Where a Guild Can Be a Guild!

6 months ago, I attended the most recent SOE Fan Faire in Las Vegas. One of the most exciting things to come out of that event was news of Guild Halls - REAL guild housing.

At the time of the announcement, we were told that Guild Halls were 9-12 months out from being released, because work on them had JUST begun.

That means we're 3-6 months out from actually seeing them in all their splendor. With fingers crossed on the nearer end of that range, I think it's time to really ponder what Guild Halls should be and do, as well as what they shouldn't.

I think one of the most important questions to decide is: WHO gets to build a Guild Hall? It seems to me that the answer certainly shouldn't be "everybody." In this day and age, after the nerf on Status Item turn-ins and the subsequent de-valuing of the lower-tier trinkets, the early levels of a fledgling guild are easier than ever. I expect if I started a new guild today, I could reach level 10 in under 1 platinum, while saving all my precious Heritage Quests for later levels.

The SOE Dev Team needs to not only come up with a huge, enticing list of features to be offered with Guild Halls, but they also need to space the perks out from minimum-purchase level through GL80. Because of this, I think a fair minimum level for Guild Halls would be GL30. Prior and up to GL30, other housing options become available, so it would seem natural for GL30 to be the jumping-off point for the most basic of Guild Halls.

Furthermore, let's talk about guild SIZE in relation to housing. I'm hardly one to take any sort of elitist stance regarding the breadth of guild rosters; if a guild of 6 is tight-knit enough to maximize their members' enjoyment of Norrath, I say kudos to them! What has always bothered me about the guild system in EQ2, however, is the lack of cleanup. Guilds of less than 6 members not only exist, but are actually quite common. All-too-often have I seen someone in Qeynos Harbor or East Freeport shouting out requests (sometimes even with promises of payment) to have people help him form his own, personal guild, with no intention of keeping the other 5 founders on the roster.

I can understand SOE being hesitant to delete undersized guilds due to possible customer service issues regarding loss of status contributions and guild banks. I don't totally agree (deletion after X days/months under size?), but I do understand.

Guild Halls are to be extra-special, though, and I've already seen some on the official forums chatting about how they need to solo their me-only guild up some more levels to make sure they have access to good perks. That's just really really really annoying. Really. If your roster can't keep the intended minimum of 6 accounts (maybe even active accounts?), then you shouldn't have access to Guild Halls. If your roster falls below that minimum at a later point, you should temporarily lose access to your Hall. I really can't fathom the idea of Qeynos or Freeport allowing single citizens to build personal fortresses. Really.

Ok I've said my peace about guild sizes. Let's move on to what key features the Guild Halls should offer.

Here's the thing...

SOE doesn't want the major cities to become "ghost towns." SOE wants the cities to be vibrant centers of commerce and socialization.

The problem is that they aren't this NOW, haven't been for ...ever, and probably never will be.

Does anyone consider "clusters of people standing at broker NPCs" to be either a center of commerce OR social? I don't. The only common sources of player interaction in any of the city zones are either special holiday events or asking for teleports. As it stands, if someone is moving around a city being non-AFK, they're probably A) On their way to their house, B) Tradeskilling, C) Turning in collections, D) Grabbing writs, E) Shopping at the broker or F) On their way out of the city.

None of those are social activities. None.

The social aspect of tradeskilling that came in with the epics has been best served in non-aligned zones like Teren's Grasp. Since Kunark, even writs become a non-City activity for the large, high-level player base, because they can be grabbed at Kylong Plains docks.

The only thing lost by giving the Guild Halls city-like amenities is the APPEARANCE that the cities of Norrath aren't ghost-towns. That may be important for new players, but there'll always be SOME people in the cities. If you want to make the cities seem more social from a newbie perspective, start by remaking them into Kunarkian super-zones. That way newbies can easily chat with each other via ooc and shout, as well as have a chance(!) to interact with non-newbies that happen to be in the cities for various business purposes.

Hm. Little tangent there. Back to the point, what should Guild Houses offer?

