Posts with tag guild-hall

Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press.

For officers, the improvements and new systems that Cataclysm brought to guilds were a game-changer in many ways. The sweeping changes to raiding that came with it brought on some difficult challenges. Fortunately, WoW does not stagnate. The Mists of Pandaria expansion gives Blizzard a chance to add new features, make important changes, and improve on what the developers gave us in Cataclysm. Here's my personal wish list:

1. Treat legendary items as guild rewards, not player rewards. As guilds in WoW have matured over the years, I've heard from officers less and less frequently about loot drama -- with one huge exception: legendaries. Every legendary in the history of WoW has caused problems for officers. For some, the legendary drama itself has become legendary.

It's time to change both the reality and the perception of these powerful items.

The topic of player housing continues to crop up as a question on the official forums. Blizzard has stated that guild halls or guild housing will not to be included in the game (at least, not any time soon).

According to Bornakk:

While this originally came up before I was around, I think this has been answered at some BlizzCons since then. While we think this could be a fun idea, we also like the idea of seeing a lot of people in cities and don't want to make main cities feel like ghost towns - if you need an example of this head to Silvermoon (yeah, that's a cheap shot, I know). So for now this idea remains an interesting idea but we'd have to make sure it fits into the game well and meets our expectations which are pretty high for something like this.

The last game I participated in which had guild housing was Guild Wars. Inside, it stored various mementos and trinkets from different epic quests or sigils that my guild had won in the Hall of Heroes (and this was a long time ago, mind you). But that was it! There wasn't much to do from a PvE standpoint. I think we had our own vendor and a "Guild Lord" (someone like Drek or Vanndar Stormpike in Alterac Valley). Later versions of the game had guilds attacking other guilds on their turf. The guild hall in this respect played a huge PvP component the game because the hall you selected would also be your home base complete with various terrain advantages and defenses if you were "attacked" by other guilds.

Now that would be cool.

Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be a purpose to having a guild hall in the game. However, I'm not going to completely discount the idea. Just because the developers have said they're ruling it out now doesn't mean it won't be included later in the future. Players continued to ask about flying around in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, right? All it takes is a new expansion, but at least we're getting it.

I'm shotgunning the Beer Garden.

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

With all the talk lately about starting new characters once the Cataclysm arrives, it struck me that most roleplayers already have more than one, including myself. Like most players, I started with one, a night elf druid, and focused on playing that exclusively for quite some time. It didn't really occur to me that I would even want to play more than one.

Then, I began to notice that other people played more than one character, even within the same small group of friends. I had one friend in particular who had mastered the art of roleplaying multiple characters. She never said anything out of character to anyone in our group, and it took me ages to even realize that her characters were ally played by the same person in the first place. Each one had its own personality, and each had a different relationship with all our mutual friends.

Knowing her made something click inside my mind, and I began to see other possibilities for myself too, other sorts of characters I could play with different weaknesses, strengths, and entirely different stories to tell. As my roleplaying experience grew, I began to feel as though one character couldn't contain all the ideas I had jumbling about in my head, so... I started another one, then another, and ... another. Little did I know all the pitfalls I could run into with so many characters, nor the quirky little tricks that could become possible with multiple characters, a small group of friends, and a bit of creativity.

All the World's a Stage. It really is. All the World of Warcraft is a actually a stage -- and all its orcs and humans merely players, each one with a role to play.

When people hear about roleplayers in WoW for the first time, some get the impression that we take our little game of "let's pretend" way too seriously, that everything we do in the game has to be some sort of mind-blowing expression of our innermost true feelings. But the truth of the matter is that only a portion of what we do in the game involves stories and character -- a lot of what we do and say to other players is not "in character" at all. In fact, our out-of-character (OOC) communication is essential in order to properly enjoy the in-character (IC) elements, and good roleplayers do a lot of cool things to help make both sides complement each other.

Much of what roleplayer does is out of character, and rightly so. Even just pushing buttons in order to activate abilities could be considered "OOC" -- in a way, the only character you can ever totally immerse yourself in is... yourself. Any time you play a role that isn't yourself, there's always some part you which is there in the background, knowing that it's all just a show. You can't really ignore your true self -- you have to let it guide and inform every part of the role you play.

The same is true when roleplaying in WoW. Roleplay is strengthened when you open up and accept OOC communication with others, establish real relationships in addition to those your characters create. Actors in a play have to support each other as real people or their play will fail, and in the same way, the honest communication we open up with our roleplaying friends can sometimes be what defines our roleplaying experience and gives it true meaning.

All the World's a Stage brings you the latest ideas and suggestions about roleplaying in the World of Warcraft.

One of the greatest problems people have with roleplaying in WoW is that the game has a tendency to spread people out all over Azeroth working towards disparate goals, and that makes it hard to sustain a roleplaying environment. Roleplayers can gather together in a meeting place of some sort in order to roleplay, but doing this every time isn't feasible -- inevitably, we want to go questing, get loot, and actually play the game too, all in different places.

So the majority of roleplayers join roleplaying guilds of one sort or another, and use the regular guild chat channel as their default in-character roleplaying channel which people can participate in no matter what they're doing in the rest of the world. Most guilds tend to imagine that their hearthstones (or some imaginary gnomish device) can act as walkie-talkies of sorts and allow everyone to communicate over great distances, no matter where they are.

Today, however, I will share with you some of the ways this solution falls short, and take a look at a better way to make roleplaying work in a guild, no matter what level you are or what you want to do with your game time. This idea can seem strange at first, but in the end it can provide many roleplaying opportunities -- allowing you to alternately build your RP stories, build up your character's levels, gold, or gear, or do all of these at the same time.

Ever since I first explored Stormwind and saw that huge instance portal behind bars in the Canal District, I've been waiting for the day that housing would be added to WoW. Oddly enough, I'm not the only one wishing we had a place to call our own.

Anthony on Idle Chatter says that player housing has worked well in LotRO and SWG, and wants to see it implemented into WoW. He brings up the instanced housing districts as an idea, an idea that makes a huge amount of sense, considering the instance portals are already set up. He proposes that there are two solutions to the housing issue, guild housing and player housing. In this scenario each would be an alternative spot to hearth to, and in the case of the guild housing, one would be able to read the Trade Channel within your dwelling.

As much as I love the idea of creating my own house for my characters, the one thing I noticed about the housing in EQII for instance that I did not like was the solitude. I much prefer the supergroup base concept from City of Heroes, where more than one person can enjoy it. In my mind, I would love to see guild housing with real world locations, so that much like Anarchy Online, the PvP element comes in and you can siege an opposing faction's guild lair. Wouldn't it add an additional element of risk to know that when you flag for PvP your guild hall is flagged as well? There is a lot that can be done beyond the traditional "this is where I keep my stuff, and those trophies no one will ever see" sort of housing concept. What good is a trophy if you can't show it off to passersby?