One guild per character in EverQuest Next? Or more?

A player should be able to join a guild and the guild should be able to form a "House or Clan" with other guilds.

Man, this can be a big one.

Some people think of their guild as the end all of the game. It just isn't a game feature but a game changer. If you allow 1 character, 1 guild as in you only get 1 character you may lose a lot of players. This is a RPG, not a facebook farming game. Some people like the game play and not the end result. Some people like to play multiple character types and attitudes. If you allow just 1 character, which i don't think this is about, then it will change the player base.

If it is 1 guild per player, then you are again limiting the RP of the game. If I want to join a guild that is about raiding and raiding only then that is my choice. But what if I want to have a raid driven group for my main and a trade driven group for my alt. I know there are a lot of people who may pass out seeing the term alt but a lot of players have them.

What I take from the title and poll is 1 guild per character, that would mean I have a ranger and he is in 1 guild. This is an interesting idea. Could I be in a guild that is my adventure guild and a guild that is a trade guild and maybe a clan that is a game type, as in protector or destroyer of the land? This could be pretty cool.

Also as far as guilds go. I would like to see useful guilds or maybe a clan if multi guilds is available. A guild designed for helping people find things, Rather than a wiki you could ask a sage for help. A guild designed for enforcing the rules (would have to be a pvp server for most of these.) a guild for causing problems, random killings, clearing areas whatever. A guild for assassinations. A guild for magic research. Etc. These would be like a clan if multi guilds are available but would have to be governed by a paid player from SOE just to make them keep on course. It could add a lot to game play.

For me I think it would be confusing to have the option to be in more than one. And how would it be displayed? Like normally you're guild name is under your name. The option to switch out I suppose but still seems over the top. I'm for one guild for one character.

I've seen the debauchery that multiple guilds can create when they can all see your lone character and you aren't representing them. It shouldn't happen, but bad feelings arise and it creates problems. I have yet to join a guild with that system where the guild leader didn't complain about feeling as though his guild wasn't awesome enough to have people wanting to represent it. If they don't know you're on, don't know what guild you're in, more's the better. There's no insecurities.

Multiple guilds per character just seems silly. If you want to be in a guild then you should devote your time towards it. If that guild isn't what you are looking for then look for a different guild!

edit: (Or make one!)

A simple solution is for them to make another character and roll into another guild with their friends/family. If they'd like to use their higher lvl char for that, they can simply swap out chars in the main guild their in and put the more completed char int he f&f guild.

Both parties still get what they want without having to add in a multi-guild system like GW2/ESO.

I can certainly see the logic in allowing one character to be associated with multiple groups. You can (for example) be part of a guild/family and still spend some of your time coordinating with alternate groups that have more specific agendas. It was for this reason that I was initially excited by Guild Wars 2's system of of allowing a single character to represent several guilds.

However, in practice it seems to do more harm than good, particularly for smaller guilds. Part of the reason people join guilds is for the social aspect.. to be a part of something larger than themselves. But if a player logs in and nobody from their guild happens to be around, and they have the option of temporarily representing another guild which does happen to have members online, then they tend to switch over rather than waiting for company to show up.

And that's understandable. However, the problem happens when the next person from their original guild comes in and is now in the same situation, and then they take the same action. And it repeats, creating a scenario where this family is now scattered apart more often than not. Eventually new bonds are formed and the old ones drop, and I've seen many guilds in GW2 fall apart from exactly this.

When you can no longer hop back and forth between guilds, when the act of leaving a guild is more permanent.. it seems to make smaller guilds more stable because people are no longer coming and going on a whim. They are part of a single family, and the desire to be part of that guild (combined with the lack of an easy means of temporarily ignoring a problem) causes them to invest themselves, making that guild a better place that ultimately becomes more appealing to them.

So, in the end I would prefer that characters only be allowed to be a member of one guild at any given moment, without a means of switching allegiance on a whim.

I don't really like guilds to begin with, and I generally just make a guild for me and my husband. However, I'm more likely to join others in a guild if I can have that private guild with my husband too. That way when I don't want to deal with others I can and IF I ever want to I can just change my active guild to do so.

One character one guild is the best option here. Community building needs to happen, but meshing it all together has worked to mess things up. When guilds have "alliances," they may as well be one guild. Just because this game is trying to be new and different, doesn't mean everything has to be new and different. The more hardcore the guild, the more dedication required by players in it, playing with and communicating with players outside your guild does not require a tool beyond your friends list. Period.

One final thought, just because no one's done it before, doesn't mean it's a good idea. No one I know has ever deliberately swallowed steel wool and bleach, but I'm not going to do it to be a trail blazer.

One character, one guild. Historically, guilds were very secretive and not open to sharing information with other guilds, and even less open to the world at large. Guild is a bad name for this kind of organization anyway, it's more of a Club or an Order. A guild guards and teaches information relative to a particular profession. A clan suggests a familial relationship.

