Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

I’m definitely pushing to have us work on some detailed brainstorming of the guild upgrade system. Here is a very short summary of discussion thus far:

• Someone suggested that the upgrades be tied to buildings which I think has some very clear potential.
• People have suggested a few ways to break those upgrades down but none too specific.
• We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
• What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?
• What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?
• How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

I’d love to see people just blue sky take a crack and fleshing out some of these ideas and then I would be happy to summarize which ones I think gel well together and try to combine them into a more cohesive design that we could then begin discussing the pros and cons of.

Jon

Upgrades being tied to buildings, I think I missed that suggestion. I’m assuming this would mean something along the lines of building say a ‘Barracks’ and hiring/recruiting an npc to work there and this is where you would go to ‘purchase’ or ‘order’ your Art of War upgrades. As you upgrade that specific line, the building itself upgrades and becomes larger, more detailed. Perhaps offer advantages, such as no longer being limited to only having 2 or 3 things queued to build over all. Instead, perhaps each building type could have its own queue, and guild ranks could be updated to allow specific members to have access to only specific upgrades (create / deploy), rather than a blanket all or nothing.

I’d like to see other things included in guild halls, to give them functionality, and to be more than just a place to hang out or to gvg. It would be interesting to have, say, the ability to build crafting stations in your guild hall. Maybe doing such would require players to speak to a crafting master and then have to some guild quests or scavenger hunts to gather all the necessary components (as well as the craft master’s good will) to build the station, and hire an apprentice to man it.

I enjoyed the assorted quests to obtain NPCs to build the Command Post, in Nigthfall, and applying something similar to gain NPC functionality in guild halls might work as well. I’m sure people would probably enjoy having a banker or the assorted black lion merchants in their hall, but simply purchasing them straight out with influence, merits, or coin (which some smaller guilds might have an issue with) is a little bland.

The ability to build a portal to our server borderland might be nifty too, similar to how GW1 halls had a portal to AB in their halls.

It would also be nifty to see the ‘hub’ functionality that halls possessed in GW1 return as well, though I’m not sure if this would be desirable for all or not. Personally, I think it would be handy to be able to ‘port’ to any of say, the 5 racial cities, from the guild hall, without a WP fee. Heck, maybe that’s an additional upgrade a guild could work for.

JonPeters.5630:

I’m definitely pushing to have us work on some detailed brainstorming of the guild upgrade system. Here is a very short summary of discussion thus far:

• Someone suggested that the upgrades be tied to buildings which I think has some very clear potential.
• People have suggested a few ways to break those upgrades down but none too specific.
• We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
• What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?
• What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?
• How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

I’d love to see people just blue sky take a crack and fleshing out some of these ideas and then I would be happy to summarize which ones I think gel well together and try to combine them into a more cohesive design that we could then begin discussing the pros and cons of.

Jon

Hi Jon,

Can you help us understand this a bit better? Are you thinking how current and/or future upgrades can be represented in virtual space, as visual representations and mechanism that we can interact with that trigger and upgrade?

Like, you just have this Asuran standing around the hall that you can interact with that would kick off a hiring one of his workers dialog to get him to help working on upgrades? He might say something like “I can’t spare anyone for 30 hours, do you mind waiting?”

Guild Hall/Alliance Hall and separation idea:

What if an Alliance Hall connects the guild halls together? I’ll call it the Main Hall. When you form an Alliance, the Main Hall is free and selectable. Guild Halls are “rooms” that attach to the Main Hall. Unallied guilds can choose their own Main Hall.

Depending on the style of Guild Hall, the room could be either

1) Directly attached to the Main Hall as a room for GHs where this makes sense
2) Floating above the Main Hall as an airship with a ladder or ramp below for airship-style Guild Halls/rooms
3) Accessible through an Asura gate for GHs that aren’t “attachable” to the Main Hall, e.g. GHs in the Mists

When you leave an Alliance, you keep your same Guild Hall/room and get to choose your own Main Hall.

(Obviously the Guild Halls/rooms could have subrooms, it doesn’t need to just be a single room.)

Edit: for fun, examples of Main Halls…

• Main Hall of the Mists – think floating island design… Guild Halls exist on floating islands as well
• Cathedral-styled gigantic hall
• Vexa’s Hall, a version of the Escher-inspired alternating gravity room from Vexa’s Lab
• Tree Hall, a Pale Tree-inspired hall with Guild Halls existing off gigantic branches

Arewn.2368:

Snip for space.
~

Airship halls above zones strikes me as useless. From the ground, the ships would be indistinguishable from the airships floating above Orr. That is to say there would be no difference whether it was an actual player’s ship or some random NPC that floats by. From the ships, the ground would be indistinguishable from a backdrop that matches the zone it’s supposed to be over. All this does is limited the “type” of guild hall you can make to being variations of Airships, instead of Castles/Airships/Lodges/etc that you could otherwise have available. Edit: just saw your post on this matter, your suggestion makes the whole “it’s above the zone” idea even more pointless, it would be completely and utterly indistinguishable from the ground. It might as well just be a sky instance with a backdrop that looks like “insert zone here”.

I would think in the center there is always the emblem and what you build around it forms the shape of your guild-hall meaning they would be distinguishable of course not as good as if you where in the sky-map itself. But that’s a trade-off for how intrusive they are. The better you see them from the ground the more intrusive they are.

Something like GvG would indeed be harder, events not. Dragons fly in the air so you might be able to attack them from your air-ship. Also living story wise you could use them as they even fit into the current story going on where a air-ship the Zephyr Sanctum has crashed.

In fact I think it would lent itself more to interact with the living story patches and dynamic events then instanced guild-halls would. How would you see that in a closed instanced environment? And lets say you would put big events in that instance is that what you want? Then people are playing the game each in their own instance.

And the GvG well if you let people build it them-self no indeed then that would not work. Still for the sky-map / open world it would be unrelated. Lets say you don’t let people build guild-halls them-self you can have air-ships then can dock and both form half of the GvG playground.

But seeing them in the sky was only an option to give it a nice extra touch (a nice gimmick), feel it being more part of the world. Not much more then that. The docking into a map somebody suggested was more mend to be a way to really interact with those maps.

timmyf.1490:

Guild Hall/Alliance Hall and separation idea:

What if an Alliance Hall connects the guild halls together? I’ll call it the Main Hall. When you form an Alliance, the Main Hall is free and selectable. Guild Halls are “rooms” that attach to the Main Hall. Unallied guilds can choose their own Main Hall.

