After a bit of searching of the forum it seems as though there’s little addressing the current state of guilds and improvements that we want to see. Firstly I think I’d like to see an actual guild suggestion forum, since most other parts of the game have dedicated forums and guilds are a pretty big deal to many people. However, in the absence of that I’d like to begin with a couple of suggestions of my own, please feel free to add to them.
Officer Chat/Custom Channels
Many MMO’s offer more than one guild channel and an alternate channel is usually used for some sort of officer/leader chat, which would make certain discussions much easier. Currently the only workarounds in-game are whispers, which rapidly become unwieldy as soon as you need to talk to three or more people, or making a party to chat. The latter prohibits people from doing any other party activities while chatting and is obviously limited to five people. The entire leadership team for my guild has 8 individuals above member status, so a single party wouldn’t be able to accommodate everyone. As such, we’d like to see the introduction of an officer chat channel, the access permission for which would be included in the permissions boxes for each rank in the rank manager.
Improved Bank Controls
There’s three overall boxes in the bank, but only two sets of deposit/withdraw permissions. That immediately doesn’t seem to make very much sense, but the system could be improved upon further, as many other MMO’s do, with enhanced controls on exactly how much can be removed over time. Examples might be allowing someone to take a single stack of something per 24 hours, or items totalling a base value of not more than 50s per week, or prohibiting people from withdrawing more than they deposit; all obviously based on tab and rank.
Boost Balancing/Expansion
The WXP boost included in the feature pack was a nice addition, even though it does feel horribly overpriced compared to comparable XP boosts. I’d like to see boosts with greater value, for a higher cost or build time, for the larger guilds that generate a lot of influence and merits that generally otherwise just get stored up. A 20% MF boost for triple the cost of the 10% one, for example?
Guild Mail
It’s not very often I attempt to dance with the in-game mail function, because it usually leaves me frustrated (either telling me the recipient can’t be found or that I’ve been suppressed because I was sending event rewards out to three people in quick succession – I mean COME ON, I’m sending them gold and valuable items, not a gold-selling advert) but I can imagine that a function where you could send a mass-message to guild members could be useful to some. The alternative is hoping that people look at the MotD every time they log on (which they don’t) or go back through the MotD history (which most people, especially newer players, probably don’t ever think about or know exists).
Guild Halls
This has been beaten to death in the past, but no list of guild wishes/improvements would be complete without it. Home instances are, let’s be honest, just terrible but a guild instance could be something really worthwhile and might also allow the larger guilds to spend some of the piles of influence on something new.
Please add your own thoughts and suggestions for the guild system.