 trees, half of which are altered to have purple leaves and 200 floating rocks to make jumping puzzles between the bank and the repair NPC.
Instead of having to store the individual placement and orientation of everything those 200 rocks could revert to being the equivalent of 200 crafting material in a bank tab for the servers. Same with all the items and rooms added on.

I see, that does make more sense. I think we’d need the devs to tell us how much space saving that would actually accomplish, and how important it is to save it. For instance my SSD holds far less than my regular HD, so I’m not installing a 30 Gig game on it I don’t intend to play a lot — but 30 Gig is a drop in the bucket on the regular HD so it really doesn’t matter if I toss a lot of games on it I may never play.

Would it in fact reduce server load to “stack” unused guild halls while maintaining full information on the contents and ownership, or would that be an additional operation/data list that counterbalances any savings? Would it be safe enough that no guild halls get accidentally “eaten,” as it were? Keep in mind that if someone’s gone long enough to count as inactive, it may be far past any restoration point by the time they notice their stuff is gone if the stacking goes wrong.

But if tons of deployed guild asset info causes loss in game performance, yes, this is a form of decay I could support. So long as all that is lost is the time it takes to set up the hall structure — no prized location gone, no upgrades undone, etc, then I can see the value in compacting data that isn’t in use.

This supposes that setting up the structure will be easy and fluid, rather than a cuss-fest as items stubbornly refuse to move just one pixel and cracks are left at wall seams or other alignment issues rear their ugly heads. The harder it is to do in the first place, the more annoying to have it undone.

Sorry to hear about that Chris.

Roybe.5896:

I would like to ask if it would be possible for the community to suggest how the funding of Guild Halls would occur? If it would be possible to discuss what would be distressing about purchasing with in game gold, gem store purchases, etc. If this topic is a problem feel free to delete this. I am not wanting to derail the issue, but it might lead to better releases of this if you have ideas on what we find upsetting.

As a general example reason why I’m opposed to the gem conversion and why stemming from that golds use in guildhalls:
Lets say an item “Sword” takes the average person 50 hours to obtain but is not tradable or buyable I feel it was a worth while time investment.
Now lets say that item is also buy-able for 10e (converted to gold or direct), (for the sake of argument lets take wages to be 10e/h)I now feel that I have wasted 49 hours of my time as I could have just bought it from 1 hours work.

Specifically on guildhalls:
1. A big part of guildhalls is going to be showing off, “This is the awesome tower skins my guild unlocked” “This ultra rare item in our hall was was earned by us through our hard in game work”.
As such the best looking skins/items should come from advanced in game content as a means of showing off, if you then introduce the gem store, people who buy gem items would expect to get nice skins too. This creates a conflict of interest and the gem store will likely win out.

There’s a specific precedent for this example: The in game guild backpieces (elegant and savage) are earned exclusively from a guild mission (was PvP too) and not trade-able making them a prestige item. The gem store recently introduced a guild Mist Herald Backpack it’s bigger it’s badder and generally stands out more. What’s the motivation to earn the other two skins when (somewhat subjectively/objectively) the gem store skin is better?

2. Gold is ambiguous,did you gold convert it? did you get it pressing 1 farming? or did you brave fractals 50 and fight the wonders of the mists ? "Oh you have a legendary, did you use debit or credit :/ "
Having specific unlock paths for each thing shows other people what you did. “Oh you have the fractal castle tower, that specifically means you completed a level 50 fractal with your guild mates awesome kudos to you”.

3. It enables prestige , the only way to get the 2014 summer bonanza fountain for a guild hall was to be the top 50 in that event. It is not tradable it is not buyable you know 100% that that guild earned it themselves.

Tl/Dr 1: Look at Mist herald backpack vs Elegant/crude backpieces don’t want that to happen in guildhalls.

Tl/DR 2: Gold sucks as it doesn’t take into account the difficulty of the content you did to get it.

JonPeters.5630:

[…]

Saved for later when we get a dungeon or raid CDI: I like the direction in which this suggestion is going but I would suggest another implementation.

Back to Guild Halls
One question I would like to have answered:
Guilds can hold up to 500 players. Normal maps can hold up to 100 – 150 (?) players.
How do you want to ensure that players don’t feel separated from each other, can you raise the player-cap for Guild Halls?
Do you have any other idea how to get around this issue?

Regardless of whether the guild halls are instanced or not, please make it so most furniture can be interacted with. Yes, give us the typical beds, chairs and benches but, I would love to be able to sit on the side of a coffee table, lean against a railing/wall, or sit on a staircase. It always seems in-game houses are made to look like a home, but not feel like one. Let us turn on lights, light fires in the fireplace, sit at the table and eat/drink – perhaps actually go through a dining animation that takes longer than a few seconds.