That does kind of bring up an interesting dynamic though. Why not some of each?

Why not give players the ability to be part of an Order, but also be part of a Clan, and maybe even also part of a Guild? Yes, it's a little complicated, but each serves a different purpose so they could overlap.

There would have to be some structure to it - Guilds would have certain benefits relating to the type of guild being organized. A merchant's guild would have certain buying and selling benefits, maybe a traders' market, access to the docks where they could invest in shipping, and so on (huge potential for mini-games), but within the guild you could still be a mage, a warrior, etc. A crafting guild might have other benefits, and a mercenary guild may have still others, each depending on the guild management, and all adding to the uniqueness of each player.

Clans would have to be a different kind of association, and perhaps would give greater benefits to people grouping together in the same clan (a solidarity bonus).

An Order could be just about anything for any reason, and could be given certain world bonuses based on world view. They should have a mission statement and have to declare a certain modus operandi (i.e. a type of order), but it's more along the lines of modern MMO guilds.

There are a massive number of combinations possible here, and the good part is they'd be mostly player controlled, depending on how the player wants to spend his or her time in the game. And it could get even MORE interesting if each type could independently declare war (or feuds, et al)... what happens if two clans who all belong to the same order declare a feud? Does the Order get involved?

And does it make me a tiny bit sadistic if I get excited at that prospect?

This is what I get for not reading the entire thread first. A lot of people are thinking along these lines, but I think that this works especially if the benefits make sense to each type of player group, and it would help (as I said earlier) add to the uniqueness of each character in the game. Managing it would not be overly complex either.

And regarding a mechanism for a formal alliance... I think it's fine, but this should be limited in scope and not rob from the identity of the base groupings.

This. x10.

MMOs have been around long enough that if you go back to the basics - the things that made them great to begin with - you're being new and different to an entire generation of gamers.

Some of us are interested in making min/maxing more difficult too, or at least not so exclusive Min/maxing shoehorns players into set class types and builds and limits play styles. When players are not invited to the raids where they can get good drops until they have good drops from that raid (to get the prerequisite DPS/mitigation/whatever) - it gets to be seriously frustrating, and the big guilds just get bigger while new guilds never get any momentum. Especially for us grown-ups with families who have a life outside of the game and can't invest 20 hours or more per week in hardcore play time, but still enjoy end-game content.

I know the "grown-ups" comment was kind of a dig. I apologize for it, but I'm not going to remove it. This is kind of a key point for me too

See, I would argue exactly the opposite. It seems to be that limiting the social circles of players in MMORPGs is what is diluting the community. Many limit their socialization to just those in their guild, which isn't hard to understand when you see how General chats can degenerate. By allowing players to join multiple Guilds, which could be for wildly different purposes, then you give them more communication outlets with a larger segment of the community.

And I really don't see why either of your points regarding your own guild, or others, would need to change in a multi-guild system. Surely guilds that only want quality members would still hold their members accountable... regardless of how many other guilds they might be a part of. While you might be able to dedicate yourself to your 'main' guild, and enjoy an easy social outlet with one or more tertiary guilds for crafting or roleplaying or whatever else you might care to.

To each their own, of course, but I would prefer to see Guilds less limited. Family and social groups sound intriguing, but I think that could be over-complicating things. If my friends and I want to create a Family, we could do so with Multi-guilding, and not require some extravagant system to do so. Even in a multi-guild system, however, I would still like to see proper Alliances in play.

Myself, I would be inclined to have one primary Guild for 'progression' through content (and I use that word almost in protest, since I am not a fan of "Digest the content as fast as possible raiding guilds"), and additional guilds for any social circles, such as Family, Friends, Clan, Crafting, etc. Heck, I might even be more inclined to dabble in hardcore raid content or PVP if I could be in the guilds I wanted to, and still be able to join a guild to support exploring that content.

I just don't get the whole "More than one guild means less loyalty" thing though. It's not like being in multiple guilds would necessarily put you at odds between them. And then you wouldn't have to change characters to socialize with that other guild that now has more players on... when your primary guild slows down for the afternoon/night. (As an example) *shrugs*

QFE. I agree with most of this, and for some of the same reasons. SL Groups are, in a way, very much like Guilds in traditional MMORPGs, and (to address some other points in this thread) I certainly don't feel that members of my groups in SL are more or less loyal to them because they are or aren't in other SL groups. Those groups tend to be for different interests, even if some are related.

And while some are worried about more drama... you're going to get more drama when more people are involved. Always. You are free to limit your exposure to that however you choose... either by sticking to a small group, or only joining one. But I'm just not sure what people would choose to be hard-limited in this case. It baffles me.

Why? Why does it make things difficult? Why is it a deterrent? I genuinely don't get this argument, unless it is about keeping your members away from other guilds that might tackle some aspects of the game in a better way than you. Otherwise, what difference does it make what other guilds they are in?