• Broker. This is one of the key things missing from houses now, which in turn have prevented me (and others) from being able to make my own guild housing. People don't come to guild houses if they can't take care of their most important business items there.
• Banker. See Broker.
• Access to House Vault. This CAN be done in makeshift guild housing now via the Friend access level, but it's a bear to manage due to the lack of a guildwide setting.
• Tradeskill Fuel Vendor. This also should provide a good place to sell junk loot. Tradeskill trainers should remain city-bound.
• Bind point. Binding to guild houses should be done via a separate skill or item than the Call Of <> skills. You do still want people going to the cities sometimes, after all, but you also want Guild Halls to provide a real social outlet. If you want to make it more interesting, make Guild Hall Recall Shards into a craftable item, where the recipe itself is a available on the Guild Hall Fuel Vendor (above), and the main ingredient for the Shard is a no-zone item pulled from a Guild Hall purchased fixture. Make the Shard poof if you deguild.
• Harbormaster/Boats. At the Fan Faire, it was stated that Guild Halls would likely reside on the shores of Antonica and Freeport, near the cities proper (in the case of Freeport, this is the only option). There should be some backyard area of the halls, for outdoorsy decorating, and with that it would also be nice to have a personal guild dock. For a price, of course, and probably a more expensive price than what's available in the cities (volume pricing), there should be a set of dock bells to locations around Norrath. Perhaps high level guilds could also purchase personal boats to Faydwer and Kunark, which would be a really nice touch (and a great money sink!)
• Artisan involvement in customizing. I admit bias a Carpenter, but frankly I don't think I'd want the job of doing all or even half or a third of building and decorating a full Guild Hall. Carpenters should certainly be involved (a project leader?), but the recent crafting epic quests and resultant Artisan Raids really have me salivating. Divide portions of Guild Hall construction amongst the 3 crafting classes (brainstorming): Outfitters can plan the aesthetics of room layouts and structure, and Craftsmen can handle the masonry. Scholars can work on anything mystical in nature such as bind points and portals, and maybe social aspects like the hiring of NPC employees.
• Purchase pooling. More for Status Points than money, but useful for both, Guild Halls need an expanded version of the escrow accounts currently available for individual housing. Members should be able to contribute their currently-underused status points to the Guild Hall for both rent and item/perk purchase, as needed.

Guild Level should influence purchase entry-points of these various features, as well as maximum Guild Hall size and the unlocking of heraldry-like visual customizations.

No Guild Hall should include trainers of any sort, in my opinion, writ-givers, collectors, or key world objects like Druid Rings. Teleports to new areas should be handled with care, lest we wind up with an EQ1 Plane of Knowledge style of transport that sucks all purpose of exploration out of the world.

Ok, that's it for now. If I think of anything else later, I'll be sure to add on!

Fantasy - The Only Frontier?

Over on Moorgard's blog, he wrote a short piece in response to an initial question here. Why are most MMORPGs based in the Fantasy genre?

I don't want to sound jaded or take anything away from the creativity of world designers, but I think Fantasy is the predominant MMORPG genre for a very simple reason: It's EASY.

Let's say for a moment that we decided to make an MMORPG out of a modern-day realistic genre. What types of characters can we offer a player? We have combat, stealth, charisma, and intelligence-based skills in our real world.

Combat in a modern setting is fairly similar to any other genre, even if the weapons aren't always the same. Guns would probably be the weapons of choice for most "adventurers" based on a combination of range and lethality, but more archaic modes of fighting still exist and can be used and identified with.

Stealth wouldn't change too much. Technology can make stealth less viable, but so can magic "detection" spells, racial vision traits, and the like.

Charisma in a realistic world could mean anything from a supermodel using looks to influence NPCs to a diplomat or clergyman invoking a silver tongue. This can all be viable if developers put some effort into it (one of EverQuest 2's flaws, in my opinion, is the utter lack of Charisma. Diplomacy is one of the few things Vanguard got right!)

Intelligence offers a lot of possibilities for careers to roleplay, but not as many in-the-moment systemic options. If a fighter gets shot, a realistic medic can't charge into the middle of a firefight and fix up the wound on an active combatant. A chemist could whip up any number of concoctions to solve a variety of problems, but chemistry takes time and often non-portable equipment. Same goes for, say, Engineers.

The suspension of disbelief inherent in a Fantasy genre where we're told "magic exists" makes it all so much easier. Even when it's not something a PC himself can do, you can always end a plot-line in a manner such as, "With Blud'Spirt the Demon Lord out of the way, Sparklefart the Sage was freed and cast his Spell of Temporal Bridge-Shifting, thus instantly summoning the Ancient Span of Prince Fulbar out of the past, which in turn enabled the Swamp Elf army to cross the Chasm of Shadowy Rainbows."

Drawing up blueprints, hiring a team of contractors, and overseeing the erection of a large bridge just doesn't "pop" in the same way.

Now of course, I'm just talking about a modern, realistic genre here. SOE's upcoming The Agency looks to be set in a semi-realistic environment, but it's a hybrid RPG/Shooter. That's a big difference from a straight-up RPG.