I would also like the addition of more held items. Make it so we can carry sheets of paper, books, maybe some tools, food or bottles of wine. Have our characters pick up and move chairs or slide around couches. As much as we like simplified UI to easily drag and drop, it can be immersion-breaking. Isn’t it better to take a few steps to get the bottle off the shelf instead of opening the inventory to click on an icon?

Maybe create a in-game voice channel within each guild hall so we can have public conversations. People complain that open voice channels lead to people randomly yelling and being trolls, but having it be guild specific and only within their respective halls allows guilds to regulate the chatter.

The system should, in essence, be like in Guild Wars 1 – every Guild with at least a bit of money, or, even better, influence (but please. stay away from guild merrits, because you basically steal smaller guilds the possibility to experience the whole game. I am the leader of a smaller Guild, we are around 10 people and play together once or twice a week at max, and we don’t have a single guild merrit.)
There should be the possibility to choose the environment the hall is located in, like in an old mine, one of the little fortresses in the maguuma jungle, a pirate or bandit hideout with a ship, or a cave that must be entered via water, a lá Order of Whispers,
Crafting areas for all professions, which can be purchased for gold or maybe even built in a lenghty series of crafting stuff, I wouldn’t mind if I had to combine around 400 items for a crafting area, that would at least be a fun project for the guild.
Give us the possibility to have fights with our guild members in the hall, which, of course, should be instanced. It could be placed in the mists and entered via a portal stone, like the one for the hall of monuments in the eye of the north.

The most important aspect is the possilbility for every guild, no matter how big or small, to achieve a full guild hall, with things that are easy to access, so no gems, no merrits, just gold, crafting material and influence.

You then could visualize some of the upgrades – the guild vault, the secret cave, heck even the asura helping you with building new upgrades and banners, rooms like dining halls, places for sleeping…

JonPeters.5630:

Rambodacious.7495:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities.

1) What makes a creature interesting and challenging?
1a) How do you make sure that all 6 combinations of skills are similarly balanced,
2) One thing that makes difficult content satisfying is mastery. How does this system allow players to develop a sense of mastery?
2a) How do we develop a clear visual language for 4 skills and how they combine into 6 patterns for creatures using the already limited set of creature animations and effects?
3) Many of the dungeons already have walls, and requirements for completion that players have found workarounds in the system to get past. How does your system actually solve those problems?
4) How do you propose to build those creature skills in a way that allows players to use a variety of tools to gain mastery over them?

The beauty of GW2 is that you guys have 8 classes that truly feel and look unique, but they are all homogenized in the sense that their unique abilities allow them all to accomplish any task in the game efficiently. This is a good thing, it simplifies what is needed to provide a repeatable challenge – straight-forward, difficult, randomized content.

Just give mobs ANY 4 awesome abilities. For example, a given mob has:

- A 2 second knock-down on a 10 second cooldown
- A 360 aoe bleed that ticks for 250 per tick and lasts 10 seconds on a 3 second cooldown
- A 360 aoe vulnerability stack that lasts for 15 seconds on a 3 second cooldown
- A self stacking damage buff, if they successfully land an attack, the next attack hits 15% harder, stacking infinitely until a miss occurs

There, give a mob, that is in a group of 10 any 2 of the above and you have the unique challenge to answer your #1 and #1a. No need to carefully craft the list, just make the list nasty like the above and both the mob and the players will sort it out.

2. Mastery currently involves watching a youtube video or listening to another player tell you to jump a wall or hide around a corner before AoEing a group of mobs. Mastery is when a player uses his character’s skillset to overcome challenging content, not through repetition and memorization (in zerk gear).

2a. How do we create this without sending an army of animators and graphics programmers to overtime land for 6 months… Alright, well, mobs have at least one attack animation already. By taking any two of the above abilities and replacing the mobs current attack animation, we’re half-way there. Now, if you want to save time, you can fudge it a bit by taking a mobs animation they don’t normally use, like jump/dodge/run/hurt and assign the other two random abilities to one of those. If it’s a dodge, the mobs wouldn’t move, they’d dodge in place to avoid confusion etc. Now players know after the very first attacks what to look for.

3. Invisible walls, certainly created by the boss of the dungeon in question, not by a programmer of course. 80% destruction of mobs in the vicinity and the wall dissipates. No more skipping, but of course, increased loots for our courageous party members.

4. Using our mob from above, let’s say he gets the first two abilities. The group sees 10 of this beast and they send in the bunker warrior/guard to “test the waters” – but wait, they don’t have a bunker. Okay, the ranger sends in his pet? Wait, no ranger either? Maybe they don’t scout it at all. Maybe they all rush in and dodge roll straight to the middle of the mobs. The mobs encircle them about to unleash hell – that’s when our group unloads the AoE’s, but so do the bad guys! Now our group pops a stun breaker or temporary invulnerability spell or dodges out, the bad guys hot on the trail. A group member throws out some swiftness and our high damage, low durability group kites them around the room, throwing out cripples or chills and aoe damage.

