Guild alliances in the UI
by Mike Schramm 
Sep 18th 2008 at 6:00PM
Violet_helix asks a good question over on WoW Ladies LJ -- is there a way in the official UI to form up guild alliances. And unfortunately, as the commenters answer her, there is not. Guilds who want to raid together just have to kind of do it.The only little workaround that is available, of course, is the chat channels -- those can be created and even moderated in an ad-hoc way (though I believe that they can't be given permanent moderators, which means that if someone leaves the channel, they could lose moderation privledges). But even if a guild alliance is able to keep up a chat channel and keep it moderated, they can't do things like leave a message of the day, or store ingame information on guilds or members as regular guilds can. There is an addon called Guild Alliance that will do lots of that stuff, but there's nothing official.
Should there be an ingame UI for creating alliances? We've been promised more backend guild-based content (like guild battlegrounds and even guild housing), and if Blizzard does choose to heavily update the guild system, there could be a lot of benefit to guilds aligning. Not to mention with the 10/25 main raiding split in the expansion, it's not unexpected that we'll have smaller guilds who join up with each other for the big raids rather than huge guilds with big raiding teams. On the other hand, the practice isn't so widespread at this point -- there may not be enough alliances out there to start officially recognizing them within the game world anyway.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Guilds, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Dreamshadow Sep 18th 2008 6:08PM
Some Alliances manage pretty well using just an external messageboard and an internal chat channel. My server, Earthen Ring (US RP), has an alliance called SASU. Because of it, my guild of about 15 or so people are able to see SSC, TK, and BT content. It's pretty neat.
Modpapa Sep 18th 2008 6:11PM
It's of course not an "official" means but Guild2Guild works well for me and my friends. Much easier than setting up an "in-game" channel.
AlexW573 Sep 18th 2008 6:17PM
YES! There was a minor example of this in Guild Wars, but it wasn't perfect. It had a special Alliance Channel, but no Alliance MotD.
My guild is a perfect example of how this could help: We're a small group of players (fairly well geared, we all know our classes), who wants do raid occasionally. However, we don't want to go on an inviting spree. We're friends with a couple raiding guilds, but it's hard to coordinate anything between guilds.
Kakistocracy Sep 18th 2008 6:19PM
Sure, when people talk about guild (or player) housing they always assume it should be instanced, but why not chop down that pesky forest outside of Stormwind and set up a suburbs for people who want to commute rather than pay to live in the city? Of course the same could be done for by other cities too, after all, we all know that what WoW needs is thousands of houses all over the map... O.o
gow Sep 18th 2008 6:24PM
This would be very useful in Wrath, where viable progression guilds can be 10-man instance sized. Then you join an alliance to dabble in 25-man content.
Pfooti Sep 18th 2008 6:27PM
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=9336460424&sid=1
For example.
Painhealer Sep 18th 2008 6:50PM
On Deathwing, our guild is part of the Costa Alliance. We do just fine with an alliance chat channel and message boards.
vlad Sep 18th 2008 6:58PM
"ad-hoc"
lol, you use this once a week
marros Sep 18th 2008 7:00PM
On Terenas I'm in the SGA (Small Guild Alliance) and we use GEM. Works out pretty well.
Coram Sep 18th 2008 7:14PM
*sigh* I would love to see something of the opposite, a guild war type thing maybe a giant 25 v. 25 arena battle between guilds to see who is better. But that would have to be a extremly large arena with a lot of lag.
Tap Sep 18th 2008 7:21PM
Our Guild (ISCA Alliance, Whisperwind, US) has an alliance with 6 (so 7 total with us) guilds. We used to use GEM, but it doesn't scale very well so we use phpRaid.
I assume the new Calendar will...kind of help...
The Avatar of Blue Sep 18th 2008 8:02PM
I'd love to see Guild Alliances. I'm a member of the Spreading Taint group of guilds on Proudmoore (H) and we have 2000 members spread out through 5 different guilds. To be able to communicate with each other, we use Guild2Guild, but that tends to be buggy at times.
So, I'd like Blizzard to either fix the 500-member or it gets buggy issue, or implement this guild alliance.
(p.s. guild housing is cool too)