Depending on the style of Guild Hall, the room could be either

1) Directly attached to the Main Hall as a room for GHs where this makes sense
2) Floating above the Main Hall as an airship with a ladder or ramp below for airship-style Guild Halls/rooms
3) Accessible through an Asura gate for GHs that aren’t “attachable” to the Main Hall, e.g. GHs in the Mists

When you leave an Alliance, you keep your same Guild Hall/room and get to choose your own Main Hall.

(Obviously the Guild Halls/rooms could have subrooms, it doesn’t need to just be a single room.)

This leads me to think of a central hub on a 5 spoke cog (assuming 5 maximum guilds in an alliance). That would be amazingly cool to see each guild hall plugged into this hub and would make for a really interesting GvG map. As long as you’re part of an alliance, you have this central structure, else you just have a hall. This way no one fights over who get this hub, it would be automatic once and alliance forms.

Keysha.2815:

What about a zone just for guild halls? Then it can have the open world feel, but not be all over the map. I just think guild halls all over would be intrusive. Especially for those who don’t do much with them. Experience says that if you open the world to building, people will drop buildings right where they start. Or in the most intrusive places possible.

And I do not like the idea of airships. I’d rather have buildings, where we can have a large room to see everyone at once.

The air-ship idea was more in the way of a floating piece of (transparent) ground where you can then guild whatever you like. That include large rooms. To get an idea what people where talking about see Zephyr Sanctum http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zephyr_Sanctum and Wizard’s Tower http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wizard's_Tower .

JonPeters.5630:

I’m definitely pushing to have us work on some detailed brainstorming of the guild upgrade system. Here is a very short summary of discussion thus far:

• Someone suggested that the upgrades be tied to buildings which I think has some very clear potential.
• People have suggested a few ways to break those upgrades down but none too specific.
• We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
• What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?
• What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?
• How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

I’d love to see people just blue sky take a crack and fleshing out some of these ideas and then I would be happy to summarize which ones I think gel well together and try to combine them into a more cohesive design that we could then begin discussing the pros and cons of.

Jon

I’ll Answer but I dislike where this is leading because it stands to make getting a better guild hall a linear progression and easy process.

We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
-Upgrades that make sense appear on the building (a deep cave under your vault if you have the deep cave. etc, your guilds banners/logo once that’s researched).

-A usable version of each banner appears after it is built at least once. Usable versions of the siege could be added too just for fun.

-not a fan of this one but your building could get fancier each tier so a t6 would be all shiny and complex while a tier 1 is pretty basic.

-When something is being researched/built the building it’s from is “active”, there could be NPC’s running around building it or machinery is active, just a visual thing.

What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?

-The plethora of guildhall related improvements -fancier windows, -second story -Banners now place-able on the guild hall -NPC guards for that building (visual)

-A functional unlock for within that building (A WvW Tornement mechant under the barracks, a banker under Vault, FOTM portal under dungeon)

What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?

-You could no longer use influence by itself as the base currency as it would completely unbalance rewards away from groups of skilled players towards gold.

-You would need to rework tiers and need a solid unskipable gate for higher tiers (before someone bites my head off functional stuff would be at low tiers).
Lets say building visuals is tied with tier?, then you need something that ensures only a small portion of the guilds have the top tier and ideally not a grind so that it’s a reward not an expectation.

-Expectations for guild progression using building based unlocks would have to shift from “we will eventually unlock everything under all these tabs to” “Maybe if we try our hardest we can unlock this this and that for our building”.

How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

This is part of my problem with this method, currently getting upgrades is just a meat grinder, no skill required. Where as customization should allow top players/guilds to stand out with a reverse pyramid style of reward distribution.

We could split it 50/50 , Unlocking upgrades from the building unlocks new placement options (can now place banners, can now place functional items, can now have a maximum of 10 npc’s in the building).

But unlocking the actual options , say different banner types and NPC’s comes from content. (With no guarantee of completion).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Tryxtr.6295:

Way too many ideas in here to comment on all of them, but here’s my thoughts on a few.

Instanced versus Open World
Instanced makes perfect sense because it will take way less effort to implement, avoids a lot of the player cap issues and completely avoids the problem of the open world becoming cluttered. Open world guild halls could be amazing in certain scenarios, but realistically I think it would be too much work to implement them.
note: I will admit that walking through Lornar’s Pass, for example, and seeing this huge towering structure built into the mountains would be a very impressive sight

Alliance Guild Halls
I think that having an actual hall for guild alliances would be a mistake, for all the same reasons as everybody else has already mentioned. It would make for a messy divorce. However, I think that building a “bridge” between guild halls that would allow guilds that have an alliance to visit each others Halls, or a large area that specifically exists so the 2 guilds can mingle, would be an excellent compromise and would present no issues whatsoever. If the alliance ever fell apart the “bridge” or auditorium-style room would simply disappear.

Minimum Size of guilds
People are suggesting that a 1 or 2 person guild should have access to a guild hall as well, but my question is “why would they need a guild hall?” They won’t have anybody to talk to, it wouldn’t increase a sense of community, they can’t really GvG (1v1 I guess, but they can do that in PvP or WvW), and the other “stuff” (ie crafting stations, etc) can be found in the open world.

Suggestion to Devs
I think it would be extremely helpful if the devs could constrain our brainstorming a little bit by making a decision on a few key areas, such as instanced -vs- open world and minimum size. That would help streamline the conversation a little. I would also suggest starting an entirely new thread once a couple concrete decisions are made.

Lots of amazing ideas so far and there’s a lot of potential here.

I was just thinking about this and then i read your post. This might not be a popular driving function (and I apologize Devata this is nothing personal and I really appreciate your input in the CDI’s) but I would like us (for the sake of focusing the discussion) to move away from Open World Guild Hall discussion.

Put simply I am removing the proposal of open world Guild Halls specifically from our brain storm.

I do however want us to continue to talk about some of the benefits open world brings. For example how could we still keep some of the cool Guild ‘Beacon’ mechanics etc (And by Beacon I mean ways for the guild to express their personality and progression)

Chris

Ok fair enough.