Like I say, because you’ve created 8 one-man-armies, there’s plenty of ways to skin a cat – this is not to say that a particular group will always be successful with a given group makeup, and that’s fantastic. Your manifesto comes alive. Players playing how they want, all that is required is that they play that particular build wisely AND with the group in mind – because no one knows what’s in there and no one can say a zerker/pure dps build is maximum efficiency.

The only real sticking point is the animations. Cheesing it as per above could allow you to put this in relatively quickly and then sentencing a poor animator to an extended duration in the animation dungeon could allow him to slowly soup it up over time.

Further, you could try it on one dungeon – Arah for example. See how players react to it.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Rambodacious.7495:

JonPeters.5630:

Iason Evan.3806:

Baltzenger.2467:

.

I probably didn’t explain myself well enough. If you design Guild Halls in the context we are talking about(free form object placement/design options etc.) for the person that is gonna want to spend 90% of their time in the Guild Hall then it will be for everyone because it will have more options than the person who doesn’t really care(Fractals guy) will ever use. If you design it for Fractals guy only, then the person that really cares about design gets left out.

This is precisely why the things we build take time. Someone earlier suggested to just list things that were seemingly easy so that maybe this could be a reality. I would suggest that the more innovative and compelling your ideas are the more likely they are to drive development because that is what we pride ourselves on.

Mr. Peters, I have to categorically disagree with you here. Guild Halls cannot be a bandaid for you guys. They simply can’t. You’re bleeding players and we both know it (NA and EU). If you burn massive amounts of development time on things that will be interesting for a couple of weeks and neglect the vast majority of other areas of your game, you will continue to bleed players. You’ll get the initial spike of everyone coming back to check things out, they’ll be excited for 2-3 weeks, and then the forum posts start and players start to leave again. I speak as though this is fact because by looking at the past, we can accurately predict the future. No more bandaid patches.

I’m suggesting that Guild Halls are a glue that not only ties game modes together, but would also have ways to occupy a player’s time unique to Guild Halls. Abandon spending any time on trying to make players see them from the game world, or having some scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that requires loot tables coded in and other nonsense. Unnecessary man hours, just keep it simple.

They’re airships (seems to be the consensus). They’re customizable (also unanimous). Beyond this, it gets rocky.

You know what, if I’m going to tell you to stray from this idea, I’ll give you things that will not only get players to come back to your game, but keep them as well. Just remember this when you’re looking at my resume for the designer position you have listed.

Here is a way to revamp all dungeons, make them replayable with endless variety, challenging enough to break the “zerker meta” yet not bring the “trinity” into the game AND do it all with minimal development hours:

Each type of mob in each dungeon is given 4 abilities. Whenever a group enters the dungeon and the instance is spawned, each of the mob types is randomly assigned 2 of the 4 abilities. Further, there are walls that prevent players from skipping past many sections. For the players to continue, they must kill the mobs present.

Now, the mobs have say, knock-downs and AOE bleeds. Maybe instead, it’s poison and boon corruption. Always something new. Sometimes, 5 zerks work. Sometimes they don’t.

To prevent frustration from the added time now needed to complete a dungeon, these much more difficult mobs now drop a silver each. There you go, it’s rewarding, challenging and infinitely replayable because it’s always something different to prepare for. These are what dev time needs to be spent on, not a massive scavenger hunt for GH unlocks that is a temporary time-sink designed to mask the problems that the game suffers from.

(P.S. To prevent players from killing mobs near the dungeon over and over and not killing a boss to allow themselves to farm high cash dropping mobs over and over, make mobs deeper in the dungeon, near the end drop 3-4 silver per mob (with great loot tables) and the ones by the door drop 25 coppers etc.)

Hi Rambo,

Not sure how you took Jon’s comments as a band aid. I think he pretty clearly stated that he believes that anyone taking on a task like this must exceed expectations.

Unless I missed something.

Chris

Chris, firstly let me say I’m sorry for your loss. I lost Indiana Jack, my Jack-Russell Terrier a few years back, was a sad time.

What I meant by bandaid was content, while certainly professionally done, providing a temporary amount of content and lacking long-term durability or even outright replayability. My concern was that Anet might spend too much time on a few GH features that absorb a large amount of resources and wind up keeping us players busy for a shorter period of time than hoped for. Sorry for the confusion.

One minigame only in Guild Halls: Guild Hall Defense

Location: In one existent map or one instanced.

Objetive: Protect your Guild Hall, pve style.

