I was thinking about a minor issue the other day that affects some players within an MMORPG and that being the Guild minimum size limitation. While a few MMORPGs allowed Guilds to form with no minimum number other than yourself, the concept doesn't play out well when Guilds have Guild bonuses. Not to mention how convoluted the Guild listing is per server within those games in question. I decided to bring up an old idea I had back in 2004 called 'Families'.
What a Family does is allow you to form a Family with friends both in real-life or in-game and/or your real-life family who also play. This will allow players to form together without minimum membership limitations and gives them access to a Family Chat Channel as well as the option to share surnames and switch to them via a drop down menu or via the Family UI tab. When you join a guild with other Family members, you're still in the Family, but it operates independently from the Guild. While Guilds typically have a minimum size of 10 for most MMORPGs, Families will be limited to a maximum of 10, 12, or whatever VR feels is appropriate.
Families do not benefit from bonuses like Guilds typically have in more modern MMORPGs. There is also no Family title over a player's head or in chat channels within a listing like with Guilds. If you are in a Family and the members are in different guilds, you can still communicate with them through the Family Chat Channel. Families have their own shared bank with a separate NPC called a Curator (Similar to a Banker). However, this can be worked into the Banker if a separate NPC isn't warranted. Families can be worked into Progeny, Housing (later iteration of the game), Naming of Items, etc.
Would this be something you'd like to see? I welcome any feedback and/or questions.
I've played games where players are limited to one guild, I've played games where players are able to join 5 guilds at one time but only have one active at a time, and I've played games where players are limited to only one guild but they are able to form alliance/ community channels and aren't restricted as to how many of these they can join but are only allowed to have one activated at a time in addition to their guild chat.
Personally what I would like to see in Pantheon is a single guild system with a cap around 500-800 players depending on server size. with the ability for a player to join as many additional communities as they wish while only having one active. This way a player could join a raiding guild but also join into a crafting community. This is also nice for the streamers who have dedicated fan bases who want to join in on a community but are in primary guilds with their friends/families.
I used to be in a guild where, once you were a full member, you'd change your last name into the guild's common last name. This means, that every official guildmember would have the same last name. This was in eq2, so there was the option to change your last name ones every so often. For me that was in a guildsetting, but I don't see why changing your surname to match that of a player outside your guild would be problem within Terminus. So Family surnames, wouldn't be much of an issue really.
There might not be a high demand for an actual design, but if the game just allows you to change your surname. I don't see the problem there.
Also, you can create your own ingame chat channel with or without a password. An easy thing to facilitate by VR.
The aspect of a family bank...well if you can't make it work with a guildbank, a normal bank or ingame face to face trading...I'm not sure how much weight that family bank would have tbh.
Unless I'm missing the bigger picture here, that is what you're suggesting right?
To me, this is all about personal input not so much a missing design feature within the game. A sidenote: I did enjoy that idea. Aside that one guild, I didn't come across likeminded people and so it never really came up again. More often, people tend to use the same surname for their alts instead.
I would like to see the concept of 'families' in game, but only because I would like to form an extended family of Disposalists with control over use of the surname ;^)
I've never seen the harm of allowing a guild of one, though. The whole needing to get a few people together thing was always abused by begging randoms to form a guild, which was just an annoyance.
Guild benefits should only be organisational/social anyway. Stuff to enable them to *be* a guild. I'm not a fan of making the already powerful more artificially powerful.
And there's no harm in giving those powers to anyone/everyone.
I have been using the term Clan instead of family but I definitely think there is room for an Adventuring Guild, a Family/Clan, and possibly some form of Commerce/trade/crafting company. Players can be in one of each and what they do is split up.
Adventuring Guilds: Mostly about raiding, guild faction generation and general adventuring with the ability to get a guild hall with simple apartment style housing in the guild hall.
Family Clan: Intended for much lower cost of entry and requiring a fair amount of trust as most of the housing and vault space will be pretty universally accessible. The big aspect is being able to create clan compounds where everyone is able to live together but still have community space. This will also be good for your non raiding friends and family casuals.
