Guild System Improvements

Currently the guild system includes 3 ranks (leader, officer, member), a chat channel, and the ability to set a deed with chapterhouse permissions and some sort of 'war' functionality that I've only heard of used very infrequently.

I feel there is a lot of potential for guild development.

Expansion of the Rank Infrastructure

Allow guild leaders to add additional membership ranks and create a permission grid (can invite / can kick / can set message of the day / etc. as additional options are added, add them to the grid).

Example:
Leader
Officer
Member

Expands into whatever you want, any themes possible - such as:
HighPriestess, Supplicant, Neophyte, Acolyte, etc...
General, Colonel, Lieutenant, etc..
President, Cabinet, Undersecretary, etc...
Assigned to whatever 'rank number' - say make a max of 10

Allow members of the guild with these ranks to display the rank as a title.

Cash Sink or Monetization opportunity to change your guild hierarchy.



Guild Banks

While chapterhouses and storage areas do allow for shared permission setups, using structure permissions can be problematic and granular to individual containers. Chapterhouse means anyone you invite to the guild can access which well, maybe you don't want, maybe there's an initiation period. Maybe you want to allow deposit but not withdraw, or limit value of withdrawals by rank. With the expanded rank infrastructure these permissions could be configured via the permission grid to affect group(s) of players rather than having to add things name-by-name.

Key benefit would be accessing from any bank interface as a separate 'guild bank' tab, allowing people to pool resources, distribute items where they are needed.

Cash Sink or Monetization opportunity for guild bank size upgrades or purchase of additional tabs for organization (ie, GuildBank1, Guildbank2, etc.)



Guild Progression & Advancement

Other than a chat channel and 'storage of stuff' consider the possibility of guild progression/advancement.
As players earn experience, a small % of this increases the "guild level" and different level thresholds can unlock different things, such as the already mentioned rank system and bank, and any other features added later. Levelling up a guild to 'max level' should be a very long term plan. Smaller guilds could do it, but it would take longer, so key functional 'unlockables' should be on the lower end with fancier/fluffier/bragging rights things at the high end.

Guild Quests - acceptable by the guild leader, tracking the progress of all members to completion.
Example - "Kobold Apocalypse" could have several objectives including wanton kobold slaughter (kill count), retrieval of so many kobold chainswords and kobold hammers to be melted into slag, and so on. Upon completion, all members who participated (ie killed at least 1 kobold) get some sort of reward or buff or trophy delivered by either mail or reward claim system. Completing guild quests would also award a large chunk of 'guild exp'.

Certain quests would become available as the guild increases in level, increasing in difficulty and/or complexity.

This provides the additional benefit of having everyone work together on a common goal and can be used to spur guild events/activities.

Cash sink opportunity - guild could 'pay' a certain amount of gold to unlock said quest or accelerate cooldowns of repeatable quests to flush money out of the economy.


Guild Development & Projects

Potential unlockables as the guild levels up, that convey benefits to all members and require high costs to complete. Many of these could be active at once, kind of like an achievement system, but its collective and rewards all members of the guild. Could even link these to the virtues/lore in some way. Sort of like a badge system of things you unlock. Don't have to call them badges, but just for example:

Badge of Charity
Unlock at guild level xx
To Complete: Guild members contribute over 100,000 gold to beggars
Unlocks: Passive benefit for all members, say +10 to max focus

Badge of Spirituality
To Complete: Guild members collectively throw 1,000,000 coins into wishing wells. Or whatever
Unlocks: Passive benefit for all members, say +10 to max health

and so on.

The 'guild bonuses' could apply as a buff upon entering a scene and have a cooldown or minimum membership time to activate to prevent abuses.

You could also add so many quirky ones!
Blessing of Nature - gives everyone +5 earth resist - complete by throwing emeralds at it
Blessing of Rain - gives everyone +5 water resist - complete by throwing sapphires at it
Blessing of Dawn - gives everyone +5 sun resist - complete by throwing garnets at it, or whatever
Do this for every element
Make the quantities absolutely absurd, sink those resources out for minimal benefit.

And crafting ones....
Treatise of Blacksmithing - gives everyone +5 proficiency - complete by throwing iron swords at it
etc.

And gathering ones - throw wood, cotton, fish, etc. at it.

