Living La Guilda Loca

A while back on an earlier recording of ChaosCast, we were talking about Warhammer's "living guild" system, how guilds had to level up to access unique guild features and content, such as custom heraldry, recall scrolls, keep claiming and the like.  In theory, this was a very cool aspect of the game -- a guild that progressed much like a player's character did, by leveling up and gaining more skills.  But I quickly spotted a potential major issue, one that's been vindicated over the past six or so months.

The problem, I said, was if guilds took a long time to level up, then it would have the adverse effect of causing people to hesitate in starting new guilds in the future.  Day one after launch, everyone's on the same level, and guilds were popping up all over the place.  Now?  I feel bad for any guild that wants to start up, because they will be trying to entice players to join a rank 1 guild that lacks the amenities of a rank 20, or 30, or 40 guild.  The newly minted rank 1 guild won't be able to overtake these other guilds in terms of game-connected benefits, just eventually catch up to them.  I predicted that new guild creation would slow down within a half year, as established guilds held tightly on to their precious ranking and grew into mega-guilds/alliances.  It also doesn't help that around the upper teens and lower 20s, guild leveling slows down to an absolute crawl.

For some people, guild leveling isn't much of an issue, beyond getting the guild recall scroll (nice to have that quick travel option to your capital city).  Some ears perked up at the 1.2 patch's new guild mounts (now with more varieties and slightly faster speeds!), but the good mounts require an incredibly high level guild to access, and that just won't happen for most folks anytime soon.  For people who do care about features that a guild rank can provide, then there might be the temptation to hop guilds to a higher-ranked one (question: can you temporarily join a higher rank guild to get the cool mount, then rejoin your lower ranked guild and keep the mount?). 

Snafzg filled me in on a potential exploit some guilds were using to speed rank their guilds -- a process that I won't go into here, but it uses Mythic's system against themselves, namely how "active" guilds level far faster than ones with lots of inactive alts or players.  Speaking of which, if inactivity hurts a guild's leveling speed, then won't that be incentive for guild leaders to kick any alts and keep only mains?

What I'm trying to say that while guild leveling was great in theory, it's messy and potentially inhibiting in practice.  I've heard players clamoring for guilds to have access to all of the special content right out of the gate -- that it's silly to make us wait for a half year or more just to get a teleport scroll to Gunbad.  I hate the thought of someone getting a great idea for a guild, but finding absolutely no support for it because other players wouldn't want to "go back" to a rank 1 guild, no matter what the premise.  High ranked guilds might become one of the game's more precious commodities in the future, and we could even see them selling the intact guild off to a high bidder, just as how players in other games eBay off their characters to folks who don't want to go through the work of doing it themselves.

Just food for thought on this early Monday morning.