Massively goes to WAR: Everything you need to know about guilds

Warhammer Online's ongoing series of production videos are almost too informative sometimes. For the bloggers at Massively, they pretty much do our job for us. Not that we don't mind taking it easy, but as you've probably gathered right now we really enjoy talking about MMOs. Thankfully, some topics are complicated enough that they warrant a second look. Warhammer's Living Guilds system, for example, was the subject of a great video just a few weeks back. And yet, there are still a number of questions you can walk away with.

Where can you use the guild banner (now called a standard)? What kind of tools will guilds have for coordinating events? What about the big picture? How to alliances work? And, perhaps most importantly, where can guildies get drunk together? All of these questions and much, much more are explored in the latest of our ongoing series of articles about Warhammer Online.

If you're so inclined, you can jump straight to to part 2 or part 3, or join us below as we chat with Mr. Drescher and Ms. Christian Bales.

So, what do we need to know about guilds?

Josh Drescher: Christian is currently a one-woman guild. We'll start from the very beginning. Six players are needed to form a guild, so basically - not coincidentally - the maximum size of our groups is the minimum size of our guilds. One of the core focuses of Warhammer overall is that it is a social and competitive game. While we have attempted to build the game in such a way that a solo player will have no lack of things to do, at the end of the day, the most effective way to play the game is always going to be to engage all of it. To do PvE, to do RvR, to engage socially with other players, but we recognize that some people are very hesitant to commit to something like a guild because of some of the stigma attached. Some people also feel that it hits them with a level of responsibility, that you're now committed to being a 'full time MMO player', and that you've gotta be a hardcore dude to play effectively, and on and on and on.

We wanted to introduce people to the idea of social gameplay in a way that was tricky (so they didn't realize that that's what was happening), but that also gave them a lot of positive feedback. So that's what the Public Quest system does, is that it basically takes a person who's belligerent and doesn't like talking to other people, very anti-social. They're running through the world, they're doing a typical quest and they stumble across a PQ. There are hundreds of them, littered all throughout the world, it's impossible to miss them. You're going to run into them very, very early on in your experience. The intention there is that we wanted to introduce you to the idea that it's Not That Scary To Group With Other People. You really can play with other people, step outside of that solo gameplay mode.

For better or for worse, at the moment, there are a lot of people that really believe fundamentally that they can only play these games solo, that there isn't anything for them socially in the game. Again, if you step back to some of the other stuff we were talking about, imagine a person who says "I love professional football. I love to watch football, I love to go to games, but I don't like talking to people when I'm at the game. I want everybody else to shut up and just be quiet, I want to yell, I don't want other people around. It's only fun when I'm yelling alone."

Part of the MMO experience is embracing the idea that the social component is part of the game, it's a component of the world that you need to be aware of, and a part of. So the guild system is really designed to take everything that a guild traditionally has been in an MMO, and stepped that up, integrated it into the world in a way that is something other than - you know - an extra chat channel, or a roster of the other people in your hardcore superguild, and then maybe a tabard. Our guild system is what we call the "living guild system".

What that actually means at the most basic level is that, like your character levels up, your guild also levels up. And in the same way that leveling your character up grants you new and interesting abilities, gives you access to things you don't have access to earlier on, leveling your guild up gives you all sorts of additional...

So as your guild levels up, you basically earn access to all of these different types of things that improve the flexibility, the quality of your guild, they apply sensibly to what a guild is supposed to be doing in the world. We wanted to make sure that the ideal was that if you're part of a guild that it's actually seamless, the way that you contribute. When you're in a guild, everything you do in the world contributes to that guild's leveling. So, that's not to say that it's taking away from your personal experience, they're like parallel chains that doesn't slow down personal experience gain while you're in a guild. It's an independent experience pool that kind of builds in parallel with everything else. So questing, public quests, RvR, crafting, unlocking things in the Tome, everything that you're doing in the game is contributing to your guild's overall experience.

There is no such thing as an 'insignificant contributor'. Anybody in the guild is helping that guild. One of the other things that is sort of important is giving a sense of purpose and direction, having the ability to see when we are currently the rank 1 guild, we know that when we get to that rank 1, we're going to get our guild bank. But you also know that later on, you're targeting different things. If you remember Civilization I, the greatest PC game of all time (that I didn't work on), you would toggle into a city, and it would bring a little thing up that says "this city is building the Colossus of Rhodes". The idea behind moving guilds is that there's always a sense that you're building the Colossus, or you're building an aquifer, or whatever it is that your guild is working on. There's always a sense of understanding there.