JonPeters.5630:

I’m definitely pushing to have us work on some detailed brainstorming of the guild upgrade system. Here is a very short summary of discussion thus far:

• Someone suggested that the upgrades be tied to buildings which I think has some very clear potential.
• People have suggested a few ways to break those upgrades down but none too specific.
• We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
• What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?
• What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?
• How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

I’d love to see people just blue sky take a crack and fleshing out some of these ideas and then I would be happy to summarize which ones I think gel well together and try to combine them into a more cohesive design that we could then begin discussing the pros and cons of.

Jon

I’m thinking when building a guild hall, there are to be 4 categories:

• Architecture
• Politics
• Art of War
• PvE

Architecture would hold the basic buildings: Builders, armor and weapon vendor rooms, decoration halls, etc. Politics would hold the room to activate the current boosts, hire outside help (such as the asura), and hold feasts for guild meetings or recruitment (Party at our place! Woo!). The Art of War rooms would contain the guild seige maker room, wvw, gvg, spvp, boosts, gvg defenses, etc. The PvE rooms would contain the buffs for gold, karma, exp boosts, maybe asura gates to dungeons.

Everything would start from the Architecture to unlock the next three categories. For example, building the Armor and weapon vendors rooms unlocks the Art of War category. You could then have certain prerequisits for other rooms, such as having to build a seige vendor room before access to wvw buffs (or vice versa). As for the boosts, they themselves should be tied to either one vendor, or still accessible as they are now by guild interface, just unlocked once the proper room is built (in other words, the room itself would perhaps be just for decoration, but it provides boosts in the interface).

As for new rooms, an asura gate room, teleporting players to dungeons, a trophy room to show off kills and guild victories in pvp, pve, and wvw. A guild banquet room to host recruitment parties or celebrations. Perhaps a research area, to unlock new weapon skins and armors.

Influence shouldn’t go away, but perhaps be used as a resource for just one type of building set, such as the Politics buildings, or banquet events. Guild merits should perhaps only be used for pvp now, building those rooms. I would also say the cap would have to be removed, as with the increasing in rooms, the cost would also increase.

But as for guild progression, providing the basic rooms (bank, armor, weapons, etc) to everyone, and having them causing the unlocking or branching into other rooms, gives the feel of progression then, along with using In game materials (note, not the actual LOGS, but have the crafting use BOARDS. You know, refined materials too).

Not sure if this has been brought up before, but what would happen if a person switched guilds while they were in a guild hall? Would they be auto kicked from the map? (one reason I ask is if someone is in multiple (or has personal bank guild) guilds, and there is a guild banker npc in the guild hall and the player switches to another guild (to one where they have access to a bank), what would happen?

Side note: (not sure Chris or Jon can answer this), but why was the ability to access guild banks taken away from the registrar npcs?

skullmount.1758:

Not sure if this has been brought up before, but what would happen if a person switched guilds while they were in a guild hall? Would they be auto kicked from the map? (one reason I ask is if someone is in multiple (or has personal bank guild) guilds, and there is a guild banker npc in the guild hall and the player switches to another guild (to one where they have access to a bank), what would happen?

Side note: (not sure Chris or Jon can answer this), but why was the ability to access guild banks taken away from the registrar npcs?

I would think it would be a you have to renter the hall for it to change sort of thing?

This is neither here nor there, but just wanted to say how awesome this thread is. When it started, I was really of the mindset that guild halls were unnecessary and wouldn’t really add much to the game, but now I just think it sounds like there are some incredibly cool ideas being thrown around. I can’t wait to see what the finished concept is and then to see if anything ever is able to come from it in game.

Title: Alliance Hall
Proposed solution to a guild leaving an alliance

Chris Whiteside.6102:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Donari.5237:

I think Lanfear’s question is what happens if the guild you are repping swaps alliances and no longer is in the alliance that made the hall — how do you handle man-hour investment in an alliance hall if for reasons fair or foul you need to go separate ways?

Yes, this is precisely what I was asking. I know in GW1, my guild was in several different alliances over the multitude of years that I played. Sometimes alliances just don’t work out for a variety of reasons and guilds go their separate ways.

What happens in such a case, when the guilds split, to all the effort that was put into these ‘shared’ halls. The man hours, the funds, etc. When they join another alliance that has it’s own shared hall already, do they now have their hall, the old shared hall, and then the shared hall for the new alliance as well? This could get cumbersome. Do they lose the old shared hall instead and thus all the effort put into it? That could really tick some people off. Or do shared halls simply no longer exist if the alliance does not exist? Could this not be a double edged sword – ie, as much deterant as incentive to build such an item?

Yeah this is a real problem. This could completely preclude Alliance functionality on our Guild Halls discussion. Can we have some ideas to beat this problem please and see if we can solve it?

Chris

Proposal: What if building an Alliance Hall was done by upgrading your Guild Hall?

Utilizing the same mechanics as the Tiered Tree structure, as you put more features into your Guild Hall, it would add functionality to the Alliance Hall.
For Example:

• Tier 1: Allows your Guild to build an Alliance Hall or contribute to an existing one.
• Tier 2: Allows your guild to add some beginner functionality to the Alliance Hall.
• Tier 3: Allows your guild to add some more advanced functionality the the Alliance Hall and so on…

So let’s say :
Guild A Tier 1, builds an Alliance Hall.
Guild B Tier 1 joins and is now able to access the Alliance Hall.
Guild C Tier 2 joins and adds a Black Lion Trader to the Alliance Hall
Guild D Tier 3 joins and adds the ability to create Alliance Camps out in the open world…

So if at some point Guild C leaves the Alliance they take their Black Lion Trader with them(and anything else they may have contributed) but the rest of the Alliance Hall remains intact. The Alliance would have to replace the upgrade of the BL Trader if they wanted to keep that functionality.
Now Guild C joins a new established Alliance. If the new alliance does not have a Black Lion Trader then they would immediately have access to the one that Guild C brought with them.

There would be some overlapping upgrades on some of the Guilds but that is fine, because if Guild D also had the Black Lion Trader upgrade then Guild C leaving would not lose the Alliance their Trader.

Belated Continuation of my above post:

This idea just hit me as I read about an old game I use to play called Ascendancy, and how its Research system worked.

Basically, you started automatically in the game with basic buildings (factories, homes, agriculture). But then there was research. When you did research, you would start at one point, which would split into two, perhaps one focusing on ships, the other on homeworld stuff. Then those two could split off into 2 other paths, or even three. You didn’t know what one research would lead into another. And sometimes you would need research from so far back to access something advance.

