Dissecting the Guild Mechanic: Will Guild Wars 2 measure up?

In my time as a gamer I’ve only encountered the “guild” mechanic, as it exists in the MMO genre, twice; first, with the original Guild Wars, and later through the “Super Group” system on Champions Online. Because these two games differ in many of their features, including the way they handle their “guild” system, I will be using them as comparative examples when talking about Guild Wars 2’s approach to this classic mechanic.

It was almost six years ago I jumped into ArenaNet’s aspiring CORPG (Cooperative Role-Playing Game), Guild Wars, and experienced a “MMOesque” world for the first time. Because of this, it was also my first time I came across guilds. In most games that have them, guilds traditionally function as a grouping feature that would cater to people with all kinds of interests and put them all “under one roof”, so to speak. For example, there are guilds for PvE (Player versus Environment), people that enjoy exploring and delving into the world and it’s story, PvP (Player versus Player), people that prefer to take part in fighting tournaments against other players, and even RP (Role-Playing), people that like to explore the world and story through in-character acting/writing. There are also other ways to further categorize guilds, perhaps by age limit, by in-game race (e.g. human, charr, asura, sylvari, and norn), or difficulty (casual or hardcore). In-game “faction” mechanics, like the ones presented in Guild Wars: Factions, have an impact on PvE, PvP, and RP gameplay, but also on the guild system as well. Guilds in Guild Wars could now alliance with other guilds and join one of two factions, Kurzick or Luxon, and then compete against each other in a PvE-altering PvP game-type called “Alliance Battles”. As far as I’ve read, this kind of factional warfare has yet to be heard of in Guild Wars 2 outside of the World versus World PvP game-type.

Moving away from the PvP aspect for a bit, I’m going to talk more about the core features that were present in the Guild Wars guild system before I move onto Champions Online.

• The User Interface (UI)

Names blurred to respect privacy.

1.          When you bring up the guild menu in-game it’s a rather simple and user-friendly design. You’ll see that there are four clickable tabs on the menu. The first one there, and the one that’s generally open by default, is the “Roster”. There are three ranks a player can be put under: Leader, Officer, and Member. Leaders can promote and kick officers and members, while officers can only promote and kick members. There can also only be one “Guild Leader” at a given time. However, both the guild leader and their officers can invite new players to guild as members or guests.

2.         The next tab over is the “Status” menu where the leader and officers can leave messages for the whole guild to see. Below that is the “Guild History”, which keeps track of invites, promotions, and players who have left or been kicked.

3.          Following that is the “Guest” tab which shows if you’re a guest to any guild at that time, which gives you access to their guild hall.

4.          The last tab is the “Alliance” tab which displays your alliance’s leading guild and the other guilds you’re allied with. For each it shows the current amount of faction each guild has acquired, its date of joining, and its guild cape design. Notice that on all of the panels that there is always a button for you to leave the guild hall, and vice-versa when you’re not in it. On the last two tabs there is a separate button for visiting the halls of your alliance’s guilds as well as the halls of the guilds you have guest privileges with.

5.          Finally, there is a small amount of info at the top of the menu all the time that displays the guild’s home, its Rank and Rating (For competitive Guild versus Guild), Qualifier Points, and the amount of Alliance Faction your alliance currently has.

• Guild Halls and Guild Capes

1.         One thing ArenaNet took into consideration with the guild system is customization, which is something that can manifest in different forms when talking about guild features, but I’m going to talk about the two that were key in their first game. Guild Halls essentially filled the role of player housing in Guild Wars. While these halls are shared spaces with the rest of the guild members, it gave players a hub to interact privately with their comrades other than “Guild Chat”. At the same time the halls serve multiple other needs.

• A player can find storage in the guild hall (like every other outpost in the game) as well as things like a merchant, dye trader, rare and common material traders, a skill trader, a guild emblemer, and much, much more.
• There are also different themed halls for a guild’s choosing, each of them mirrors a setting from the actual game world. However, the guild hall must be purchased and so must the traders in it. If you ever decide to change guild halls, you have to pay for a new one with in-game currency. That said, you get to keep all of your traders and NPCs you had in your previous ones.
•  In the event of a Guild versus Guild (GvG) match, whether it’s a scrimmage with another person in your guild/alliance or a rated match against another guild, the halls become battlefields with a defensible position on each side of the map. Because almost all of the halls are different, each one provides a unique battlefield experience.

2.         Lastly, we have the guild capes, which as you may have already guessed are wearable capes that are viewable on your character and can be turned off and on in your inventory menu. Everyone can play with the guild cape creator/editor, but only the guild leader can actually make the cape for their guild. From there you’ll have access to border-style changes, patterns, and emblems and plenty of colors to dye them. Making/changing the cape costs two platinum (two thousand gold), in-game, which isn’t too expensive if you don’t need to change it often.

Now that I’ve gone and shown you the guts of the original games’ guild system and some of its good points, I’m going to move on to Champions Online’s super group system and see how it measures up.

