So, I was reading one of the recent threads on families or clans, and it made me think about the benefits / drawbacks of guilds. Something I have not seen before but think would be interesting, is if your guild impacted your faction. When you stop and think about it, it impacts your reputation with other PCs, so why shouldn't such an obvious association with a large group also impact your NPC faction? I don't think it should be a LARGE swing, but something small but noticable.
As an example let's look at how EQ treated the velious expansion. Often times you would have guilds who would focus on one of the 3 factions so that they could raid appropriately. I think it would be an interesting take if your guild had an overwhelmingly high dwarf faction, that it would boost faction of all members by some amount. Maybe a 0-10% multiplier based on how high your guild's average standing with a faction is?
This would create consequences for joining or leaving a guild. It would make the work feel more real, as your associations have more meaning.
Thoughts?
I think that it would a very interesting idea to put into a game. I don't think it could be reasonably added to Pantheon at this stage of development without the problems of it being 'grafted on' rather than built into the code from the beginning.
Separate from that, it would seriously alter one's relationship to their guild. I see that as one of the biggest ways it would make for a very different game than we're used to playing (or expecting to play in Pantheon).
I could see it allowing players within a guild to work on opposing faction for themselves, so that the guild faction would give them just enough of a nudge to be indifferent to the original faction so they could sort of go both places, but not have all rights in the original faction, maybe just enough to sell to merchants.
Jothany said:I think that it would a very interesting idea to put into a game. I don't think it could be reasonably added to Pantheon at this stage of development without the problems of it being 'grafted on' rather than built into the code from the beginning.
Separate from that, it would seriously alter one's relationship to their guild. I see that as one of the biggest ways it would make for a very different game than we're used to playing (or expecting to play in Pantheon).
Why would you think it couldn’t be added at this point? I'm sure they built Pantheon to accept future expansions and those would include new races and with that new factions.
Zorkon said:Why would you think it couldn’t be added at this point? I'm sure they built Pantheon to accept future expansions and those would include new races and with that new factions.
I think that because every time one person in a guild kills almost any humanoid or sentient mob, their faction change would have to be recalculated into the official guild faction, which would then be used to adjust the faction of every member of the guild. Many of whom are out changing their own faction at the same time. That sounds like an awful lot of constant updating for EVERY guilded player in the game, in real time.
I am guessing that there is some significant amount of code already written dealing with faction that would need to be changed, in addition to whatever new code needed to be created and implemented and tested and debugged. Not that it can't be changed, just that I can't imagine VR deciding to ADD something that involved into the game at this point. Particularly with the ongoing "Just finish the game" messages that we see almost daily on the boards.
As a completely separate issue, this change - while quite interesting to think about - would be a fairly serious change to the way most of us relate to guilds.Which are a pretty fundamental (and so far, fairly traditional in function) part of the game we have all been expecting up to this point. Making that much change in the paramaters of the game at this stage would likely result in quite an uproar from any and all players who didn't like the idea, and the chorus of complaints would be joined by all those who see it as another delay in getting to release.
But hey, maybe I'm just a pessimist :)