People are social animals and we need more ways to be social (or anti-social) for a lot of reasons that I don’t really need to get into. It’s in everyone’s best interest and I have a few ideas for friends list and guilds that might help. Some of these ideas are more feasible from a project (and project management) perspective than others:
1) Friends list should save it when you’re invisible from everyone, so when you close the game and log back in, you remain in invisible status. In guild window, just make it say that their location is unknown.
2) You should be able to join guild-mates in PvP (hotjoins or custom non-passworded servers). PvP guilds are pretty hard to come by in this game, and the ones that are actually out there would really appreciate it. It would also open up PvP to a lot of new people, yielding a more diversified community.
3) You need make guild halls happen, and it has to be done right (meaning time will obviously need to be taken).
Guild halls were the place for family to idle together and do banking and merching. They were also the place for PvP to happen in GvGs and had very easy access to Alliance Battles. It was also isolation, you could ignore what you want and play the game how you want, I mean what about the people that love the game but want to ignore the Living Story (for as long as they want) and LA map chat?
In my opinion, I think that megaservers (awesome addition by the way!) may have been a little ahead of it’s time. Something that probably should have happened first was a WvW reorganization or restructuring (hindsight is 20/20). Transfer costs are currently killing the community and really limiting social play. With WvW needing to evolve with the rest of the game it would be cool to see Guild Halls be part of it in some aspect.
Social play is nearly synonymous with fun play and opening up more parts of the game to more people will stimulate everything, including the economy. The Black Lion Trading Company will love it.