The GW2 system would have the research, but remove the mystery (as guilds will want to specialize), but each new research could provide new skins, armor, boosts, rooms, etc. And you would have to fill in the prerequist for said research.

Example: Guild Banquet hall – Requires Guild Farm, Guild Butchery research.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I was just thinking about this and then i read your post. This might not be a popular driving function (and I apologize Devata this is nothing personal and I really appreciate your input in the CDI’s) but I would like us (for the sake of focusing the discussion) to move away from Open World Guild Hall discussion.

Put simply I am removing the proposal of open world Guild Halls specifically from our brain storm.

I do however want us to continue to talk about some of the benefits open world brings. For example how could we still keep some of the cool Guild ‘Beacon’ mechanics etc (And by Beacon I mean ways for the guild to express their personality and progression)

Chris

What’s your stance on player real-estate? ‘Guild Beacons’ (as you call it) would be a great inclusion, but if they are to be displayed in the open world in any way, you’ll inevitably run into the issue of ‘real-estate’ (limited space, and who gets the right to occupy that space).
Are you okay with limiting who can display their stuff, or are you looking towards a solution where everyone can show their ‘beacon’, even if to a lesser capacity?

Propsal: Instanced guild halls providing an integrated purpose for existing guild missions.

- Instanced Airships functioning as a staging area for guild missions

Function:
Before your guild starts guild missions, everyone gathers in their guilds instanced airship guildhall (maybe a briefing room on the airship with a mini globe, like the one in order of whispers hideout in bloodtide).

When the mission is activated, everyone in the guild airship instance is transfered to the same instance of the map required for the GM, (The system could search for an existing instance with enough room for all those present, and if one does not exist, create a new instance)

If its puzzle, challenge or rush, they appear around the shield symbol, ropes from the sky swinging around the general area.
If its bounty, players are randomly spread out to waypoints on the same instanced map, again ropes from the sky swinging about the individual players.

JonPeters.5630:

wwwes.1398:

Aeolus.3615:

JonPeters.5630:

The point of this question is to first generate wild ideas before discussing details of those designs and figuring out what problems/edge cases those details create that must be solved.

Jon

some fast brainstorming:

Guild leader option to buy a fraction of mist crystal to make a guild floating island, being the MIST a infinite world,:
Guild Research Tree – being asura, dregdge kodan human etc, and those tech’s would affect the guild , on PVE and WvW events guild’s could deploy some of their tech on the field.

Brainstorm on your brainstorm, what if your guild can even befriend dredge/kodans/skritt and get them to accompany the guild on bounties and missions.

Lots of cool potential in both these responses.

What kind of tech would you want to deploy? In PvE? In WvW?

What unique benefits for bounties and missions could different NPCs give you that you could NOT get from just having another player?

Hummm, wwwes that would be a good feacture to unlock.

Since models are already done and some were used in the LS system under control of the player, i tough this could be a possible and feaseble design.

*Tech Tree: *
Asuran – Range, AOE shield abilities.
Norn/kodan – Field close combat shrine buff abilities.
Human – Focused on siege defensive abilities.
Charr – Focused on fiery attack abilities.
Silvary – regenerative and AOE trap based abilities.
Later via LS could be introduced several new tech even like aetherblades or dredge steampunk tree, or unlocked via dungeons, raids, unique missions, this would add a unique stategie concept to the mmo.

Since there are several versions of the same map would not be feasebly for a guild to have is GH only on that map version, reason i choosed the floating islands, after guild had research the siege deploy tech, new option would apear, lets imagine on a certain map a undead dragon appears, members there could spawn a dropship to deliver envorimental weapons and a few golems(deppending on research level how man they could deploy) if they win more XP points could be used to the guild improve their tech, if they loose every member of that guild would be tagged for a version of that map where a cleanse/counter atack is needed, they would only get de decent form of that map when raid is completed or even like wwwes said, that would be a good option to unlock other feactures, skirts would be nice for faster resources :P ask help of the looters and help building the necessary weapons for the raid.

Siege with effect that would deppend on racial selected tech tree.
Turret; golem or other heavy siege ; bundle of weapons, npc’s that would accompany leader or selected officer in that zone.

On WvW guilds would adopt what they feel better at, being at defense, open field or sieging castles.

And sorry for the bad english.

Imo, if one guild drops from the alliance, anything they have shared would vanish, if guild C drops from alliance X, guild C looses access to improvemens made by A and B, where A and B looses the improvements that C made, and alliance Y if ment the requirements for C improvements they turn to be unlocked after a medium fee.
This might resul on guild A and B need to recruit another guild or themselves making the upgrades that guild C had.

Hey Chris,
I’d like you to check the next link if possible. It was a suggestion for another MMO that was ignored by the developers along the years, but it did cover most of the stuff a guild needs. This suggestion was just a player’s idea but he did photoshopped and created the entire UI needed for it. He did also took feedback from the players, same as a CDI.

Right now this CDI is working perfectly, but i feel that you guys should actually “see” how a proper guild pannel could look in the future. I hope this post is ok and I don’t get in troubles for linking it

Link: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?385713-Kinship-Revamp-Proposal

Needless to say it was the best suggestion I ever seen in any MMO. It’s sad it was completely ignored, specially the Calendar.

I believe the idea of a shared linking space has been floated. I.e. one that has no intrinsic value or cost, it simply acts as a common meeting area between alliance guilds and a gateway to visiting each other’s guild halls given the right permission settings. It could contain interactive points to access functions special to alliances, but be far more automated and uncustomized than the halls themselves. Thus it appears/vanishes when the alliance does without affecting the use of individual guild resources. True, that makes it a much simpler space than the whole-greater-than-sum-of-parts that a shared building project offers, but also gives complete freedom to walk away.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Yeah this is a real problem. This could completely preclude Alliance functionality on our Guild Halls discussion. Can we have some ideas to beat this problem please and see if we can solve it?

Chris

I’m only now joining in the conversation, but I have a lot of ideas to contribute. I figured I’d start with this point, since Chris asked so nicely (and directly) for input. =]

Personally, I like something I read in here about each guild being able to bring in some feature for an alliance. I think the idea of developing an alliance-owned guild hall of their very own is just not going to work for all the very valid reasons mentioned (not the least of which is splitting of guilds within an alliance). That said, I think there’re some good options that could be implemented to make alliances viable.

