What are the pros/cons of using a player house as a guild hall of sorts vs. using a guild hall proper? We are a small guild and would like to use a plot in one of the more populated neighborhoods and the available guild plots are enormous in size and removed from the populated areas in the neighborhoods we have been scouting. Also if the guild drops below the required number of members to be considered a "guild" not sure the impact to the guild hall in this case. Can Bankers/guild bankers be placed in a home? Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Howdy, welcome to or back to EQ! Housing vs. Proper Guild Hall?: So you've already pretty much identified the biggest cons of using a house as a proxy for the guild hall & that's the NPCs. Last I checked you can only place housing NPCS (e.g. personal parcel NPC) in player housing and Guild vendor NPCs in Guild Halls. "Flavor" roamer NPCs or familiars are the only ones I'm aware of that can be placed interchangeably. Likewise, only guild halls can go on guild plots and houses on housing plots. The obvious con to the guild plot there is that it gives you a lot less variety in housing. (e.g. you can't use cool houses like the Wayward Lady [i.e. the pirate ship], the Hive of the Bixie, or Evantil's Abode [i.e. the giant tree], as guild halls. Guild Membership & Losing Plot?: Honestly, this is pretty rare, I'd appreciate it if someone could confirm, but I believe you can register alts to your guild, meaning meeting the requirement should be easy. I don't know of any guilds that've had too few members so I'm not even sure if that restriction comes into play. Guild Plot Location vs. Other Player's Housing: Candidly, housing is first come first serve unless your guild buys its own neighborhood (in which case it'll be first come first serve within your own guild). Often (but definitively not always) a populated court will be already be people in the same guild & they're the ones using the guild hall plot. Rando's (i.e. not guild buddies) will naturally populate and congregate in courts , but often people will run a side-guild for their own alts. Very often, a "rando court"'s guild lot will get snatched up by someone just wanting a plot for their personal alt guild. Your best bet might be to just rent the lots & guild plot in an entire court and make new guild members co-owners of court's housing plots as you recruit. In other words, pick a spot, settle and build it up yourselves. Bonus Tip: You can save/load your guild/housing plot item/NPC placements very easily. So moving isn't really that hard if you're still a small guild without a lot of members/items placed. i.e. I wouldn't sweat your fledging guild's location too much yet because it won't be hard to relocate your hall if you do see a spot you like open up. Edit: However, I do want to caution that moving gets more complicated the more players you have in your guild placing items because items unique to their owners will make packing/unpacking trickier.
I would go for the guild hall if you can swing it. Just for the teleport guy alone its worth it. They may seem far away from the rest of the neighborhood but you can enter your guild hall thru the guild lobby and if you get a Shabby Lobby Door and put it in your guild hall then you can use that to go back into the lobby. Plus you can buy anchors thru the loyalty npc or marketplace and place those in your guild plot or hall (so long as your a paid or Silver player) and port right to it. The house and that plot will not hold near enough items even for a small guild. You cannot put a banker or any of the other guild NPC in a house. You can put a personal parcel merchant thru a little quest. But any more than 3 players with those merchants and it will be like bunking in summer camp. There are 4 types of guild halls. You can also purchase a guild neighborhood and guild hall package called a "writ of sunrise" - This is in the marketplace for about $30. Go with the Palatial because it is the largest one. You can only place and own one guild hall so make it big! Do not buy any guild hall accessories until you have fully unpacked your guild hall - doesn't matter if its the ones thru marketplace or NPC in Sunrise but they all come with an "accessory package" that will include your banker, recharge pool, tribute NPC, teleport guy with all teleports etc. If a guild drops below 10 members or runs out escrow funds, the Guild Hall gets parceled to the current guild leader. Only the guild leader will be able to put a placed guildhall in their inventory. So if you bought it and you are not the guild leader then he can run off with it anytime he wants I made a lot of alts to make up the ten players. But at least I know I will never fall below 10! If your not sure then I would suggest you buy one of the houses from the Loyalty merchant if you have enough points. Those houses when you set them will not charge you rent. You will need to pay plot rent. So once you buy the plot you want you will need to put some currency in it for "escrow" (plot rent) I use loyalty points again and buy bags of doubloons cause they are only 11 points and you get like 100 of them and it only take 7 for a full week! Guild halls also charge rent. Any other questions we will be glad to answer!