The result is the guild develops through working on common goals and everyone ends up with a buff that over time and progression adds to their base passive status. The cumulative total of months of effort might give you +5 to 20 different things, and maybe there's some duplicates, enough bonus to be worth it but not so much as to be drastically overpowering. You could even keep these separate and have members 'choose' which ones they want to activate.

For the PvP folks - guild war 'wins' could be another measure for unlocking some sort of perk
For the repeatable questers ...
For the dragon slayers...
For cooking of hundreds of pies....and so on.

This entire suggestion is a huge cash sink / resource sink opportunity.
I'd stay away from coto purchase perks, though, for pay to win reasons.
But monetization opportunity to allow more objectives to be worked on at once via unlock

Guild Announcements
Text announcement in chat (disable-able) for milestones:
When someone levels up adventure or producer level
When someone completes one of the key story quest paths (truth, love, courage, oracle)
When the guild levels up, completes a quest, or completes a project
When a new player joins, or disgruntled player leaves the guild
When someone gets a rank promotion
Or when a guild leader/officer wants to type /announcement !

Could make this feature unlockable at a certain guild level


Other Little Stuff
Setting up the infrastructure for more guild features unlocks an endless stream of incremental possibilities, most of it not requiring new artwork beyond a UI window to hold it all and tech to track collective progress.
Unlockables such as a guild icon or text color to display your guild name in above your head *(leader sets these for consistency), or the ability to have sub-guild organizations within the guild (such as the pvp folks who want to war without dragging everyone else into it, or player organizations for different purposes that fall under the same guild umbrella) add small but meaningful social enrichment.


TLDR -
There have been almost no changes over the years to what is, essentially, a fairly basic/rudimentary set of guild functions and, considering the strength of social elements within the game there's a lot of untapped potential both for strengthening communities as well as cash sinks /monetization in the implementation of these sorts of systems. Being part of and contributing to something adds a whole new level to the gameplay experience and player retention.

 

I would also add the ability to have a guild "left" to someone. As an option, a guild leader can have a set number of days that they can opt into that will pass the guild to an assigned person if that lead has not logged in during that time. This would help prevent guilds from dying out when some leaves the game for any reason.

 

I love all these guild Ideas, the two things I felt disappointed in when I started to get a bit more invested, was the lack of ranks/diversity of privileges for both POTs and Guilds. Having more ranks/permissions for guilds and towns is a great +, and having "Perk Trees" for both can be very interesting as well! I think your suggestions fit in so well with both guilds and towns, and really need to be thought about! Great ideas !

 

*With a really loud voice* We wants this.

 

I wrote nearly 2 years ago that I thought that player communities are the corner stone to all MMOs and more guild tools would help, as guilds lack any real function in this game. Without player communities you may as well be playing a single player RPG.

What I would like is tools to enable guild level goals. In a sandbox game having goals is what drives you to play. Having shared goals with the guild makes this more multi-dimensional and give the players reasons to continue to play.


Regards
Spung

 

...Mac start saving cash for guild upgrades....

 

Elrond stop using all the mats saved up for the guild upgrades!

(Jk I still need gear done!)

 

Thanks kaeshiva for this topic, and thanks so much to the rest of you for responding in perfectly appropriate and important ways. A rich and functional guild system would be a tremendously important and immeasurably valuable addition to SOTA, and as Violet Ronso noted, the POT's need the same. Shroud of the Avatar is an amazing game that lends itself so well to the specific needs of the RP community at large, with a couple of notable exceptions... ...this topic being one of them, and "mounts" being the other. So much thought, creativity, passion and work went into the myriad amazing features and systems in this game, and so little into guild and town functionality. That being said, I completely understand the demands and time constraints placed on a small dev team (who all do amazing work), but I'd like to add my 2 cents to this discussion and say that I personally feel that guild functionality should live near the top of the priorities list. I find it hard to imagine we could ever substantially grow our player base without what kaeshiva described here. It's basic and essential.

*I've been in SOTA for almost 10 months now but try not to spend much time on these forums and until now have never felt compelled to respond. Most of what's discussed here relates far more to veteran players than to newcomers like me. This topic, however, affects us all equally. Thanks again to kaeshiva for putting the thought and work into her astute take on this topic, and thanks to all for responding and supporting her effort.

Shouts in chorus with Crazy Teeka... WE WANT THIS!

 

I think auto-promotion of the longest member of the next rank down in the officer tier would work well for that.