There are a few major points that will bear discussion, so I’ll separate them out here and discuss each in more detail afterward in separate posts. They include:
I: Division of Features among Guilds
II: Small Guild Motivations
III: Large Guild Motivations

I: Division of Features among Guilds
This is mostly a topic to address the issues with alliances forming and separating over time. I think Yalora had an elegant solution mentioned above: Each guild brings features to the alliance, developed by their guild, stays with their guild if they leave, and is available to any alliance they’re a part of. This allows members of an alliance to contribute to the alliance through their own guild, while not losing any of their own contribution if the alliance were to separate or reform or add others, etc.
This alliance construct could manifest in a few different ways:

1: a hall of it’s own, distinct from each member guild’s guild hall.
2: the “only” form of guild hall (I’ll elaborate in a moment)
3: a “guild forum” of sorts, with alliance-based features in a shared space, and access to each guild’s hall (instance) accessible (or better, each guild’s hall fully realized in the shared space)

The second bullet may not be very clear, so I figured I’d elaborate a moment separate from the list. It would effectively exist such that all members of an alliance contribute to a single large hall (with different features being contributed and decorated by different guilds). If your guild is not part of an alliance, then only features your guild develops will be accessible in the “alliance hall”. “An alliance of one.” Perfectly viable, but would take considerably more time to get access to all features. Otherwise, features developed by each member guild are accessible in the alliance hall so long as at least one guild has developed them. If a guild leaves, then any features they developed that no other member guild has goes with them to any other alliance they join, etc.

JonPeters.5630:

I’m definitely pushing to have us work on some detailed brainstorming of the guild upgrade system. Here is a very short summary of discussion thus far:

• Someone suggested that the upgrades be tied to buildings which I think has some very clear potential.
• People have suggested a few ways to break those upgrades down but none too specific.
• We need to discuss how the building system would incorporate old upgrades but also provide new ones.
• What kind of new upgrades would be possible because of the system turning into buildings?
• What changes to influence and guild progression should happen to make it more intuitive if we went with buildings?
• How do we build customization into this upgrade system where there currently is none? Someone suggested this and there were some talk of separating clear core functionality from the unique customized features, but that is sort of where we stopped.

I’d love to see people just blue sky take a crack and fleshing out some of these ideas and then I would be happy to summarize which ones I think gel well together and try to combine them into a more cohesive design that we could then begin discussing the pros and cons of.

Jon

Do you remember the Trait revamp from earlier this year? Because you’re rushing right towards that same mistake again, but for guilds.

The current upgrade system works. It may not be flashy, and it may need some minor adjustments in a few places, but it does the job and it does it well. Simple and straight forward is important, ESPECIALLY when there’s multiple people giving their time and energy to the guild to make things happen.

Other than a few minor links (guild banners, guild merchants, and such), the two systems should NEVER rely on each other. New upgrades to guilds that do not physically manifest as part of the guild hall should not be part of the guild hall system. Nobody should feel forced into making a guild hall to get a non-hall upgrade.

Now, with that said, I really don’t think you’ll agree with me. So, let’s go all the way with your idea for a moment. If you’re going to do it, there’s no point in half measures.

• A guild should start with a very basic guild hall from the moment of creation. This is the physical representation of your work, and should be there from the very beginning.

• Upgrades to the guild’s max size should upgrade the size of the hall. This will likely require upping the costs to increase the max size. I would also suggest that it require a minimum level in Politics upgrades.

• Asuran portals that target the locations of any guild missions. When one is started, the portal becomes active and can send you there. And before anyone yells “LORE!” at me to say they don’t work like that, there’s an underwater puzzle with a re-targetable asuran portal that needs no exit portals already in the game.

• Influence stays the same. Let’s face it, gold makes things happen. Look at all the ministers in Tyria. With their mansions, guards, and servants, they are practically guilds unto themselves. This is money and politics at work. (Plus: gem sales.)

• Space will be required to put any upgrades into the hall. If you have a small enough hall, you may not have space for all of your upgrades to be active at one time. Pick and choose to fill the open space, and put a cool down timer on changing it so that they don’t just swap them out as needed. Make it important, so there’s more need to upgrade to a bigger hall.

II: Small Guild Motivations
Alliances existing in the sort of “shared space” model with each guild able to contribute features/development to the alliance serves to allow small guilds to contribute smaller amounts, maintain their identity, but still have access to the full range of features made available by an alliance. For instance:
Guild 1, 10 people, develops a trader market (BL, some vendors), and a smithy
Guild 2, 2 people, develops a tailor
Guild 3, 25 people, develops a huntsman workshop, and an asuran gate to LA
Nothing contributed is lost to a guild, but they still benefit from joining up with other small to mid sized guilds. The result is an area that has a few useful conveniences, and all of the allied guilds’ guild halls.

III: Large Guild Motivations
As a larger guild, the motivation to ally with others is understandably lower. If you have 100 active members, then you reasonably don’t really need to ally with other smaller guilds (or even large guilds) to gain access to things you can develop yourselves. That said, I thought I’d discuss a couple potential motivations for a larger guild to decide to Ally:
1: Showing off your guild hall in all its customized splendor.
2: Potentially a “community income” of some sort that will help support the larger guild’s development and maintenance. (I’ll discuss my concept of the community income in more detail in a second)
3: To fill in features that might be too costly to maintain, or too out of the way down a different development tree to quickly access for yourselves.

There are a couple points embedded in the large guild motivations that I’d like to delve a little deeper into. These are largely just mechanics / functionality I’ve mused about myself that might help keep things rewarding and interesting.

1: Community Income – what is it? Why is it?
2: Guild Maintenance and currency considerations – how to keep it interesting but simple and motivating

”Community Income”
First off, the idea of a community or alliance income. I’m working from an imagined point where an alliance forms a “guild forum” instance of sorts. A ring of guild halls, customized as they may be, with some open shared space for effectively a small development of a sort of town. An Asuran gate to Lions arch in one corner, run by a small squad of Asura, a bustling market with a handful of basic npc vendors and a few crafting stations embedded in NPC shops in a cluster, a small amphitheater with displayed trophies and plaques of the allied guilds denoting their achievements.
This alliance community would be something that drew income to a region from a roleplay perspective. As such, there would be an expectation that the guilds that formed and protected a community received some portion of that influx as a tax. To give an oversimplified example of how this might work and why it would provide motivation to larger guilds as well:

-Each feature (redundant or not) brought into an alliance by a guild generates an amount of “taxable income.” Duplicates of a feature increase that amount more.