I started with a house thru loyalty like the post above mentioned. It was in a guild neighborhood that was open so I did not own the "hood". I soon filled that up so since I have 8 character slots, I made some alts. Made a couple free accounts with 2 characters each and made my own guild. So yes, it did take ten members for the guild hall. And yes, they can be alts. I bought the neighborhood package cause I just didn't like being in a random neighborhood. It has my guild's name so I can easily find it when I go to the gate. You get no choice in the neighborhood name. It will be "your guild name II" Edit: the other reason I bought a guild hall is because I was just in the "Novice" Guild which is offered on all servers. Novices of Server name -get in thru a quest. That allowed me to use the port in the standard guild hall on the right in the lobby. But I didn't like not controlling the bankers etc What are "courts" that are mentioned above? oh, think he means neighborhoods, heh was confusing.
The basic (Batcave) guild hall has all the amenities of a placed hall except the ability to place items, like clickie ports and trophies which can be guildwide. Before the recent server merge I had a 1 character guild tag for storage. I liked the name and wanted to import it to our new server, so I rolled some alts and moved a couple lowbies from another tag to make it to 10 members to be sure I kept the tag after the move and placed a hall. Personally, I like to collect placeables and make a nice roleplay kinda vibe guild hall. Several classes get guild hall specific ports and all can get guild hall specific anchors in addition to personal anchors, so there is additional functionality there also. Placeables include Quest arc reward stat trophies, expansion specific portal clickies, healing pool, combat test dummies, guild halll specific anchors, tradeskill workables and literally THOUSANDS of graphiced placeable items to decorate with just for the FUN of it. There is also the storage side of this. You can stash an awful lot of spell scrolls and such in closet and hang weapons, shields and even temporary items just by placing them. (Mage weapons, shodowed rapier for Jboots quest, Modrods etc are all placeables for instance and can be pre-summoned or pre-looted and stashed.
I am in 2 guilds with different alts (associated guilds) and am the one doing the majority of the hall decorating. One guild has a Palatial and the other has the next largest (I forget the name of it). I actually prefer the non-Palatial one and have it decorated more cohesively. The Palatial is perhaps just a bit too big with lots of side rooms.The Palatial also takes up a lot more of the plot if you want to do more in the yard (or even have the Hall only taking up half a plot). Both are, like the houses, a lot bigger on the inside than the outside (TARDIS technology at work ). The only one of the placable Guild Halls I don't like, especially inside, is the "standard" which is the same interior as the non-neighbourhood guild hall but without anything placed. It's far too dark and the spaces are... odd. The outside is very Greek temple-like with pillars and stuff. The two middle-size guild halls have the same outside appearance, kinda fort-like, with the bigger one just expanding on the interior space of the smaller with an additional 'back' area. (The guild leader of one of the guilds and semi-defacto leader of the other had one of each of the halls in his inventory from when the more active guild was considering getting one and wanted to choose.) As for guild hall locations in a neighbourhood, 2 of them are on hills overlooking a valley (with house plots) and 2 are connected to valley, but in their own area/valley. All four locations have their own flavour which lends itself to different kinds of decorating (if you're into that). Place a Kicking Gnome in the yard of a Hall or House if you want a quick trip to the gate without using the teleport pad. As for moving from one neighbourhood to another... Save a layout FIRST. (in fact, save layouts often while you are decorating). Get the big estate crate and place it in the yard. When the hall packs up, that might be enough to hold everything because anything that's No Trade will be parceled in an "eviction crate" and sent to the owner. When you get to the new spot, place the crate in the yard, unpack the crate from the shift + i window (everything will go to yard storage), then use the layout you saved to put it all into place. Be sure to pick up the crate from the yard (or unpack again if it still has items, use the layout, then pick it up). Then, and this might be the trickier part. Have each character (guild or associate) who received an eviction crate place the crate in either the yard or the hall and Unpack the crate (then pick it up into inventory). Use the layout you saved before to send things to their rightful spot. Each time you run the layout, if there are items missing (i.e. still in someone's eviction crate), you will get a list of "could not place". That list will dwindle as more of the lost crates are unpacked. Once everything is back in place, I suggest making a new layout just because I am a huge proponent of SAVE OFTEN (due to working on finicky computers over the years that have had a propensity for eating unsaved stuff including auto-saved). Do not rely on an auto-save. You have no control over when the auto did it's saving and I have personally found it to be a bit unintuitive on when/what is saves. But... other than it being finicky, it is remarkably easy to move from one neighbourhood to another. These directions are also how you can move a house from one plot to another in the same neighbourhood or to another neighbourhood. The guild I am in with the palatial hall did such a move recently along with the housing of any guildy (mostly me) who had placed them.Oh and which plot you unpack/layout-apply on doesn't matter. You can move from one plot location to another as long as the yard decor is less than the max of the new one.
Thank you all for the responses and all the great housing/guild hall tips! In retrospect my original question was pretty dumb. Guild plot rent is cheaper than housing plots (2 pp vs 8! ) so we decided on a guild plot for the reasons you all stated above. The banking and portal is an awesome convenience!