I have played tabletop RPGs in my day that were "realistic" in their genre and rules. They never quite stuck with me, and based on the big-name tabletop games I can think of off of the top of my head, the less-fantastical RPGs never did too well with anyone else, either.

If I'm going to play an RPG, would I really want to play a technical trainer whose height of adventure is braving the wilds of Southern California traffic every day? That's not an RPG - that's a Sim. MMOSIM was tried once, and it didn't work too well.

What if I played an RPG where I was a soldier in Vietnam? There's plenty of grim and grisly plot to keep things interesting, but come on, I learned about that stuff in school. Gaming isn't homework!

We don't play RPGs to do "normal" stuff. We play RPGs to have experiences well beyond the bounds of what could be accomplished in normal life. As such, ANY successful MMORPG that emerges on the market is going to be "fantastic" in nature.

Look at the genres we have seen thusfar. Swords & sorcery "fantasy," science fiction, and superhero. Those are the big MMORPG players. Are any of them REALLY different?
Sci-fi like Star Wars or Star Trek hide behind technobabble to recreate the same basic things that magic objects accomplish in a Fantasy world.

Superhero powers are almost identical to magic in effect, but with different backstories.
Alien races and/or mutants in either of the above are little different than the humanoid races and horrible monsters that we have in an EverQuest.

ANY game (all MMORPGs that I know of) where you can die and re-spawn is purely fantasy. Even sci-fi cloning doesn't make sense if you have retention from after the time you dropped off your DNA.

So fine, basically all MMORPGs can be boiled down to "Fantasy" if we argue things a certain way. But that's not what the original question was. Clearly, the intent of the original question was regarding Swords & Sorcery Fantasy as opposed to other storytelling milieus.

I'm going to stick with my "it's easy" explanation:

• Origins - Earth's history contains hundreds of creation myths that already have a D&D feel to them (or, more to the point, D&D borrows from ancient creation myths). Making a new story about how a group of gods created the races as their children yadda yadda isn't really new at all. That doesn't make it uninteresting, but it does make it easier than coming up with something totally original.
  
• Magic vs. Technobabble - People expect gadgets to come with some means of explaining how they work. Magic just IS. We wiggle our fingers a certain way and fire shoots from our fingertips. Sometimes there's code words involved, or even reagents, but apart from potion recipes, magic rarely has to explain that Part A was glued to Part B and infused with Radioactive Substance Q to produce Effect XX. Magic tends to measure will or intent in ways technology can't.
  
• MUDcestors - The graphical MMORPGs of today were born from the text MUDs of yesterday. The text MUDs were designed by (heroic) nerds who wanted to bring their tabletop D&D games to life. D&D was born from the legacy of Tolkien.

What else needs to be said? RPGs have evolved to offer a wide variety of choices over the years, but High Fantasy is where it started. It's been bred into us. We gamers know and comprehend the ins-and-outs of wizards and warriors, mazes and monsters, and all-powerful rings better than anything else.

Game designers are artists. They want to take the visions in their heads and bring them to spectacular life. Most of those visions, thanks to how we grew up, are of talismans and dragons. If that's your passion, then that's the sort of game you'll be best at making.

From a business standpoint, games also need money. EverQuest was huge while Earth & Beyond sucked the pipe. Tell a publisher or venture capitalist that you're going to improve upon the EverQuest formula and out comes the blank check! Now World of Warcraft has the throne, and companies want a piece of THAT fantasy pie instead.

So far, games like City of Heroes and EVE Online haven't been able to achieve a high enough profit margin to spawn many competitors. After debacles like Auto Assault, really unique MMOs are going to be hard to secure funding for. That's what has led us to the market we have today, and I don't think it's going to change significantly in the near future.

...for the record, I'm not necessarily happy about that. I love high fantasy, but I do want to see new things as well!!

Future Fantasy?

Amongst my first RPG experiences - computer or otherwise - was one of the all-time greats: Ultima IV. To this day I'm still perplexed by how much I love that game despite my absolute frustration with it. The Virtue system was SUCH a bugger and distinctly UN-fun at times. Take the one NPC who asks you if you're The Avatar, where if you say yes you lose Humility, and if you say no you lose Honesty; either way demolishing your avatarhood (avatarship? avatarosity? avatarliciousness?). Bad designer, bad bad bad!

That is to say, I never won the damn game. Eventually I was so fed up that I traded it to a school chum for Ultima I, just so I could see more in the series and, hopefully, learn that they weren't all so diabolical.