Mechanics: (Your guild can activate or not, this minigame)

-Other Guilds on your server or another servers, choose a drop point to send enemies, who can attack your guild hall. Only monsters summoned by other Guilds, no players.

-You can choose the difficulty. Easy, Medium or Hard. Easy activate few drop points, Medium activate more, and Hard activate all.

-To defend your Guild Hall, you have your pve skills, and special weapons in the Guild Hall, for example Electric Balistas (purchased upgrading your Guild Hall).

-If you win, get resources and influence for your guild. For example the next unlocked feature for the Guild Hall. Level up in global ranking of guilds.

-If another guild win, they can get resources and influence for their guild.

-If you fail, you lose influence and rank in the global ranking of guilds.

-If another guild fail, they lose the influence inverted to send the enemies, and rank in the global ranking of guilds.

-If you win and your Guild Hall its fully Upgraded, this minigame can give gold to the players.

Upgrading your Guild Hall, make your guild best prepared for this minigame.
(more Health Points for the Guild Hall for example)

The top 100 in the Global Ranking of Guilds, win a collection of materials to decorate the Guild hall, one year.

Proposal Overview
Sandbox area/s of hall for temporary content and non-permanent layouts.
Goal of Proposal
Have some areas of the hall be wiped clean easily to situate temporary or hired content, but be able to have granular permissions for trial building in such areas.
Proposal Functionality
Allow set layout pieces whether entrances to things like SAB or a pre-built tower with goggles and a bucket to be easily added to a hall. When not in use with that kind of content have the ability to trial layouts in the area. It could vanish back into the ground if no one was in the hall. Could even allow trial for an hour before you buy on unlocks if games were added or something similar.
Associated Risks
Multiple people interacting at once could have issues like the guilds bank can. Could be intensive to have a constant customisation going on and cause lag.

Proposal Overview
Guild hall mini games
Goal of Proposal
Guild halls have been the place that legacy guilds spent a lot of time hanging out, chatting and having some fun with only the guild and selected guests. Add some basic options in to allow this to continue.
Proposal Functionality
Add basic options like hiding all allies on the maps to allow games like hide and seek. Having a roster of players participating would be even better in case someone left the area.
A new game either free for all, or in a set map area to solve some collision issues with decorations, could be paintball. The basics are already in game to allow this with the wintersday event of painting princess dolls with a paint gun.

Just food for thought;

“Guild Hall” systems that require large amounts of materials and time to get desired convenience services for members absolutely kills small guilds. Look at Star Trek Online and their starbase system. As new players come into the game, they want to join a guild that gives them immediate access to all the conveniences available.

Current large guilds have the man-power and materials to unlock all these at a break-neck pace that small guilds will never be able to keep up with making recruitment more and more difficult until it is virtually impossible to attract new members.

well I have an idea for guild halls and player housing.
imagine this:

player housing can be done from the beginning of the game. you get an empty (small map) which you can build on , a House with for example multiple levels, then when you join a guild you’re " Land" gets placed on the " Guild Plains" this way a whole city will be build around the guild hall, and it can all be instanced so that the open world does not need to suffer from loading issues

just my thoughts on the housing and guild hall system
of course I would like to see more features in guild halls.

for example :

A throne hall , or a hall with a round table which all members can sit at (25max)
then a pub-like area , a training area where you can spar – one on one or three or three
(imagine a simple room with one of the capture circles in it except you cannot leave the capture circle invisible wall)

well a pub is simple enough. a bar , chairs and tables and ale kegs!

Guild Hall : Guild Missions:
Guild Hall Defense / Guild vs Guild,
Enemy Guilds must first go through the town in order to reach the hall , Traps can be placed WvsW style and more like this.

just my thoughts need to sort e’m out though

This CDI has been a great read! Almost all aspects of Guild Halls has been discussed. What I’d like to focus on is how Guild Halls interacts with the open world. When I was reading through the discussion I read about the benefits of Guild Halls being instanced or open world. I feel that you can have both if its done in a way where you are able to show off your guild but not add clutter to the maps. How I envision guilds in GW2 is instanced maps that are linked to WvW.

For example in PvE maps you can jump right into your guilds hall basically the same way as in GW1. In WvW add an asura portal to castle/tower/camp that teleport you to the guild who claimed the points guild hall. This function can have permissions so if guilds don’t want random people in their guild halls they just turn that function on. In my opinion this is the best way to have a place to meet up before guild missions in PvE and you are able to show off in the open world. In PvE Zones we can already promote your guilds through banners.

So I don’t see the reason to clutter the story and vibe of the game with guild halls in the PvE maps. And by having the guild halls linked to WvW it is a way for guilds to claim land to show off. And small guild when they want to show off they can just invite their friends to the guild. Also Jon Peters you had some funny responses I lol’ed reading through the thread. Chris hope everything goes well.