-Each guild’s overall contribution, relative to the other member guilds, determines their “split” of the income

-The income could be “influence”, or any of a variety of other currencies. A discussion for another post.

Example:
Guild A(lpha and omega): 200 active members. Develops half of every possible “alliance feature” for themselves, generating a total of 1000gp/week (gp is an arbitrary currency at this point). As they are not allied with anyone, they receive 1000gp.

Guild B(iggies anonymous): 50 active members. Develops a 25% of the possible “alliance features” for themselves, generating a total of 500gp/week. Also unallied.

It turns out, evert feature Guild B developed was also developed by Guild A. Why purpose would Guild A have in allying?

If they ally, the total available features remain unchanged. However, they now have two “tailor shops”. They don’t manifest separately, but the effect is that the tailor shop has “twice the employees”, and produces 2.5 times as much income for the region. Same for a few other twice-developed features. Guild A contributes more to the overall community, so they get more of the gains. (1000/1500, so 2/3 of the total goes to Guild A) The end result?

Unallied: Guild A: *1000*gp/wk, Guild B: *500*gp/wk

Allied: Total: 1750/wk, Guild A: *1167*gp/wk, Guild B: *583*gp/wk

Why does Guild A want currency? That’s the next discussion.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Donari.5237:

I think Lanfear’s question is what happens if the guild you are repping swaps alliances and no longer is in the alliance that made the hall — how do you handle man-hour investment in an alliance hall if for reasons fair or foul you need to go separate ways?

Yes, this is precisely what I was asking. I know in GW1, my guild was in several different alliances over the multitude of years that I played. Sometimes alliances just don’t work out for a variety of reasons and guilds go their separate ways.

What happens in such a case, when the guilds split, to all the effort that was put into these ‘shared’ halls. The man hours, the funds, etc. When they join another alliance that has it’s own shared hall already, do they now have their hall, the old shared hall, and then the shared hall for the new alliance as well? This could get cumbersome. Do they lose the old shared hall instead and thus all the effort put into it? That could really tick some people off. Or do shared halls simply no longer exist if the alliance does not exist? Could this not be a double edged sword – ie, as much deterant as incentive to build such an item?

Yeah this is a real problem. This could completely preclude Alliance functionality on our Guild Halls discussion. Can we have some ideas to beat this problem please and see if we can solve it?

Chris

Le Bump

I like this idea… Think of the crazy diversity if there were GvG’s in these combined halls.

munkiman.3068:

timmyf.1490:

Guild Hall/Alliance Hall and separation idea:

What if an Alliance Hall connects the guild halls together? I’ll call it the Main Hall. When you form an Alliance, the Main Hall is free and selectable. Guild Halls are “rooms” that attach to the Main Hall. Unallied guilds can choose their own Main Hall.

Depending on the style of Guild Hall, the room could be either

1) Directly attached to the Main Hall as a room for GHs where this makes sense
2) Floating above the Main Hall as an airship with a ladder or ramp below for airship-style Guild Halls/rooms
3) Accessible through an Asura gate for GHs that aren’t “attachable” to the Main Hall, e.g. GHs in the Mists

When you leave an Alliance, you keep your same Guild Hall/room and get to choose your own Main Hall.

(Obviously the Guild Halls/rooms could have subrooms, it doesn’t need to just be a single room.)

This leads me to think of a central hub on a 5 spoke cog (assuming 5 maximum guilds in an alliance). That would be amazingly cool to see each guild hall plugged into this hub and would make for a really interesting GvG map. As long as you’re part of an alliance, you have this central structure, else you just have a hall. This way no one fights over who get this hub, it would be automatic once and alliance forms.

For beacon mechanics, hmm. Just some possibly ridiculous brainstorming here before I go grab lunch.

1) Skins, banners, communal boosts, banquets, dance rooms. The sorts of things we already have, but specific new ones made that come from having more invested in a guild hall. The guild can deploy them (preferably with some way for others to know the full name of the guild doing so) for the fun of all. Advertising by doing nice things.

2) Invitation booths/banners. Something a guild can deploy (with restrictions to avoid spamming them, by duration, cooldown, proximity, dedicated locations?) which a player can use to go see their guild hall.

3) Lots of entry points around lots of zones. Explorers can find the entry point and select which guild instance to enter. Perhaps there is a spinning rack with guild emblems that show up in small batches, with tooltips or dialogue panels in which the guild writes itself up in brief. An interested player can browse these, and select entry to the ones most intriguing, then wander the landscape of that hall to see how it’s been built. Or there could be rows of flags or placards on walls by the entry areas, though that could present the need to load a ton more stuff all the time.

4) Guild NPCs in the cities akin to heralds. A player chats with them and via a dialogue tree gets “gossip” on guilds of what s/he likes. “Tell me about medium sized guilds that roleplay.” “Well, I’ve heard that Tyria’s Best just expanded their hall into a full mansion. Want to see?” And “Yes” transports you there. (This is likely far too complex to do well and will result in guilds wondering why the gossip’s never about them).

5) “Leaderboards.” I really don’t like these for any metric, but there could be an information source somewhere listing guild accomplishments. Those who care about joining a crack WvW team or Teq killer or sPvP advancer could see what guilds do well at such things.

6) “Finishers.” Like doing /rank, you perform an action that drops a brief image of your guild hall’s current progress. Again spam controls would be needed, but assuming lots of customization, a guild could wow the crowds with a beautiful design and then just use chat channels to field questions and send invites.

(Oho — a permissions thing — add a new guild rank for every guild. “Tourist.” A guild specifically gets an “invite as Tourist” option. Grants visiting privileges, adds a “go to” button for easy travel, is completely look-don’t-touch. Does not count towards max number of guilds joined, but decays in, say, 2 days if not canceled sooner. Maybe 5 slots available on top of guilds joined, so you can peruse guild environments while deciding who you’d like to fully join).