I was dumbstruck by Ultima I. In the Ultima IV world I was used to, the height of technology was a hot air balloon. In Ultima V (which I didn't have at the time, but had heard about), glass weaponry was the new hotness. But Ultima I? The Ultima that took place years - if not generations - before the ones I was already familiar with? Oh let's see...lightsabers, laser guns, and a freakin' SPACE SHUTTLE, complete with combat against baddies that bore a striking, low-res similarity to TIE Fighters!

As a Star Wars fan, I'm perfectly OK with the notion of mixing a little Sci-Fi into my Fantasy story. Not in every game, of course, but I have great fondness for Star Wars games, the Wizardry series, and especially Alternate Reality.

I haven't played all the Ultima games, and I don't pretend to know all the lore, but I've played Ultima I, I understand that Ultima III involved a demonic supercomputer, and then IV comes along and it's all gone. Geographically-speaking, Brittania didn't change into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, though there was undoubtedly some continental shift taking place. How does a whole planet just devolve? So far as I know, there was never a lore explanation for this, nor do I know of the people of Brittania ever recovering from this technological debacle in generations to follow. What was so bad about the fantasy/sci-fi mix? It made Origin a lot of money!

I'm often amazed at how accepting we are of our fantastic worlds never evolving. It isn't just gaming worlds, but literature as well. Gandalf roamed Middle Earth for thousands of years with nothing but horses and carts at best. Belgarath (a personal favorite) can recall an approximate 9000 year existence, during which time the height of technological development seemed to be a well-kept international highway. Harry Potter's wizarding world developed right alongside muggle technology, yet considers telephones to be quaint and silly compared to owl post, despite the fact that phones provide instant communication while owls require time to fly.

And that, dear readers, brings me to EverQuest 2 and the world of Norrath. I admit knowing essentially nothing about fare inspired by the EQ MMOs (Lords of EverQuest, Champions of Norrath, a handful of novels), but we have a 1000-year timeline to look at just among the 3 MMOs currently out there: EverQuest 1 set the zero-point, with EverQuest Online Adventures set 500 years earlier, and EverQuest 2 set 500 years later.

Scholars abound, so it would be hard to argue that Norrath is in a dark age, yet all but one of the races shun technology in favor of manual labor and/or magic. The one race that truly invents are the Gnomes, and I'd argue that even they haven't changed so much. In EQ1 there was already a subversive, self-aware element hanging out in the caves under Ak'Anon, and the big change is that the Gnomes got their asses SkyNetted out of their home city. The Tinkering skill of today offers more options and toys than the EQ1 version, but on the whole it seems surprising that in 500 years, such technology hasn't led to the production of, say, a personal computer.

I could certainly understand if the experiences of the gnomes dissuaded the rest of the races from embracing the art of robotics, but what about some intermediary steps between discovering metal alloys and artificial intelligence?

Explosives have been discovered, but no one (gnome or otherwise - come on humans, innovate!) came up with the idea of a slugthrower? Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of gunplay, but from a sociological-lore-writing standpoint, I don't understand why authors/designers shy away from letting their societies develop.

Personally, I think societal advancement over time could provide really interesting options for the EverQuest license. In a gaming genre much maligned for focusing too much on fantasy while settings like sci-fi, superhero, or even modern-realism go widely unused, I'd love to see the true FUTURE of Norrath. Let's brainstorm!

EQ2010 - Elves, dragons, and magic mix with politics, mafia, and machine guns (at least in Freeportopolis) in a gritty modern-day setting. Sound like Shadowrun? Well, it should. The Shadowrun-style genre is basically non-existent in the MMO world, and that should really change. Since Microsoft seems content to stay out of the MMO market and just make Shadowrun into a lame shooter, another company should pick up the slack.

EverQuest 5399: The Final Frontier - What would the world and universe be like if both magic and technology kept growing and evolving into the space age? Alien forms aren't a totally new concept in Norrath, so what if there's more to their invasion methods besides a wearisome "dimensional portal?" Phaser Gun or Fireball Spell - you decide!

EQAftermath - Far into the future, the races of Norrath went to war and destroyed just about everything, including their entire record of history. The remnants of the races start to form small societies again, but technology is setback to medieval at best, and even magic is more scarce than before. (This would be handy when EQ2 characters are up to level 200, soloing Nagafen, and the fantasty genre needs a healthy reboot :)

So what do you think, fair reader? Should fantasy worlds evolve over time into the future just as the real world does, or should modern and sci-fi stories only be based on their own independent backgrounds? What else would be a fun new take on the world of Norrath? Any Photoshoppers wanna make some FutureEQ box art?