1. Guild Halls are big hubs. There’s space for housing and stuff, so guildies can be your neighbours. There are crafting stations, farms for harvesting and other activities.

2. The Guild Hall can be themed differently and there’s a really wide customization options.

3. Other guilds or members of another guild or a friend can join your Guild Hall hub by being invited, but they can’t access your home unless your invited there too.

4. Factions. You can team up with other guilds for bigger events and social hubs.

Proposal Overview:
The costs of acquiring commodities and customizations of the guild hall should scale based on the number of players of the guild.

The cost of acquiring a guild hall should be constant regardless of the size of the guild.

Graphical upgrades and other non-functionnal upgrades of the guild hall should scale at a higher rate than the purely functionnal upgrades.

Goal of Proposal:
Guilds hall should be a mechanism that should be used by a majority of the guild/population. Having costs too prohibitive remove the numerous small guilds from the system, while low costs allow large guilds to trivialize the building of the guild hall.

Having variable costs will help mitigating this issue.

Proposal Functionality:
As said in the overview, the costs can be divided in 3 categories :
- fixed costs : acquiring a “naked guild hall”. This should be constant. As stated by other persons before, guild halls should be acquired by giving a special item (“guild hall sigil”) to an NPC. Players should be able to acquire this sigil in all 3 game types (WvW, sPvP, PvE). The item should be tradable and its drop rate should be low.

- commodities costs : these are the costs of acquiring crafting stations or asura gates or anything that improve the quality of life of members of the guild.
These costs should scale based on the number of players in the guild with a constant rate. Guilds regardless of size should stand on the same ground regarding this.

- graphical costs : these are the costs of acquiring visual and prestige updates for the guild hall. Anything that does not provide an ingame advantage goes in this category.
These costs should scale with the number of players with an increasing coefficient : large guilds that already attract lots of players should have a harder time acquiring these. It should also be an incentive for players to band together and form small guilds to get these.

>My opinion about the scaling coefficient for commodities :
Let there be 2 guilds [A] and [B]. [A] has twice the population of [B]. The cost of acquiring a crafting station within the hall for [A] should be 80% higher than [B]. Because [A] is larger, it should have much more inactive players, hence a scaling ratio that is lower than 1.

Associated Risks:
>Larger guild will probably tighten their policy about representation, activity and guild contribution for the hall.
>Incentive for very dedicated players to get a fully upgraded hall then sell it to other players interested in constructing large guilds.
>Endless controversy on the value of the scaling coefficient(s).

VodCom.6924:

- graphical costs : these are the costs of acquiring visual and prestige updates for the guild hall. Anything that does not provide an ingame advantage goes in this category.
These costs should scale with the number of players with an increasing coefficient : large guilds that already attract lots of players should have a harder time acquiring these. It should also be an incentive for players to band together and form small guilds to get these.

Have to say that sounds like you’re actively trying to punish large guilds in that part, form a smaller guild to get it?

I’m fine with functional upgrades scaling with guild size in some manner. But graphical ones should be flat unlocks, even a 500 man guild is not going to pay 300g for a basic chair.

And to reiterate again why even use resources at all, make them unlocks. Example: You’ve got the AC collection, you get the glowy ac chair for placement in your guildhall as many times as you want for free.

I feel people would be reluctant to spend money/resources towards their guild, it’s not a permanent improvement for their character , they may leave or get kicked etc. I know I wouldn’t want to waste resources towards my guild that could be advancing me personally. Unlocks give a way to help your guild while not being detrimental to the player.

Goal of Proposal -
Guild halls for guild only meetings/gatherings, but have the option to invite non-guild members to join (similar to the GW1 method of temporary invites). Places for player housing (I would like this to be in a public place so everyone can view every players home, but I’m sure technically this would be near impossible).

Functionality -
1) Don’t make it so the GH’s replace the need for towns, so limit the available amenities that can be added.
2) If player housing were to be introduced, give players the choice of the style. Be they limited to one set build for each race or from a selection of. Or ideally, though again probably not feasible, a similar method of Wildstar housing as personally I REALLY like the (dare i say it) Sims style house building.
3) GH’s could be in a set portion of the Mists where you can see (default) GH’s in the backgrounds floating in their own spaces (if that makes sense lol).

That’s my 2 cents worth. I’d really love the addition of player housing as it would give something non-essential to work on, that would offer no real benefits to players to make having one unfair to those who don’t for whatever reason.
(Condolences also on your loss Chris, it’s a very sad time when a household pet passes away, I can relate to the issue personally).

Roybe.5896:

I would like to ask if it would be possible for the community to suggest how the funding of Guild Halls would occur? If it would be possible to discuss what would be distressing about purchasing with in game gold, gem store purchases, etc. If this topic is a problem feel free to delete this. I am not wanting to derail the issue, but it might lead to better releases of this if you have ideas on what we find upsetting.