Companies: Companies could be the exclusive source of player vendors and upgrading your company is its own form of progression. Only companies would be able to build crafting stations.
Just because ESO butchered the concept of multiple affiliations does not mean that it cannot be improved upon to be a real addition to the World of Pantheon.
Trasak said:I have been using the term Clan instead of family but I definitely think there is room for an Adventuring Guild, a Family/Clan, and possibly some form of Commerce/trade/crafting company. Players can be in one of each and what they do is split up.
Adventuring Guilds: Mostly about raiding, guild faction generation and general adventuring with the ability to get a guild hall with simple apartment style housing in the guild hall.
Family Clan: Intended for much lower cost of entry and requiring a fair amount of trust as most of the housing and vault space will be pretty universally accessible. The big aspect is being able to create clan compounds where everyone is able to live together but still have community space. This will also be good for your non raiding friends and family casuals.
Companies: Companies could be the exclusive source of player vendors and upgrading your company is its own form of progression. Only companies would be able to build crafting stations.
Just because ESO butchered the concept of multiple affiliations does not mean that it cannot be improved upon to be a real addition to the World of Pantheon.
"Just because ESO butchered the concept of multiple affiliations does not mean that it cannot be improved upon to be a real addition to the World of Pantheon."
Very true. I can't see it as being a very complex thing at all to have these constructs. The only reason they get butchered, in my humble opinion, is they are always treated as an afterthought.
Social constructs should be a fundamental consideration in any MMO that wants to be a success.
It seemed that Brad thought these things very important as he spoke of player matching, caravans, mentoring, etc early on and often. I really hope VR have continued to keep them a focus, though I know recent efforts have been very much on combat mechanics, which of course, are vital.
With the recent announcement that mentoring and caravans are to be post-launch, I hope they are aiming to make what remains of the social constructs a shining paragon of how it can be done.
I like your ideas above @Trasak, I would just say that I would see clans/families being perhaps the core of some guilds and companies, rather than separate or lesser, much like in real life. In history many powerful guilds and companies have a controlling family dynasty at their root and I could see that concept/construct really binding social structures together in Pantheon.
I agree with disposalist. Many people like to have personal guilds for just themselves or for just themselves and a few friends or family members. Reasons may include access to a guild house, access to extra storage, easy communications between the members and the like. I see no harm in allowing one person to form a guild and some good. It doesn't hurt anyone else. It seems easier for all to use whatever guild mechanics there are for small private guilds as well as large public guilds rather than programming for multiple types of associations.
Trasak said:I have been using the term Clan instead of family but I definitely think there is room for an Adventuring Guild, a Family/Clan, and possibly some form of Commerce/trade/crafting company. Players can be in one of each and what they do is split up.
Adventuring Guilds: Mostly about raiding, guild faction generation and general adventuring with the ability to get a guild hall with simple apartment style housing in the guild hall.
Family Clan: Intended for much lower cost of entry and requiring a fair amount of trust as most of the housing and vault space will be pretty universally accessible. The big aspect is being able to create clan compounds where everyone is able to live together but still have community space. This will also be good for your non raiding friends and family casuals.
Companies: Companies could be the exclusive source of player vendors and upgrading your company is its own form of progression. Only companies would be able to build crafting stations.
Just because ESO butchered the concept of multiple affiliations does not mean that it cannot be improved upon to be a real addition to the World of Pantheon.
I like this idea. As Pantheon is really trying to bring back the social aspect of MMO's the more tools gamers have to interact socially the better. That said, I do like some boundieres or spheres of influence. The goal of each organization would have to be carefully considered and which tools they are provided. In the games I've played where you could join multiple guilds all at the same time everything felt very impersional and actually detracted from the social aspect of the game.
We already expend so much energy trying to supplant social relationships with hollow technological ones, I would be against anything in game that seeks to substitute yet another such as family. Guilds, clans, trading companies I'm fine with, since they generally represent technical relationships anyway. Leave the meaningful ones (family, friend) to develop and be expressed organically.