Hmm… how damaging would it be for this, hypothetically…

Let’s say we have Guild A and Guild B in an alliance. Guild B drops out of the alliance. Guild A and Guild B then each get an exact copy of the Alliance Hall they had. Guild B then decides to ally with Group C, and they use the same Alliance Hall that A&B had together.

Instead of having to start from scratch and lose progress from splitting alliances, it now goes the other way that progress can be gained incredibly easily by adding new people to alliances and splitting. That’s the major issue I see out of it. Would it be possible to limit it that you have to be part of an alliance for, say, a month, to get your own copy of the hall should things go sour?

Or maybe (I think I saw someone else suggest this, but maybe not), is there a way to track what upgrades Group A did/participated in, which Group B did/participated in, and then just have them keep a copy of the alliance hall with only their upgrades?

EDIT: For as to how two guilds who were in previous alliances would “combine” their upgrades, that I’m not sure about. I’ll let it go for now though.

Proposal Overview
Create a “Guild Commons” where members of an alliance can gather, mingle, and make use of shared resources developed for the commons.

Goal of Proposal
The goal of the Guild Commons is to give more of a community feel to an alliance, with ways that all the member guilds can bring something to the alliance.

Proposal Functionality
(NOTE: I am basing this off the idea of a maximum of 5 guilds to an alliance.)
The guild commons area will be a fairly open area where various objects and NPCs can appear, depending on the guilds connected to the commons. Around the edge of the commons, each guild hall (or a portal to that hall, which may be more practical) can be located, with their banners showing.

Each guild will have a series of upgrades they can purchase ONCE. These upgrades will be such things as “Commons Size”, “Food Vendors”, and “Decorations”.

Each commons will then have a value based on that, ranging from 0 (none of the guilds have that upgrade) to 5 (all of the guilds have that upgrade). These values will then decide the nature of the commons, such as the size, level of decorations, and the NPCs that can be found there.

Associated Risks
Some smaller guilds may find themselves excluded from an alliance that wants to maximize the commons they’re attached to, and some larger guilds may find many smaller guilds wanting to attach to them for the same reason. However, if the costs of the commons upgrades are reasonable, then eventually any guild can earn them if they want, even smaller ones. In the event of a breaking of the alliance, each guild takes with them the upgrades they’ve earned, and will have access to them once they’ve joined a new alliance and therefore connected to a new commons.

Guild Currency, Maintenance
As with all things guild related, it’s always a challenge to find something that both is accessible to small guilds and rewarding to large guilds. To that end, I think I have a basic model that would suit both in many cases.

As I was on a diatribe about alliance functionality to address as Chris was asking how to make them viable, I will constrain this to primarily a discussion of the basic premise of a currency system and how it ties to an alliance and guild halls, rather than a detailed dive into the pros and cons of its utilization as a replacement for (or modification of) the influence system.

It makes sense that the larger an organization gets, the harder it is to organize. Administration is more difficult the more facets or departments or silos that emerge in an organization. As such, I think a good way to keep small guilds participating and accessing but large guilds rewarded for their organization is in an ascending-cost model for development. This would be much easier to explain through demonstration:

[Numbers are arbitrary to demonstrate an idea]

First upgrade (regardless of what it is): 100gp (arbitrary currency) administration fee, 10/wk after that
Second upgrade: 150, 15/wk
Third: 300, 30/wk
…
Tenth: 10,000 , 1000/wk
Eleventh: 100,000, 10000/wk
etc.

This combined with the alliance system allows for guilds to get access to features cheaper through collaboration (3 guilds with 3 unique features each gets 9 features for only 55/wk vs potentially 500/wk if only one guild). While at the same time, the big guild that wants it all and can generate resources faster can get a lot more access on their own. Combined with the “community income” idea from my previous post, even a giant guild could benefit from allying just for the increased income allowing them to support more features on their own.

Now, the idea of maintenance fees irk some people, so I’ll be addressing that in my next post just for my own thought experiment and getting some ideas going.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

All the Alliance accrued points or cost ideas are a bit complicated though don’t we think? My main concern is inaccessibility leading to frustration.

If two alliances break apart my opinion is that each alliance should keep an instance of the original one and can carry on from there separately.

If a guild leaves an alliance the above solution is completely unworkable as it will lead to cloning and gaming of the systems we are brainstorming.

The harsh design would be if a guild leaves or is kicked it is back to square on or the more complex solution would be total number of pertinent progression points are available to spend on a new Guild Hall that belongs to the guild or can be spent on a Guild Hall of an existing or new alliance.

Chris

I’m not sure I follow, or perhaps we’re just on different wavelengths. My idea would be more along the lines that a guild doesn’t “progress” the alliance. All progression is guild-centric and as part of the guild would carry with the guild if they go to a different alliance or are removed, etc.

Eg: Guild 1 builds the upgrade of “Alliance Black Lion Trader”
Guild 2 builds the upgrade of “Tailoring Shop”

If they ally, both get both, if that alliance splits, they keep their own pertinent upgrades wherever they go (and can still access them as an “alliance of one” if they don’t re-ally with anyone). The motivation for redundant development within an alliance is two fold:
1 – If both develop a tailor then if the alliance splits noone loses access to a tailor
2 – if both develop a tailor the overall “income” or benefit of the perk is increased if they stay allied

Perhaps most relevantly: all “income” or currency toward upgrades are guild-specific, not alliance-specific. You get some benefit on income from being allied, but the income is always and will forever be for your own guild, toward your own guild’s progression, and cannot be transfered or lost by allying or splitting up.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Donari.5237:

I think Lanfear’s question is what happens if the guild you are repping swaps alliances and no longer is in the alliance that made the hall — how do you handle man-hour investment in an alliance hall if for reasons fair or foul you need to go separate ways?

Yes, this is precisely what I was asking. I know in GW1, my guild was in several different alliances over the multitude of years that I played. Sometimes alliances just don’t work out for a variety of reasons and guilds go their separate ways.

What happens in such a case, when the guilds split, to all the effort that was put into these ‘shared’ halls. The man hours, the funds, etc. When they join another alliance that has it’s own shared hall already, do they now have their hall, the old shared hall, and then the shared hall for the new alliance as well? This could get cumbersome. Do they lose the old shared hall instead and thus all the effort put into it? That could really tick some people off. Or do shared halls simply no longer exist if the alliance does not exist? Could this not be a double edged sword – ie, as much deterant as incentive to build such an item?