There has been talk about it and I would be against both. Simply unlocking things in the game. If we talk about your basic guild-hall it would likely be influence but after that blue-prints for model (or in what other form it may come) should be unlocked from stiff you do in the game. Bigger more important things I would say as unlocks for doing something specific (completing a dungeons with guild-members and so on) while smaller things might have some rng in them. The unlock can drop in a dungeon or from a mob and so on.

This is in short one of the things that has been talked about. Have a read back in the thread for more details.

Gold makes it yet another grind. Gems is or gold-grind or buying (what is not playing).

Conski Deshan.2057:

VodCom.6924:

- graphical costs : these are the costs of acquiring visual and prestige updates for the guild hall. Anything that does not provide an ingame advantage goes in this category.
These costs should scale with the number of players with an increasing coefficient : large guilds that already attract lots of players should have a harder time acquiring these. It should also be an incentive for players to band together and form small guilds to get these.

Have to say that sounds like you’re actively trying to punish large guilds in that part, form a smaller guild to get it?

I’m fine with functional upgrades scaling with guild size in some manner. But graphical ones should be flat unlocks, even a 500 man guild is not going to pay 300g for a basic chair.

I understand the objection. I’ll try to refine the idea:

Eg : I’d like my guild hall to have “foefire glowing tables” in it. What should I do ?

Step 1 : unlock the possibility to purchase the chair in the first place. => Complete all AC paths with a team of five members once. [Does NOT scale with size]

Step 2 : Purchase the “foefire glowing tables” at an NPC with AC tokens (could scale with size, not sure about this one), influence and merits (DOES scale with size)

I think it makes sense since larger guild earn more influence than smaller ones because of more members doing stuff in the game. Moreover, larger guilds have access to more guild activities increasing even further the amount of merits earned. Hence the higher scaling.

I’m not eager to punish large guilds, I’m just trying to level the playing field and make it fun for everyone.

Proposal:

A personalized and guild WvW Warchest

This chest holds all loot,currency that hasn’t been collected.

Or
Create a system where the amount of people killed/stomped adds to the treasure in the chest, while dying reduces the amount. (can’t go into negative numbers)

Personalized:
Adds X silver per stomp.
Adds 0,X- silver per kill.

Removes <X or 0,X silver per death.

Guild:
X silver for each person killed In the area of a claimed keep.

Pro’s:
-People will kill for rewards and maybe this can solve the current "problems"with loot.
-More rewards for defense
-Improved loot system

Example of problems:
The visibility of loot (Pressing a key to see if you have drops in an dynamic environement, pressing another to pick them up~result spamming commands~adding to workload)

Con’s:
-Ac camping for tags.
-If death reduces income people tend to be more carefull.
-Loads of work to implement i would recon.

What current aspects of guilds would you change to integrate them more with guild halls?

-Having guild alliances. iow more members. (Guildwars 1 as reference) where each gamemode pve,wvw,pvp is needed in a way to contribute to the upgrades. iow, a wvw,pve and pvp guild come together to form an alliance to get advantage in upgrading the guildhall.

-Stop the gold sink or “buying” guild attributes but allow constructing trough guild events. Add events that support the creation of the guildhall (trough a story maybe)

-Guildmember interaction trough creation. May it be farming,gathering,killing,training,crafting,fishing,building houses, ballons or spaceships.

-Access to all guild associated “things” earned through events/missions.

-Buffs, banners or bonfires could become guildbound and maybe last for 24 hours upon placing inside the guildhall. [i]I invision a sacred garden, of Gwen, where you can add banners,buffs etc. that wil automaticly buff the player when he enters/walks trough[i]

-Activate events and ready up for events trough an npc that will reserve an overflow for the guild, then the alliance and then fills up. Reserving 10 spots for alliance members.

-Guild arena implemented as a feature, where map/gamemode and other settings are chosen trough an npc and portal.

VodCom.6924:

Conski Deshan.2057:

VodCom.6924:

- graphical costs : these are the costs of acquiring visual and prestige updates for the guild hall. Anything that does not provide an ingame advantage goes in this category.
These costs should scale with the number of players with an increasing coefficient : large guilds that already attract lots of players should have a harder time acquiring these. It should also be an incentive for players to band together and form small guilds to get these.

Have to say that sounds like you’re actively trying to punish large guilds in that part, form a smaller guild to get it?

I’m fine with functional upgrades scaling with guild size in some manner. But graphical ones should be flat unlocks, even a 500 man guild is not going to pay 300g for a basic chair.

I understand the objection. I’ll try to refine the idea:

Eg : I’d like my guild hall to have “foefire glowing tables” in it. What should I do ?