Despite Cryptic Studio’s reputation as of late, there’s at least one thing I can, without a doubt, praise them for: customization. An amazing character creator aside, their guild system has some impressive features of its own that shows a desire to put the controls in the players’ hands. Super groups, like guilds in Guild Wars, are subject to themes of their creators, (e.g. Golden Age Superheroes, Aliens, Robots, PvE, PvP, RP) and can be as broad or specific as desired. With that said, I’d like to do the same for Champions Online as I did for Guild Wars and review the functions and features this game has to offer.

• The User Interface (UI)

Again, names are blurred for privacy.

1.         Starting with the first tab, also labeled “News”, there are three viewable features on this menu.

• At the top there is the message of the day (MOTD), which, like Guild Wars, is used for announcements that pop up in the chat whenever a player logs into the game.
• Second is the Activity Log. Similar to the Guild History feature mentioned earlier, the Activity Log keeps track of bans, invites, rank promotions, and even when a member’s character levels up.
• Last on this page is the Vault Log. Something Guild Wars didn’t have was a sharable guild storage; this game does. The leaders determine how much access the members of the super group are given to the super group bank. The purpose of the Vault Log is to keep track of who takes what out and who puts what in.

2.          Move one tab over, and you’ll find the “Events” menu. This is where the leaders post and update super group events planned for the week, dates and times included.

3.          Next up is the “Roster” tab. Like earlier, this roster menu displays its members. In this case the members can be listed alphabetically, by rank, level, or location.

• At the bottom there’s an invite feature for those with permissions, and a button to leave the super group.

4.          Fourth on the line is the “Information” tab. This menu includes the super group’s name, the founding date, a place to put a main website link, and a description section.

• After the main information there’s an area for the leader(s) to “categorize” their super group with search tags. The language, play style, social group, and time zone categories will drop a checkbox list to fill out.
• Finally, there’s the recruiting message that players who’re searching for super groups will see in their search function.

5.          The last tab is “Settings”. This is where the leaders can create ranks, name them, and then decide what kind of responsibilities and privileges a given rank can have. The leader can even pick the super group’s colors and emblem at the top.

This is what I meant when I said that Cryptic handed the controls over to the players. The players build their super groups: they structure them. At this point I would’ve normally moved on to talk about super group bases like I had with guild halls but they do not currently exist in Champions. When I first started playing I thought that was a bad thing; that the game would be worse off because it didn’t have a place for my super group to hang out in. It’s been almost two years since then and my opinion has changed through observation. I’ll get to my epiphany soon, but for now let’s move on to the real star of the show, Guild Wars 2.

Guilds in Guild Wars 2 are doing their own thing. From what we know so far, when a player joins a guild, all of their characters are “bound” to that guild. This is how it worked in the original Guild Wars, but here’s where the two systems diverge. While all of your characters are bound to a single guild, you can “bind” several guilds to your account and choose which one you wish to represent at any given time. The action of switching between guilds, as ArenaNet has explained it, will be a quick and simple thing to do. To provide a second comparison, Champion Online’s guild system restricts super group membership by character rather than by account. So while each of your characters can be in a different super group, they cannot be in more than one at a time. At this point, it’s hard to say which system I think works better. I know I prefer the way Cryptic handles guilds/super groups to how ArenaNet did guilds in their first game. The features in Champions allow for much more flexible and internal structuring; however, it’s plausible that for some, this amount of customization may seem unnecessary and overcomplicated. One of the benefits of the guild system in Guild Wars was that it was easy to use and even easier to maintain, but because player values tend to be liminal, the middle ground isn’t always immediately apparent.

Guild Wars 2 has already proven it’s doing a lot of things differently from other MMO’s, the guild system included. Like Champions, there won’t be guild halls/in-depth player housing upon release, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. This is where I get to my epiphany, if I can even call it that. One thing I’ve noticed in Champions is that, without super group bases, the community became more invested in the world around itself. This also promoted more community events held by a single player, a team, or even an entire super group. It is my opinion that if guild halls are present from release that they become a “clubhouse” feature that keep super groups from being more community centric, which can degrade the entire game’s community to a certain extent. If you let the players settle into the world first and promote interaction with players from outside of the “clubhouse” (which Guild Wars 2 already does, e.g. the dynamic event system), when guild halls do come around, they won’t have as much of a negative impact on a more community oriented player-base. After my time in Champions, I found that super group bases aren’t necessary for super groups, which isn’t to say they don’t make for cool and useful (not to mention gorgeous) housing spaces, but that, if you take it at face value, is all cosmetics.

Now that I’ve said what I wanted to about building a strong guild community, I would like to move on to share some of my own hopes for the guild system in Guild Wars 2. First would be increase the amount of customizable assets in the guild interface (e.g. Namable ranks, guild emblems and colors, and more) and make sure insignias or capes make it into the game. Insignias could technically be painted onto armor/outfits, while capes are, in the traditional sense, usually limited to the back. Following after that, if guild halls are implemented later, I’m hoping they live up to the same functionality they did in the previous games (not including the GvG aspect since that’s kind of been implemented into WvWvW). Finally, and this is the last thing I can think of now, is guild storage. People can throw in items and materials they’re willing to share or that they can’t use that someone else might.

I’m hoping the developers have done their fair share of observation of guild/super group-like mechanics from other games and have assembled the best of what each has to offer and done away with the worst things that came with. In any case, I’m looking forward to the result.