I have always been in favor of each character belonging to only one guild. The system that they implemented in GW2 where you choose which guild to represent is just messed up. I do not think that guilds should be account wide either sometimes I create alts to play with friends that do not play as often as I do and I do not wish to be bothered with guild drama so I play an character without a guild.

I did always have an issue with small guilds being left behind or becoming the guild farms for larger raiding guilds. People join, level up and move on and only a handful of guilds ever get to the end game and if your not part of super elite guild X you get left behind.

To deal with this issues I have seen in many games where a handful of guilds kind of band together to create an alliance so they can raid and do end game content. It works better than nothing but there is no systems in place its harder to communicate etc. However there is a game out there called Atlantica Online. What they have done is created an Alliance system where you as a player join a guild but the guilds officially join together under an alliance. In that game I think it is up to 8 guilds per alliance but there is an alliance channel you can send alliance mail etc. The way it is set up is there is group content, guild content and alliance or raid content. In a system such as this the alliance is like an extended guild which allows smaller guilds to exist and still get to do end game content. This also eliminates the small guild farming where people join level up and move on so they can raid. I think a system such as this could find a good place in Everquest Next.

One guild per character, for the following reasons..

Multi-guilds have shown that they bare weak integrity. It -also- requires all of your characters to be linked to an account title, but that's another issue.

Guilds should be about supporting a strong community, big or small. And dedication, if you can't dedicate to one guild, what was the point of being one in the first place?

social structure is just one point of guilds, and I feel that game devs are trying too hard to get the attention of social networking sites (to appeal to social facebook gamers), whilst throwing the gimmicks of previous MMO's ontop of their own at an attempt to be everything before it but "Better!". Of course that doesn't, and hasn't worked.

If your goal is player connection, this is a very redundant form, there's one simple solution- CUSTOM CHAT CHANNELS. That's right, if people want to be able to contact each other, whilst maintaining their presence within their guild, there should be custom chat channels.

This covers for the idea's floating around regarding 'communities' and 'families' and all that nonsense. Those are what custom chat channels are for. Of course you can give them more organization, to prevent them from being taken over and abused (like in WoW if someone joined a channel first, they got leader, and ability to kick and ban everyone from the channel).

They're free, and if people want to have a guild alliance? Go ahead, there's a custom chat for that, and you can not join if you don't want to be apart of it, the problem is solved and I think Multi-guilds are just a gimmick getting around a very simple solution.

A lot of the arguments against multiple guilds seems to be "I don't want to have to deal with the Drama, so no one else should be allowed to enjoy multiple guilds at once" which is ridiculous. you might not want to join multiple guilds, but I might. Why should I be shackled to one guild per character, just because you're afraid of having that option? Or "Guilds are Loyalty! You can only Loyalty once!" Which is also ridiculous. First, it's a video game. Not the U.S. Marine Corps. Second, I can make an alt, and loyalty a second time. But I then have to log off of that character, and onto my alt in order to check if any of my friends in that guild are active. That doesn't deter me from loyaltying twice, it just makes it more inconvenient for me, and does nothing for you.

Edit: A third argument I see is the whole "I don't understand how you can do it! I'm confused!" It's simple, just look at Guild Wars 2. You only represent one guild at a time. However, I did see a valid criticism about that system above. And that's the fact that it's the fact that my account joins the guild, not the character. So, I would suggest that we get a choice to either join it account wide, or only that character. And if we have joined multiple guilds, I'd like to have the option to make an individual chat box for each guild, and be able to speak to people in all of my different guilds via something like /guildname, /whisper: Guildname, or /guild1, /guild2, /guild3...

TL;DR: Your arguments are you don't want it, and refuse to allow it to others, based entirely on your inability to ignore the option to join multiple guilds yourself, Loyalty, or a legitimate complaint about having my account join, and not my character. That last one I can agree with, and it needs tweaking. See above.

Where on Earth did you get the idea that having structured guilds somehow ruins "family" style guilds? If a guild is social, they don't need to min/max and hit the hardest content with everything they have, nor do they need access to other guilds' chats. Alliances have been done before (Warhammer, for instance) and they add virtually nothing to the game that simply talk between two guild leaders doesn't. The long and short of it is, the only reason people are clamoring for the option is because of vanity. They want their guild tag under their name, while being able to be in another guild, in an alliance, etc. If you want to be in a hardcore guild, be in a hardcore guild. If you want to be in a social guild too, either find a hardcore guild that's close-knit (they exist, most of the hardcore guilds I've been in were more close and less cliquey than "family" or "casual"guilds) or join a social guild on an alt.

So why not make it more "flexible?" It's already flexible enough. Another system would add nothing to the game that isn't already possible, the end result being Sony having something to advertise, and that's it.