Step 1 : unlock the possibility to purchase the chair in the first place. => Complete all AC paths with a team of five members once. [Does NOT scale with size]

Step 2 : Purchase the “foefire glowing tables” at an NPC with AC tokens (could scale with size, not sure about this one), influence and merits (DOES scale with size)

I think it makes sense since larger guild earn more influence than smaller ones because of more members doing stuff in the game. Moreover, larger guilds have access to more guild activities increasing even further the amount of merits earned. Hence the higher scaling.

I’m not eager to punish large guilds, I’m just trying to level the playing field and make it fun for everyone.

Step one.. No does not scale but is very much doable for bigger and smaller guilds. Imho if you are not able to ever get a group of guild-members together to do a dungeon (also not for special things like this.. not talking about a random request in the guild—chat) then you are to small to consider yourself a guild. But with a group of a few friends as guild this is already very doable.

Step two makes it a currency grind what is boring and we already have way to much of that in the game.

So step two is boring and not to mention it is unfair towards bigger guilds if it would scale.. Why would they have to pay more for exactly the same?. only because they earn more? Thats just wrong.

Step one is fun and works for all guilds.

And there is no need to level the playing field. Bigger guilds can and should be able to do more as long as small guilds also can have a shot at everything.. Just as in the step one option.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

I was going to jump in today but this morning I took our Golden Retriever to the vets this morning and he had to be put down.

We are all very upset and i need to spend time with my family. Hopefully this will be the end o the issues we are facing and I will be able to give you my full attention.

Sorry,

Chris

Sorry to hear. Hoping things even out for you.

Prophet.6257:

AlienMenace.7516:

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

If they just made it so a housing instance could be accessed from within the Guild Hall (maybe a door you could use to be transported to the customizable interior of your home) space would not be an issue. Just like using a doorway that took guild members to their specific guild hall instance (if they had their instance at that location) would work.

All of this could use the already-existing technology that sends people to their Home Instance (remember those?) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_instance

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

Your suggestion is likely to be the one incorporated if they do housing b/c it is a bit easier to incorporate into the game as it is now.

However, I would love to see full “Guild Zones” with that many homes in it. It would be beautiful. Full of NPCs and special guild merchants. Making all those instance portals shouldn’t be too much trouble. As far as home variety goes it could be kept to a pretty minimal palette with a more robust texture and asset placement options.

Guild Farms
Personalized Guild Enemies
Guild NPCs
etc, etc, etc

It would end up being a lot of work but the end result would be a place I think people would love to spend time in.

While i think it would be a good place to run around in, a lot of those sandbox type elements tend to be difficult to maintain. Population changes a lot in MMOs what happens when we run out of space with a ton of inactive houses?

Anyway, i think we could address player housing in another discussion. I’d personally love to see the home instance get a make-over, including being able to allow your friends to check it out whenever they want.

Devata.6589:

And there is no need to level the playing field. Bigger guilds can and should be able to do more as long as small guilds also can have a shot at everything. Just as in the step one option.

As I said earlier, not scaling the rewards implies that :
- either larger guild trivialize the building of a guild hall (they have tons of influence to spend immediately on this)
or
– having a nice guild hall is impossible for smaller guilds (takes too much time to gather all the influence/merits)

This is why I proposed the scaling in the first place. So that the majority of guilds can build get their hall and customise it in a reasonable amount of time while keeping the sense of accomplishment. It does not have to pusnish, there is a difference between a large guild getting a reward 10% faster than a small guild and getting the same reward 400% faster, the former being where I am aiming

Larger guilds will have the advantage of unlocking more options quicker (since the requirement does not scale) as well as boasting more trophies and accomplishments, because of higher pool of players (much more likely to have 5 great players of sanctum sprint in a 400 ppl guild than in a 20 ppl one).

TehPwnerer.7215:

Honestly if they were the exact same as GW1 I would be happy.

My hopes:
-Give us multiple layouts to choose from like GW1
-Allow us to upgrade it to include more vendors, guild/personal storage, etc.
-Allow us to bring guests into it
-Maybe have gathering nodes that reset daily?
-Allow us to explore it and make it an actual guild hall. Something large and wondrous.

And finally, think of the small guilds.. Before you go adding 100k+ influence costs or 1k+ gold costs, remember not every guild has hundreds of people.

Thanks for your time and I’m glad to see guild halls finally being discussed!

I can get behind these ideas. I’d really enjoy seeing GvG guild halls in GW2, with similar functionality. I’d add Saars dynamic content for workshops and asura contractors too!

munkiman.3068:

Prophet.6257:

AlienMenace.7516:

Prophet.6257:

Housing:

In GW1 my friends and I use to pretend we owned houses in our Guild Hall. It was just a bit of RP but would be AMAZING if we could actually do that in GW2. It would take a lot to make enough houses to actually allow everyone a place but would be an amazing living city to actually see.