Obviously, there's a lot of data that gets pushed in as well. Maintaining a guild in the modern MMO has unfortunately, for most people, basically deteriorated into a secondary full-time job. If you're running a large relatively hardcore guild, you're looking at 20-30 hours of time a week, probably just managing that guild. Planning events, getting things scheduled, making sure people know where to be and when to be there, you can't just be in the game and doing it, you have to also have a website that has a forum, and you have to have a mailing list, and everybody's instant messenger thing and blah blah blah. One of the things we wanted to do was have a feature set of events available to guild leaders that made it easy to accomplish all of the basic tasks without it requiring you to 1: leave the game. You shouldn't have to do anything outside of the game in order to organize your guild effectively, so getting you things like the calendar (which is not active yet, but you understand hypothetically what a calendar is...) What that gives the guild leader - and it's a stupidly simple thing you explain it, and then you go "huh? Why was this not always in things?" It gives you the ability to say "Okay guys - on Saturday, we're going on this raid, and we're taking 20 people, here's a sign-up list."

Guild members can sign up for events straight from the calendar?

Josh: They can sign up right from the calendar. And so not only do you know when the event is, you know whether or not you're a part of it, you know who else is going to be there, you know if you need to go out and recruit more people from the guild, or if it's already full, the guild leader obviously has the ability also to say "We don't want Bob, we want Susie!". Now, I've always been of the view that if you don't want Bob, you should just kick him out of the guild, because that's just mean to Bob, but whatever, you might be running a really mean guild. And that's totally up to you. But the calendar feature's very, very simple and straightforward but also extremely powerful. It eliminates the necessity for all sorts of additional time-wasting secondary stuff, to free you up to play the game. Because it's not Schedulehammer, it's Warhammer. And then obviously the calendar will notify you when your events are coming up and so forth, and you can track things within your alliances as well.

Is there going to be an out of game component? Are you going to provide guilds a web-based component as well?

Josh: If you're familiar with what we did with the Camelot Herald, that was actually one of those features we think started to evolve that game for us. There needs to be more server-front-facing information that's going out there, because there are going to be people - you're going to be at work - you're wondering how the war is going. You can't have a persistent world conflict and then disconnect people from all the information, so your guild will have a page that's automatically generated, on the Herald, that'll have certain types of information.

I don't have the final list of what we're probably going to display, but it'll give you things like - what your guild rank is, do you have a keep currently, what's the status of the keep that you've taken over, what is the overall status of the Realm war - and so on and so forth. So in terms of the top of the fold front-page information, if this is a newspaper, that's all on there. Below the fold Op-Ed information, that's all - once again - inside the game.

One of the good examples of that is the News Feed. Guild News operates like an RSS feed, again, it's all about getting information to players in a way that doesn't waste the time of the guild leaders. So, you take all the basic information that people would normally be telling their guild, you know - "Hey everybody, just wanted you to know I've added something to the calendar, please go ahead and take a look at it" - or, "Hey, we've recruited ten new people" - or "Hey, there's a recruitment drive going on, we need to recruit ten new people" - or, "We've taken over a keep". That's all stuff that traditionally the guild leader would be responsible for disseminating that information to his guild members, either by email or in a forum post or message of the day or whatever else.

This automatically generates it. It basically goes through and says "Major events have happened in the guild" and it auto-populates in that window. What that also means is, if you log in off hours and nobody else from the guild is around, you still get informed. Or maybe you're the pariah Bob ... and nobody wants to talk to you for some reason, you notice they're recruiting lots of people that serve your function... that information is there for you, so you're never disconnected from what your guild has accomplished and what's currently going on.

A question - and if the answer's yes, it might make us giddy. Can you actually get that information as an RSS feed? That you put in an RSS browser?

Josh: That I don't know yet. Not at the moment. But it is definitely on the list of "Wouldn't it be great if..." Basically, that's kind of how the Camelot Herald functions, like I said, it's the top of the fold version of that information will populate in the Herald. So you'll know if you've got a keep that you control, like the really significant stuff that will make you actually go "You know, I do have some PTO... maybe I'll leave work a little bit early..." that sort of thing.

Continue reading Massively goes to WAR: Everything you need to know about guilds pt. 2 -->