Blizzard, I’m going to leave here an honest opinion and something that I believe would help guilds in this game.
Back in the day, I played ragnarok online and for me, it was the best MMO for guilds that ever existed. Better than “guild wars” (for me, okay?).
Why ?
1 - The visual that the guilds used in Rag was very interesting.
1 - There were flags with the guild symbol
2 - These symbols were chosen by the guild owner
3 - And there was a symbol of the guild icon in the player’s name (very important).
This helped the guild to be “recognized” on the server after some important event made by the guild.
In ragnarok, these events were basically the guild wars - the war of emperium (WoE).
The guilds who managed to keep one castle, out of the three~five castles per region, managed to keep the flags with their symbols for a week in the main city of those castles.
These flags in the main cities, with the icon in the player’s name, made the guild “recognizable” by the public.
That’s why it was interesting that these icons were in the player’s name.
And let’s be honest: nobody likes tabards.
Either I’m in a bubble where I only see players who hate tabards, or that’s a universal truth.
What would make sense are guild icons in the player name.
Xmog in this game is too important to be ruined by a tabard.
2 - The guild members/activities window was better in ragnarok.
The window was simple. It looked like an excel table, with name, class, rank, picture of the character’s face and status. There were well defined tabs for guild skills, perks, allied guilds, guild plan messages and activities.
The wow guild window has been improved but in my opinion it’s not nice enough.
First, the “new” icons on the sides like guild finder, should be tabs under this guild window.
Second, the main focus of this window should be on guild members/players.
That is, the listing of guild members should be in the center, large, as if it were an excel listing, with the player’s character photo there, rank, status, position, etc…
Nowadays that small list of members on the side of the current guild window doesn’t make sense to me.
It should be: a large list in the center, as if it were a table, with lines, showing first who is online, then offline, with a photo of the player’s character, race, class, rank, etc., and on the side a smaller chat for members to talk and tabs in there to change to other pages, like: enabled/learned guild skills, allied guilds (this will make sense later), guild messages, activities, etc.
3 - Guild activities.
In ragnarok the guild activity was the WoEs, as I mentioned before.
In WoW could be:
In orgrimmar, there should be 3 locations in the center of the city, with 5 flags in each location, representing the 3 forms of gameplay in the game: Raid, M+. and PvP.
The top 5 guilds with timing rank and key lvl would have the guild symbol stamped on the flags of m+. (this would require all players from groups in the same guild)
The top 5 guilds with the best rank in the guild ranked pvp, would have the guild symbol stamped on the pvp flags.
The top 5 guilds with the best raid results, which could be the timing (or some other idea you get) would have the guild symbol stamped on the raid flags.
Obviously, there could be a fourth activity, which for WoW would make sense:
The Lost Garrisons.
Every two weeks there could be an event where several Garrisons would be unprotected / open to invasion. The guild that maintained control of the center of these garrisons for enough time would be the controller of the place, and for another guild to regain control, just kill all the players present there and remain with a majority of members for 1 minute to be able to regain the location.
This would last for one hour, the guild with the highest control score during that hour would be considered the winner and “owner” of that garrison for two weeks, having access to an exclusive dungeon and some materials to make cosmetics and etc from that place. Varying from one garrison to another.
Allied guilds could also enter these dungeons, each guild being able to have 2 allied guilds.
The number of players in each guild could be capped at 60~70 players to avoid overpopulation problems in guilds.
In the end, Blizzard would have control of the number of players per server as well as the number of players allowed per guild to balance numbers and specify which servers have guilds for the event and which servers need guilds for such an event to be enabled.
As I’m a programmer and I work with databases this is basically table metrics and a few checks to know the exact number I’m talking about…
The most difficult thing to do would be for this event to be created (those garrisons).
The flags, icons in the player’s name and ranking is something more “ok” to be done, considering that all this already exists in game, what does not exist yet are these garrisons for the fourth event I mentioned.
Obviously, in technical terms, this should be in sparsely populated and instantiated regions, and there should be enough garrissons to spread the guilds and only the guilds ON THAT server would see each other, and there should be a minimum of guilds on the server for the event to occur, avoiding a dominance of a single guild on dead servers, and a maximum of guilds per server, which would make sense for guilds to migrate from server to balance things out.
4 - Guild House
Lastly, it would be nice for each guild, after all this, to have a house. A place where members could access guild storage and some guild-only npcs, getting these npcs out of orgrimmar / stormwind city once and for all.
Gaining space and relocation locations in orgrimmar for the guild flags that i’ve mentioned or other stuff.
In the end, they are things that take work to create in general, but that would make guilds have “life” in this game.
(I’m still revising the topic to fix some phrases)