If they just made it so a housing instance could be accessed from within the Guild Hall (maybe a door you could use to be transported to the customizable interior of your home) space would not be an issue. Just like using a doorway that took guild members to their specific guild hall instance (if they had their instance at that location) would work.

All of this could use the already-existing technology that sends people to their Home Instance (remember those?) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_instance

So I think it might be possible and reasonable to see your idea come to life, without the problem of there needing to be one separate house for each and every person in your guild (could you imagine what a full-capacity guild would look like if it needed that many actual houses in the Guild Hall? lol).

Your suggestion is likely to be the one incorporated if they do housing b/c it is a bit easier to incorporate into the game as it is now.

However, I would love to see full “Guild Zones” with that many homes in it. It would be beautiful. Full of NPCs and special guild merchants. Making all those instance portals shouldn’t be too much trouble. As far as home variety goes it could be kept to a pretty minimal palette with a more robust texture and asset placement options.

Guild Farms
Personalized Guild Enemies
Guild NPCs
etc, etc, etc

It would end up being a lot of work but the end result would be a place I think people would love to spend time in.

While i think it would be a good place to run around in, a lot of those sandbox type elements tend to be difficult to maintain. Population changes a lot in MMOs what happens when we run out of space with a ton of inactive houses?

Anyway, i think we could address player housing in another discussion. I’d personally love to see the home instance get a make-over, including being able to allow your friends to check it out whenever they want.

Suggestions to solve this problems have already been made.

Simply lose your plot / place in the world if the guild go’s inactive. But don’t lose the guild-hall itself. When the guild is back spawn it again at a new plot. With air-ships despawn and spawn back again much like players do in the world but now at the moment the last guild-member logs out and the first logs back in again.

Devata.6589:

munkiman.3068:

While i think it would be a good place to run around in, a lot of those sandbox type elements tend to be difficult to maintain. Population changes a lot in MMOs what happens when we run out of space with a ton of inactive houses?

Anyway, i think we could address player housing in another discussion. I’d personally love to see the home instance get a make-over, including being able to allow your friends to check it out whenever they want.

Suggestions to solve this problems have already been made.

Simply lose your plot / place in the world if the guild go’s inactive. But don’t lose the guild-hall itself. When the guild is back spawn it again at a new plot. With air-ships despawn and spawn back again much like players do in the world but now at the moment the last guild-member logs out and the first logs back in again.

I’m not a fan of the idea of open world guild halls, there is already enough trolling going around, not to mention the amount of real-estate you would need to add to the game to support the thousands of guilds. I think if the game was more designed around the sandbox, it would be a cool feature though. I think we could focus on instance based halls and have similar utility without the complication and overhead.

Zoso.8279:

…instanced maps that are linked to WvW. …

Cutting your text for space, not because it’s a bad read.

My issue with this would be queues. If the only way to “walk up to” the GH entrance is via WvW, then either pure PvE’rs end up getting only a UI button click for entry, or everyone in the world tries to enter WvW just to get to the hall and suddenly the maps are clogged.

So it could be interesting for the WvW land claimers to have a bonus GH entry, with extendable permissions, but the same functionality needs to be available to those who don’t step into the borderlands.

On scaling of costs:

How do we keep it fair given that guilds change size? As Conski asks, would this system encourage people to make a small guild, create a huge hall, then invite in all the other members waiting?

I don’t want to limit small guilds, but with scaling it might be vital to have a hall size limit based on membership, so when you get more people in, you can build more space but at the increased costs. (And then we worry about inactive members bloating costs just as afkers scale up events). Contrariwise, guilds that downscale should not have their large space demolished. Remember my adamant stance against decay, here!

Hmm, that will tie into the upgrade revamp you’ve posited for discussion. I don’t envy the balancing headaches involved in making sure that every size guild can get something deeply satisfying without feeling the big guilds are the only ones getting the “cool” stuff.

I’m not qualified to make substantive suggestions on upgrade rearrangement. I’m not a theorycrafter or game designer, and I’ve barely used the system as it is. From my narrow point of view on it, the only thing I can note is that bank vault size increases should be easily available to even the smallest guild. (I am a pack rat and the only guild I’ve made is a personal one for storage overflow). That’s sort of an across the board feeling for me in all games — the harder it is to get more storage space, the more frustrating the game becomes for me.

Moreover, it does seem likely that guild storage may be where undeployed customizations are kept. The more room there is to hold those, the more flexible the hall design becomes. Don’t like your tile pattern? Swap it out, but keep the old one available. Unless, of course, all the customizations are freely applicable unlocks that don’t need any physical space except while in use.