WoW's Guild Problem

Community General Discussion
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I think it’s important that we resurrect this discussion, as the community is perhaps the most important part of any MMORPG.

For those who are unaware, the guild system in World of Warcraft at the moment – compared to pretty much any other MMORPG on the market – is extremely outdated. Guilds get very few updates anymore outside of the addition of a few instance-based achievements.

The last “update” they got was nearly 3 years ago in Battle for Azeroth’s pre-patch, but it was nothing short of disastrous for guild leaders. If you’d like to read up on why this is the case, check out Osiris’ thread on the matter:

TL;DR: Guild masters were given (and to this day are still given) far fewer options. If we want someone to have access to set their public note, they essentially must have every other officer permission as well (i.e. deleting messages, editing the guild MOTD, and more).

Today, I’d like to at least start a conversation of what Blizzard can do to improve guilds. I think having a strong community-based system in this game is very important, and is the basis for having engaging content to do.

My Ideas for Improvements

I encourage all of you to share what you think could make the guild system better in the game. As somebody who was a guild master for nearly 5 years, I'll share my input below.

Guild Halls

I cannot stress this enough. I think it’s important for guilds to have some form of centrality in-game. As a guild master, I’d even like this to be done first over player housing. Take some time to make an instanced location that members of a guild can go to. I’ve had some ideas of what guild halls could have for a long time. Here’s a small list:

  • Group Instance Teleports: If your guild has cleared a raid, have a stone that, when interacted with 10+ people in a raid group, teleports that entire group to that raid.
  • Guild Missions: Have group mission quests where you have to have 3+ members in a guild group to do a Mythic+ dungeon or some form of open-world content, and reward the guild with a certain universal reward that can be purchased or something (or something that puts gold in the guild bank).
  • Trophy Hall: Can’t stress this enough. Guilds need to have physical trophies that can be displayed in guild halls based on certain achievements. Of course, this assumes that there’d be more achievements added to guilds, which I discuss below.
  • Guild Treasury: A guild bank, essentially.
  • What’s Not in Guild Halls: No auction houses, questing boards, missions/work orders, and no regular banks. We don’t want cities to be entirely emptied out!

General Additions

They really need to make some updates to guild permissions and the general function of guilds. Here’s some ideas.

  • Higher Player Cap: Please increase the player cap. With all the alts people (somehow) have these days, it’d be nice to have more space for alts.
  • Recognize Alts: If a player has multiple toons in a guild, allow them to mark a main character and provide a dropdown based on their BNet account’s characters to easily show their alts. This is also helpful if a player and their alts need to be kicked.
  • Visible Guild Reputation: The new guild UI doesn’t show a player’s reputation with the guild. Some guilds use guild rep as part of their ranking system. Though it’s accessible in the old UI, it should be able to be seen in the new UI too.
  • MOTD: Allow for the use of symbols and longer messages in the MotD tab.
  • Guild Information and Links: Allow for the use of symbols and longer messages in the guild info tab, and have a separate area to put certain links!
  • Send Mail to All: Allow the GM to send mail to ALL players in the guild at once (this would have a 1-day cooldown).
  • More Ranks and Rank Badges: Allow for the creation of more ranks, and let us choose certain icons for ranks if need be!
  • De-Homogenize Permissions: Make all of the officer checkbox permissions separate permissions again.

Achievements

Simply put, it’d be great to have all kinds of new achievements to go for. Obviously, the new ranking system doesn’t make Keystone Master in season 2 an ideal grind whatsoever, but it’d be cool to have a group keystone master (i.e. complete all the +15s on time in season 2) for a special title similar to “Famed Slayer” (or even a mount for those who partook).

It’d also be nice to have some new achievements across the board, though. Whether it be for island expeditions, more quest completion achievements (including world quests now), and just additional achievements for certain general completion achievements (i.e. killing more critters, earning more gold, getting more reps to Exalted, reaching max level on allied races, etc.)

Thank you for reading. Again, please share your own grievances with the guild system down below, as well as what you might like to see from Blizzard down the road. Obviously, we’re in a tough spot right now, as it’s been 7 months without a content update. That should be a priority for Blizzard at the moment, but down the line when they (hopefully) have things a bit more together, they can focus on this glaring social issue in the game.

Shared Ideas

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This is a neat idea. Thank you for posting it.

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I couldn’t agree more. My guild on my main has been together for a while now, and pretty much everyone agrees that it’d be so cool to have a guild hall we could just hang out in. It’d be a really nice feature to see added.

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Just FYI, Blizzard’s only comment on guild halls (a few years ago) was, “Guild halls sound like great fun for the GM, not so much for anyone else.”

So you’ll need to get over that hump if you want to convince them.

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Thanks! Definitely hope Blizzard does something about it in the future. I’m sure guild halls would take quite a while to put together, but if they worked on it incrementally in the background, I could see it working out well.

Yup. Just as a center for a community. It’d be nice to have.

I can see why they’d say that, and I can totally understand their aversion. I feel like guild halls would have to be relatively limited in features in that case. They’ve made it work in so many other MMOs though, so I don’t see why it couldn’t work in WoW.

But yeah, if they have an aversion to it, who knows. Maybe their philosophy on it has since changed ever since this crazy long wait.

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I think the list is okay but it leaves off the most important thing of all: Helping people find good guilds.

Blizzard really needs to turn to the data management industry for some help with this. Because they have all sorts of data, they just don’t use it.

Blizzard knows:

  • What time of day we play.
  • How regularly we play.
  • What types of things we do a lot in game.
  • How far we progress in those difficulties.