Yeah this is a real problem. This could completely preclude Alliance functionality on our Guild Halls discussion. Can we have some ideas to beat this problem please and see if we can solve it?

Chris

As silly as this may seem, maybe we should have a last-minute addendum for guild alliance functionality at the end of the rest of the planned guild cdi. Because there are serious questions that need to be answered, especially around entrances/exits.

Otherwise, I think that the only way things don’t get messy with alliances is to either have a shared room that just has permanent stuff that nobody gets to take with them or to have a “mine” system. Each item in an alliance hall has a single guild listed as its owner.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think it is important for Guilds to be able to show of their prowess in each of the core pillars of the game and Guild Halls would be a great place in terms of a nexus to reward guild members with ways to show of the pride they have for their guild.

Does this answer your question Arewn?

Chris

Yes thank you. In which case my suggestion is as follows:
Assuming Guild Halls are instanced, and assuming the guild hall instance consists of not only the interior of the hall, but also an exterior with surrounding landscape:
You could perhaps make a guild hall browser (something along the lines of the pvp match browser, though I don’t know what technical implication this would have on your servers/cost), wherein all guild halls are listed. Guilds could then set their guild hall to private, public, or public/open.
Private – would of course mean only guild members may enter.
Public – would allow anyone to enter, but would impose limits on where the visitors can go (for example, they can only wander around the outside landscape).
Public/open – would allow anyone to enter, and the “front gates” or “door” to the interior of your guild hall would also be open, granting visitors full access. This could be achieved by something as simple as a button that opens/closes the hall’s door, which guild members with appropriate permissions can press.

Under such a system, you could implement events in the guild hall instance, and limit (some of) the event to the “exterior” part. In this way, visitors could come in, see your guild’s progress/prowess, socialize with the members, and participate in an event or two. The events would act as a small incentive for outsiders to come in and take a look, and completing the events could, in some way, contribute to your guild. But the visitors wouldn’t necessarily gain access to the “inner sanctum” of the guild, which the GM could decide to keep exclusive to the members of the guild.

The shortcoming of this system is that it would be on the player’s initiative to go explore other guild’s halls, and guilds would have no intrinsic way to attract people other then chat advertisements.
Something similar to the WvW guild claiming of Keeps could be added to key locations in the PvE world. Some form of PvE scoreboard/leader-boards could be implemented to determine which guild gets the right to claim a particular location (for X period of time), and outsiders could access the guild’s hall by interacting with something (a portal?) at these claimed locations.

My brainstorms were most all along the lines of player initiative to explore. I have a life-long distaste for “cold call” ads. Just as I don’t want someone knocking on my door to say “your neighbors are having us replace your windows, shall we do yours too?” or random guild invites popping up in my face while playing a game, I don’t want guilds able to dominate or trump my interaction with the game. If/when I want to find a guild, I’ll go looking, thank you!

So an eye-catching area that one can just trot by, or stop to peruse, then look deeper and actually go in the interesting ones? That works for me much better than HeyLookListenWeAreAwesome shouts.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

So of course carry on discussing progession with Jon and any other ideas, discussion points you might have.

But for those interested can we look at these two problems/opportunities:

1: Issues around Alliances and Guild Halls
2: Beacon mechanics in instanced environments

Chris

As I’ve unloaded quite a bit on the ideas surrounding Alliances, I’m going to give those a moment to be discussed and address the second point here.

If we instance, how can we maintain the feel of open-world GW2, and allow guilds to express their achievements and character in an open and available way in character with the game?

I think an ideal situation (limitations aside, since this is brainstorming I’ll leave the technical judgements for someone else) would be to have guild halls of guilds of all sizes visible in various locations to be seen by casual observers in the world as they explore and go about their gameplay. That said, we obviously can’t do a purely open-world guild hall with megaserver functionality, as there are simply too many guilds that want their halls, and entire zones would be overrun with obtuse guild halls jutting up out of every orifice. I also dislike the idea of “plot claiming” as proposed early on, as it means that not everyone can have the guildhall they want where they want it, which is another discouragement.

I like the idea of logging into a zone: upon entering, my megaserver instance is determined and then there are 3-5 “guild hall” anchors or plots in that zone, scattered about. At the time of my entering the zone, a poll checks what guilds are prominent in active players there at the time, and prioritizes those guild halls to be displayed in those plots if that guild has built one there; otherwise they’re populated with pseudo-random guild halls that have been built in those plots (could even have some cookiecutter fake halls for atmosphere to fill in places that have no active players if preferred). Plots could run a variety of sizes, some more affordable to smaller guilds and some grandiose ones for large guilds to show their colors.

Limit one hall per zone per guild (and not all zones will have plots), but a guild could establish, with enough time and effort, a presence in every zone – that would either randomly be displayed to passersby (not always the same one to every passerby, as it should be determined at login to the zone), or be displayed more often and prominently when your guild has more presence in that zone on that server.

Alternately, having a central “guild hall” zone for browsing various halls, and just having guild “outposts” or camps scattered about as per above, instead of entire guild halls.

Either way, the importance is on a combination of persistence (Have you seen our castle on the side of a mountain in Lornar’s Pass?) and accessibility to all (We just built on the plot right outside Caudecus’ place. You guys have a hall there too, right?)

Players could toggle perhaps always seeing their own guild hall in places where it exists, or being able to see others’ halls that have been built there as well. The former allows for a better sense of “permanence” to their own guild assets while the other halls may change as guilds come in and out of prominence in an area.

EDIT: I forgot a major point… the guild halls that appear to everyone would be facades and exteriors with at most a “lobby” or “grand hall” accessible through the open front door of the guild hall that may have within trophies, plaques, statues, a book showing the roster, a guest book for visitors to sign in after having viewed your place, maybe a vendor associated with the guild or an asuran waypoint if the right upgrades have been purchased.

But the “instance” of the guild hall would be through locked doors (or an unlocked open door at the guild’s discretion), that leads to the hall interior for the guild.

People are suggesting that a 1 or 2 person guild should have access to a guild hall as well, but my question is “why would they need a guild hall?”

For a meeting place, and for RP purposes. In GW1 my guild has fallen down to just three active members. We still use our guild hall all the time. In GW2 I manage a small RP guild with only 3-5 active members. We still want a guild hall to RP in. There’s absolutely 0 benefit to excluding small guilds from getting guild halls.