It appears to me that the majority of functionality you describe can be accomplished by the creation of persistent, custom 'Family Chat Channels'. The channel always exists and as soon as a member logs in they are in it, just as in Guild chat. There wouldn't need to be an overarching group structure beyond the channel.
As far as Family banking goes, I think it would be fine if a character could designate any number of trusted friends to have access to his bank account. This would of course mean that all of a players characters would have access to each other's bank accounts, which may not be what VR wants. It would also be ripe for exploitation to acquire a huge storage capacity by anyone taking a serious interest in the game of "playing the markets".
I think the function of changing surnames would be very problematic.
1st, because there's a strong desire among many to limit any sort of name changes as part of the concept of player reputation. If I'm a jerk (no comments please), then when Jothany of Knights Who Say Ni! becomes Jothany of The Doom Brigade, how can anyone tell if it's the same player?
2nd, because a significant purpose to having surnames - as I understand it - is to allow multiple players to have the same first name. So, if changing my surname when I join a Family (OR a guild) were to be initiated, then no Family or Guild could have more than one Jothany. Unless you give us all three names, and I don't want to open THAT can of worms :)
Finally, I believe that any form of persistent, meaningful group structure that is implemented will inevitably result - on average - in SOME level of dilution of the value of Guilds. It may or may not be large enough to be a problem, but it is something to be taken into consideration.
My concern is that if a Family has their own storage there would end up being a lot of contrived families just for that reason or it would feel like a requirement to be in a family. Also Families would have to be account wide in order to stop people from making multiple families on alts for storage. If it were as suggested where the permissions were not custom then I suppose that would limit this concern as you would certainly not want strangers with access. This assumes that storage is at a premium and matters a lot.
I like the idea of Companies as a way for crafters to work together that are not nesc in the same guild, but it does hold the same concerns of becoming a requirement, leaving the more solo entreprenuer type crafters/traders at a disadvantage. I realize this is also true for standard Guilds that a solo crafter would have a slower time than say someone in a Guild that supplies them with materials with the intention of leveling up the crafter for the benefit of the entire Guild.
That being said, is there really a need for all of these extra constructs? Don't they all perform the same function that a Guild does? (With the exception of OP concern that their small group of friends/family would not meet the requirements to found their own Guild). The surname thing everyone could just pick the same surname to begin with. The chat channel thing has already been said, and devs have mentioned it in streams there will be custom chat channels. The shared storage would be a Guild bank/hall.
If Guild size minimum is 1 then you may be forced to make Guilds account wide instead of character specific for the same reasons of "everyone with the money has 5 alts with each their own guild for extra storage" one for ore/metals, 2 for drops, 1 for provisioning, whatever.
My gut says something like 5-10 players minimum and RL friends/family should find in-game friends (perhaps with their own small family group) with common interests to form a guild of their own. Keep the endless guild names to a minimum. God ever done a search in some games looking for a guild and there are just thousands mostly saying the same stuff it's lame.
I've been the founder of family friendly / casual / relatively small guilds several times since my hardcore days ended, so perhaps I'm biased.
To break it down. Janus asks for 3 things for the "family" group.
1)Chat Channel 2) Surname/Title 3)Shared Bank
1)Chat Channels: Don't you think we will be able to make chat channels and call it whatever you want? This seems like a given regardless of being in a "Family" you should be able to do that anyway.
2) Surnames/Title: Sure, may as well. I'm good with surnames not being unique. Let there be 20 different Smiths or Jones. Though again this can just be something a group does on their own. The game shouldn't have to put them in a "Family" group to do this. A title could work.