Surely Blizzard can use this data, and help to get people in contact with others, who play the same times they do, who like to do the same things, and do them at the same skill level?

If in 30 seconds I can find the perfect insurance policy, why can’t Blizzard point people at some guilds that would be a good fit for them?

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In my opinion, it seems that the focus on Guilds is over and “Communities” will be the main social units going forward.

Since Blizz has no indication that they are going to shut down servers, "Communities " allow low pop server players to still interact as part of a larger group

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I don’t want this to turn into an ‘other games are better’ thread because I support what you’re saying 100%, but take a look at the upcoming game “Ashes of Creation” especially with an eye towards what they’re planning on doing with Guilds.

I especially like the idea of guilds being able to declare war on one another. Many of the ideas you’ve expressed are being built into that game and when it’s out I fully intend to try it for a bit. Not saying I’m done with WoW then, but I’ll definitely at least split my time between the two.

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You’re absolutely right, and I even have a whole concept written up for that. Guess I forgot to add it to the list haha.

Yeah, we need to have a system that makes finding guilds and joining guilds easier. It’s still ridiculous how often players are overlooked in the guild finder.

Gosh, I hope not. It’s been a long while since we’ve gotten any update regarding guilds/communities, and I can’t recall any heavy use of communities if I’m being honest. I feel like low pop servers exist for a reason, and in a way, it can build tighter-knit guilds (or could w/o CRZ).

Hopefully they don’t go down that path, though. Communities are extremely limited in what they can accomplish, imo.

Oh, 100%. I’ve been taking a look at it, and it looks absolutely awesome. I’m pretty set on having some sort of dedication to WoW (albeit nothing heavy until they fix the major issues) but I’ll definitely be trying out different MMOs to get some fresh air in me.

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In Dark Age of Camelot there were 3 factions in the game, at war, and each had a frontier with 8 castles in it. As a guild’s members did things, the guild built up Guild Points. A guild could claim one of their realm’s 8 castles (or conquer another realm’s castle and claim one of those) and spend their Guild Points to upgrade to make it stronger.

And the guild’s pennants would fly from the rooftops. And all the guards (and the Keep’s Lord) would have the guild’s tag under their names. Since the entire realm had access to the castle as a base and would use it during gameplay, you got to see your guild’s name in lights, so to speak.

That’s how you make guilds cool.

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This, for sure.

But the communities thing is useful even within the Guild-is-primary structure because, as is the case with the guild my main is in, some guilds are more social than anything else and players may prefer that for general use. The PVP community I created is more focused on just rated PVP play of one sort or another. There’s not a lot of twaddle and nonsense going on in chat there. So between the two, I have a fairly full and fairly satisfying game experience having both available to me at once.

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I disagree with 99% of what you argue about but dear god this is correct.

Finding guilds other than the traditional means of player’s you’ve seen before is so bad. Why is it I can’t find guilds who are just doing Normal, or low M+ keys and teaching players? We’re getting a M+ scoring system now, but yet for some reason there’s no way to say:

“Hey you’re currently parsing at x%. You consistently play during Y times. Here’s a group of players who match your profile that want to get more people to play with”

Instead we have guild finder where guilds who are “teaching guilds” break apart in 2 months because of lack of consistency. Or you have overcrowded mid-tier guilds rejecting everyone because the first tier is non-existent. Then the top guilds reject everyone because there’s only so many slots they can fill.

Its the same thing I think with the LFG tool. It’s literally atrocious. Yet some reason Blizzard insists this is a good model. Every other major MMORPG that’s Blizzard’s competition doesn’t want you to go to a third party website to find players, or they don’t want you to browse discord servers for players. They want you in the game using their tools they give you to find people.

It’s why I think WoW is seriously just League at this point without MMR.

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Communities are still relatively new so you are correct…

But even on my high pop server I have been raiding in a cross server community for the last couple x-packs because my guild has 4 or 5 active players.

You can do both, but the ability to communicate cross server and be in multiple communities as the same time will increase their importance over time.

For most player, the only reason to be in a guild at this point is access to perks…and maybe free repairs if your guild is generous

And as a side note, if you remember the original guilds perks/functions…they have been heavily nerfed since then. Especially the guilds ability to generate funds

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3 XPACS is “relatively new”?

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This is an amazing idea. I commend your attention to detail-- this is REALLY well thought out. I hope Blizzard decides to do these things.

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Around 5 years in a 16 year old game…yeah, that’s relatively new

Plus Blizz did a very poor job emphasizing them, so many players still don’t know they exist

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An old liitle request, but as a solo player, I’d still like the ability to make a guild to hold my alts without having the guild creation mechanics fighting me every step of the way.

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as a guild GM who wants nothing to do with guild halls, It would really suck if they implemented them and I was forced to deal with it because people wanted stuff done to it.

if they do it, i hope they give us the ability to make a rank to manage it. I would happily pass guild hall management on to anyone in the guild who wanted to do it.

A side note:

I made a guild in TBC for my retail guild to drop charcters in, and holy cow do I have MORE functionality and flexibility in guild management in freaking classic than I do in retail. it is so amazingly stupid how much they’ve hobbled us.

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Yeah they are like the systems they keep adding since Legion .

They are relatively new so they don’t know if the concept will work yet :rofl:

By the way OP great thread with some good ideas

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They were on the launcher notice regularly and the Guild panel was changed to include a tab for them with the same size and general positioning as the Guild tab.

I suppose there were (and still are) players who just don’t pay attention to things, but they were well-publicized at the time.