Linked guilds

There were plans to enable linking guilds. What happened to that?

 

What is meant with "linking guilds"? Presuming the members to be of the same guild and enjoying membership benefits (e.g. guildhouse) of both? Being considered allies in a PVP event?

 

At the very least, names should appear in the color of a fellow guild member and guild chat should include all linked guilds. I'm not sure if guild house permissions would (or should) extend to linked guilds.

I believe that PvP "allies" are only done through groups.

 

oh bro, there aren't even 60 people playing this, why would they waste time doing something for the guilds?

 

I would say that 60 are a very low estimate. There are people playing whenever I log in so not only during the standard US times but from Europe or Asia too. And there are people logging in using the games own startetr who do not appear on Steams count.

 

yes, I exaggerated a bit, but also remember that most old players have 2-3 accounts/characters.

But on the subject, I really don't see any advantage in wasting time on this, while we have bugs from years ago that haven't been resolved yet.
Something about guilds would be the last thing on my update list.

 

I could say that about every suggestion that's made here. Just because you don't care about it doesn't mean that others don't care about it. Also, It's already on their roadmap.

 

This is similar to linking guilds into an "Alliance" and also then having an Alliance Chat channel. That is done in UO quite readily.

• A guild can only be in one alliance.
• The alliance leader who adds/removes guilds is the guild that starts the alliance and its leader or officers do the add/remove.
• So when we have a guild of mages or pirates or a certain player town, they can be allied with other guilds and communicate without removing themselves from their unique guild.
• The Alliance Chat channel is like a party chat channel, but all members of allied guilds can chat in that channel automagically.
• Adding more features than Alliance Chat can be hard affecting permissions on buildings, etc. (which I think the Devs have pointed out over the years).
  • It might be easiest to start with the chat system to help groups of people (guilds) play together in their Alliance channel.
• UO also has a special Name color for alliance members when met in-game.

Reference: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/alliance-chat.167340/

 

What do we see the purpose of 'guild linking' being? From one perspective, guild linking sounds like an important step to enable more of a factional system in SOTA. Yet we lack factions in game that would benefit from such a system. Despite SOTA weighing player "virtue", we don't see much game design that differentiates player groups by virtue or some other faction. That leads to the question: "Guild linking - why care?" So would 'guild linking' be more about helping less-active guilds keep their doors open while connecting them to more active groups? A noble cause! But is it worth the expenditure of the SOTA development budget to enable that? Or should we just expect less-active guilds to reform with other more-active groups? Why not expect that and invest available development dollars into Episode 2 content instead?

 

You make a good point about how linking guilds can help less active guilds become more active by participating with other guilds. As far as a factional system, I agree there aren't game mechanics for factions -- that would have to be role-played without mechanics.

In many cases, guilds are formed with a story or history about them, or they reside in a town or region; much stems from Role-playing or simply common interests. For example, there might be a group of 5 people who want to play pirates and don those costumes and fight like pirates, have a pirate ship for a home, or even a POT. While the "Pirate Brigade" guild is not large, they may want to participate with other guilds like the "Almighty Fishers" guild.

In UO, guilds linked together not because of the small numbers of members in those guilds, but because each guild was unique in some way and people did not want to disband their guilds (and their history). In PaxLair in UO, we have brought in guilds of even one person at times into our Alliance. That is because that one person wanted to be identified as a "Family" guild where they once played with family members, but he wanted to keep the guild name ... while still participating with larger numbers of people. Ref: https://www.uoguide.com/Alliance

As for how much Dev time is needed for linking guilds in some manner, perhaps just for a chat system and maybe avatar name colors, I don't know. I think as long as it does not involve permissions like guild or alliance houses and property, it might be fairly simple. But it is for them to decide.

 

For me, it would simply be for associated guilds to be more easily included in activities.

 

As an example -- I have an alt guild (RP) project that I would most likely spend more time developing, if I could do so while still having access to my main guild's chat, as well as being more attractive to other players joining me, having ready access to a larger alliance chat for advice and grouping.

Other smaller groups could more easily work together sharing a chat channel without relinquishing their guild tag, merging assets, etc, and it could be leveraged later for small scale pvp projects (player planned/run), or larger global faction ideas.

 

Hear, hear.