3)Shared Bank: This would be abused. If you want no drop items to be sharable that is definitely abusable. Even if you only want tradable items to be used in the shared bank, we will have localized AHs. If you want to camp someone at an AH on one side of the world and buy something and share it to someone camped on the otherside of the world to sell at the other AH that is definitely abusable. I don't see a way this works. Besides, if there are really a family of people playing the characters it should be easy to just trade from one person to the other directly anyway.
philo said:3)Shared Bank: This would be abused. If you want no drop items to be sharable that is definitely abusable. Even if you only want tradable items to be used in the shared bank, we will have localized AHs. If you want to camp someone at an AH on one side of the world and buy something and share it to someone camped on the otherside of the world to sell at the other AH that is definitely abusable. I don't see a way this works. Besides, if there are really a family of people playing the characters it should be easy to just trade from one person to the other directly anyway.
This can work when not only the AH is local but also the bank account. I always read here 'immersive'. Just think about the medieval times, there was no Western Union. Almost each city has its own currency. Why should the bank from a city allow you the access to the bank content from another city? I think shared bank accounts for family members can work.
Ive never heard them mention anything about localized banking.
That isn't planned. There are a variety of other issues that entails.
In all honesty, I saw it from the standpoint of, something you can join with a few people that would allow you to form a guild without the benefits of a guild when your numbers are below the threshold for a guild. That is an ongoing issue when you are with 3-4 others and play together enough but don't have enough or don't want to bring in other players to meet the minimum for a guild. If they decide to make membership at minimal 1 for a guild, that opens up all kinds of problems, so i don't think they'll go that route.
This is why I thought of a Family. Something smaller, more simplistic that can fill that bit of a hole. I then though that it could continue even within a guild much like if a few of my closest friends went to different schools but we were still tied together by another factor, in this case, being close friends. This is really just about a simple addition to deal with that issue but also allow it to be intertwined in other features like Progeny and other components.
The chat channel, surname and shared bank are just additional components tacked on but the underlying basis being what I detailed above.
Maybe I missed it. Can someone point me to the interview, newsletter, or dev roundtable where Joppa (or anyone else from VR) went into detail on what they have planned as far as guild systems, what guilds will do, what perks they will have, and so on? Because I'm pretty sure they haven't revealed any tangible information about any of this stuff to us since Brad's blog post about "p-harmony" long ago.
In general I support the idea of providing players with multiple social tools to leverage, from custom chat channels to full-on guilds to something in between. But I think it's a bad idea to start trying to define what those should be until we know more about what VR is planning. I'm especially leery when we start trying to talk about arbitrary minimum or maximum numbers of players, or about "perks" that in many games have proven to be unhealthy for socialization outside of guilds in the long run.
Nephele said: ...
Which is why this is going on the assumption that they will have the standard guild system in place. This isn't meant as a rubric for some overarching change that the developers are to then read and take note. It was an idea that I continually thought about when this issue was presented in 7 of the last 11 MMORPGs I've played. I agree with most all of what you said but I'll add one aspect to the concept of Families. It can be capped at 12 players. This largely prevents it from being an alternative to a guild if they continue with the standard minimal number because of the number of listed preventative issues that come with a smaller size.
Once we have more concrete data on the concept of Guilds, which I expect sometime in mid to late alpha, I'll raise this issue again and we can discuss it more definitively. Until then, this is really just conjecture and wanted people to voice their criticism so I can better frame the concept at a later point in time when it's meant to truly challenge an iterative framework.
@neph
The p harmony thing was a group finder, not necessarily related to guilds but I guess it could be used as a guild recruitment tool as well. Since we haven't heard anything about it since Brad I'm guessing it's out.
There have only been a few things mentioned as far as guild systems that I recall.
The infamy system was recently discussed and will allow a guild to spawn a raid mob.
Guild housing/outposts have been discussed but that has always been planned for post release.
Some sort of in game dkp system has been discussed to help guilds assign loot. They've never gone into specifics but I believe it will likely be very simple and general. Almost like an in game guild excel spreadsheet.
Janus said:Nephele said: ...Which is why this is going on the assumption that they will have the standard guild system in place. This isn't meant as a rubric for some overarching change that the developers are to then read and take note. It was an idea that I continually thought about when this issue was presented in 7 of the last 11 MMORPGs I've played. I agree with most all of what you said but I'll add one aspect to the concept of Families. It can be capped at 12 players. This largely prevents it from being an alternative to a guild if they continue with the standard minimal number because of the number of listed preventative issues that come with a smaller size.
