I think it would be pretty fantastic if we could name our Warband in War Within and have that name sometimes mentioned by NPCs to acknowledge that we’re part of a legendary group of adventurers.
For an example of a similar feature, in SWTOR you have (or had, haven’t played in years) a “Legacy” on each server. This legacy served as your characters’ familial relations to each other rather than a simple group membership, but the idea is similar. In it, you could choose your legacy name and have it displayed as a surname for your character.
With Warbands, it would make more sense for the Warband name to be displayed differently (if at all, which I don’t care as much about anyway). Probably let us choose between displaying it or our guild name, or maybe make it so that it only shows if we’re not in a guild.
But the best would be having random quest NPCs etc say, for example, “Oh look, it’s [NAME]! [WARBAND] have come to save us!”
Anyway, I think it’d be cool and hopefully you do too and we can get enough people on this for Blizzard to include it (assuming it’s not already planned to work that way).
It’s not a guild. It’s not even a system. It is a catch all phrase for the rebuilt character foundations that allow account wide stuff. There is no actual “warband”.
From what I’ve seen of the Warbands features, it’s an (albeit a bit late) exact answer to why myself, and those like me started a one or two person guild; for an easy method of moving resources between alts (among other reasons).
I caught an interview a streamer did with a couple of the devs, the question was asked about Warband naming and tabards. The devs’ response was “great idea!” Which makes me wonder, if that was a genuine response, how no one floated that when they were coming up with the concept. And again, IF that response was genuine, then it’s a safe bet that Warband naming and tabards will most likely be a thing at some point in the, hopefully not too distant, future.
It’s not anything right now, that’s why I’m making suggestions at this stage.
And to say it’s not a “system” is a bit ridiculous. It will absolutely be a system. That’s why they’re naming it as a feature. It will be the system by which progress and other things will be shared across your Battle.net Account.
Since they’re couching it in lore-friendly terms by calling it your warband, even giving it its own bank which from the screenshot looks pretty much exactly like a guild bank, then there’s no reason it can’t have other trappings of a guild.
Theoretically, the only difference between a guild and a warband could end up being in gameplay rather than in lore.
A warband is just the collection of 480 characters on a battle.net account. They can all be in the same guild as well. I don’t think Warband will ever come up within the game itself.
And a guild is just a collection of characters on a server. What’s your point?
What is with these anti-fun replies?
The change is them moving from the current system (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) to the warband system. It may itself be a system of other systems, but that changes nothing.
Since we’re floating ideas, I came up with this one last night while I was trying (and failing) to fall asleep; What if, say going forward starting with War Within, when the character you’re on travels from one questing hub to the next, your alts in your warband camp are also there with you, or they’re wherever you have your hearthstone set. So let’s say you set your HS at a given questing hub, you do the main campaign quest on one character, then, before moving on, you can approach one of those characters hanging out at that inn, and with, maybe some dialogue selection, you’re on that other character to go knock out whatever side quests are in the area, all without having to log out and log back in? Or I’m sure most players have their hearthstones set at whatever the capital is, so the character you’re on can just hearth there any time, then again, use a dialogue function to switch characters? Something like switching companion characters in D3, except you’re switching the actual character you’re playing, all without having to relog. Thoughts?
Guild Wars (the first one) had this system that allowed you to have copies of your max-level alts follow you around and quest with you.
Granted, that entire game was predicated on you having NPCs with you when you went out in the world unless you had enough players to take their place, but in WoW it could easily be something like the Garrison/Legion followers but with your own custom characters.
I don’t know about switching, that seems like it would come with a lot of architecture and system work that would likely be high-effort and low-reward, but being able to see my characters hanging out in the world would be pretty awesome.
Rather than having your characters wherever you are, I think it’d be almost cooler to either A) have a home base for your warband that they all hang out at (though that idea kind of gives off garrison vibes and we know how that ended up) or B) have them show up in whatever inn their heartstone is set to (probably with a limited number of slots in any given inn, so that if you have all of your toons set to the same inn, a max of say 3 or 5 can be hanging around at any given time).
You could even have specific actions and animations a given character could be doing based on their race and/or class.
In all honesty, when I dreamed that one up, I did picture some exasperated developer looking at me like I just asked him to turn a bicycle into a Toyota.
I can meet you at this one, sure. From that one screenshot that’s been going around, a warband camp consists of four characters I think? I’d throw in the ability to deposit certain resources with them. Like if I somehow end up with a bunch of leather on this char even though he’s an alchemist and herbalist, I can just “give” that leather to my rogue, who’s a leather worker. But then again, that kind of defeats the purpose of the new bank I guess. And again, there’s that imagined developer asking me what the heck I’ve been smoking. And the answer is nothing, just getting over an insomnia bout.
This would be kinda cool. Would likely just be a shortcut way to mail stuff to them. Like maybe you hand them stuff and you don’t have to go through a mail window at all, and it just auto-generates the mail and message for the alt when you log into it.
Definitely feels like pie-in-the-sky at this point though, since as you said this overlaps pretty hard with the warband bank.