Once we have more concrete data on the concept of Guilds, which I expect sometime in mid to late alpha, I'll raise this issue again and we can discuss it more definitively. Until then, this is really just conjecture and wanted people to voice their criticism so I can better frame the concept at a later point in time when it's meant to truly challenge an iterative framework.
Yeah, we should definitely wait until we know more about how the "guild game" is shaping up for Pantheon in general. Until then, I would strongly caution you not to get too attached to any numbers for minimum or maximum - for anything. Here is why:
World of Warcraft - 10 characters to form
EverQuest 2 - 6 characters to form
EVE Online - 1 character to form
Lord of the Rings Online - 6 characters
Guild Wars 2 - 1 character to form
Star Wars: The Old Republic - 4 characters to form
Final Fantasy XIV - 4 characters to form
Elder Scrolls Online - 1 character to form
Some of these games have minimums that must be maintained once formed. For others, the minimum is a single character in the guild. Some of them have items such as shared bank space that are only unlocked after reaching a certain number of members, but many of them place those sorts of perks behind different mechanisms than member count - a guild level, points earned by guild members, currency costs, age of the guild, or some combination of all of the above.
You keep saying "standard" guild system and you keep citing numbers in the 10-12 range, and I don't believe that's really accurate or representative of most games that we can expect players coming to Pantheon to have played before. While my list above isn't exhaustive at all, I don't believe there really *is* a standard other than "most games have some form of guild system".
In terms of what's right for Pantheon? I honestly think sizes are the last thing that should be determined. We need to understand what guild-level goals and gameplay could potentially look like first. Will guilds have triggerable raids that only they can do? Will guilds be able to declare PvP war on each other? Will guilds be able to use some system to collectively sell items in the player economy? Will guilds be the sole entity able to construct or manage outposts? And so on. Once we know more about this, then at that point we can talk about what sizes make sense, both minimum and maximum. Although I wouldn't be surprised if Pantheon just requires a full group (6 characters) to start a guild and leaves it at that.
More to the point, if we're talking about game support for informal groups like families, then we probably also need to talk about game support for things like guild alliances that allow smaller guilds to band together. People form guilds for a lot of different reasons - roleplay, casual socialization, crafting, RL timezone, RL languages, RL social identities, and of course, gameplay activities like housing or raiding. The goal of Pantheon's guild system should be to support all of these players and all of the reasons that they might want to form or join a guild - and allow them to maintain the guild identity that they want while still being able to work together with players outside of their guild to do things like raiding which might require more people than they have.
So, my feedback for you is to not try to put numbers or parameters on it. The idea should simply be that there are different types of social tools players can use:
- Families (informal)
- Guilds (formal)
- Alliances between guilds (formal)
As for how it gets implemented, it's best to leave that until more is known.
IMO, form it however you want, whenever you want, for free, even, with one person even.
Just make every single feature a milestone, after that, including name, chat channel, all of it.
Every single feature is a milestone that has requirements. Then, you can be as flexible as you want with the implementation and maintenance aspects of all guild features.
So, on day one? Go ahead form your guild, or family, or whatever you want to call it.
Now you need to meet whatever milestone(s) are required to enable any subsequent features, including a name, a chat channel, or any other feature.
Makes everyone happy, and is the most flexible.
Personally, I would also make both the enabling of and display of a visible guild tag/name a significant (Tier3+) milestone that requires significant social contribution, fame, or similar consumption for maintenance. But that's just me. :)
I generally like the idea of providing "players with multiple social tools to leverage" as Nephele said; however, in contrast to a design of something in the game that may end up restricting freedoms when it comes to "family" creation and the such I think it's best to leave it to the creativity of the players. Simply put, we could make alliances guild to guild even if there is no system in place to uphold such alliance, so why couldn't we make a party of players that we'd call family? Although, having a system in place would make it easier to trade and connect with a said family depending on the design of such a system!