One guild per character in EverQuest Next? Or more?

Works for me. And really, all of those are communities. I don't understand why one type (the Guild) gets formal in-game recognition while the others are limited to being "a chat channel". The tools and code that The Guild gets should be made generic and used for all of the other types too. And then people can join as few or as many as they fit into.

This is an excellent point. I miss the days when the cities were much more active with people going to the broker, mender, etc. (or even going afk and showing off their gear.. lol) I do like the idea of guild competition when it comes to raiding though. If there are going to be guild halls I would get rid of some of the amenities and make them only available in the city or town.

You've raised very good points.

However there is a solution to this... Allow guilds to raise guild halls inside major cities and minor towns. Since the whole world is destroyable, chances are towns and cities will be as well. And also build-able.

SWG had a pretty decent city building system that allowed for a mayor. Just have guilds responsible for making the cities themselves, or placing between 1 and 3 guild halls directly in major cities (that are more or less permanent) with really expensive rent rates.

I'm in the camp of "One character, one guild" type of philosophy. However. After many years of playing Secondlife, I've gotten used to the idea of being able to represent one group while still having access to the chats of other interest groups. (They are not guilds as per say. Just groups). Where a guild is concerned, this idea could perhaps be carried over.

Guilds are simply that. A group of people who band together for a common goal. You represent them, display your colors etc. Interest groups would be different. Much like how in EQ1, you can create/join different chat channels. But, I would like to see the idea further developed with it's own dedicated interface to manage it.

As just an example: I belong to a guild called <Epic Raiders>. We are friends and to an extent, we raid as the name implies. There is a leadership structure, benefits for being a member of the guild, access to a guild bank/hall etc. All the normal things you'd expect from such.

However, I'd like to join a community of roleplayers on the server. Even in EQ1 and in other MMO's, this is accomplished by finding the channel through word of mouth or through a community website dedicated as such. It's simple, it's neat and basically boring. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'd just like to see 'more'.

Suppose there is an interface/system in place that I could browse these different interest groups. Perhaps some are closed to the public, others are open for enrollment. I could see a brief description of the channel/community, perhaps see the entire member list or just see the moderators if it is an exceptionally large community. (This could perhaps be accomplished by settings in the interface for the mods/channel owners).

With that said, there could be a limit to how many community groups one could join. Secondlife caps it at 45 I believe (Correct me if I'm wrong please). But i'm not suggesting to copy the method they took, but it could provide some inspiration for a workable system that could suit peoples needs.

Ha! I noticed the same thing so I started to give out thumbs up!
You think this is a crazy topic wait till we get the PVP thread!

Well, I did get an alert that said "VahnFox down voted everything you hold dear in life. She'd kick your kitten if she could!". Honestly though, I'm not sure if down voting adds any credence to the way a poll is heading. I know up voting gives you more point for your forum rank.

I don't know how anything works I'm used to Reddit I'm sorry D: *flails*

I prefer one character, one guild.

Alts can be in whatever guild they prefer.

Having one character in multiple guilds splits loyalties and causes guild members to "choose" every time an event comes up, such as raids. Which group do they go with? Plus all the drama with "stealing" members from one another and all that. It could cause a lot of internal guild drama as well as community drama with warring guilds.

I do like the idea of Alliance or Sister guilds. It would be nice if Alliance/Sister guilds could share a chat channel and other amenities, such as a bank or something like that.

After seeing the results of multi-type guilds in FFXIV ARR, and then GW2, I very happily vote for one guild per character at the very least.
I thought they sounded okay in theory for FFXIV's case, their smaller sized social channels (you can join a few of these) and their full guilds (you join only one) yet even with only a couple it quickly became overwhelming.
Miss tells all over the place, having to colour code each one to be 100% sure I was typing in the right channel and not defaulted to another via the chat lock are just a couple examples of the confusion that spawned from it lol. It's not so bad if each group is smaller and slower, but if you've got a lot of large groups, even isolating them to their own tabs can be a lot of mulit-tasking.
GW2's system with joining your account to every guild just felt like an invasion of privacy, because whether or not you had that guild activated you were still on the list with your account name visible for everyone to see. Also the fact you had to turn one channel off to turn on another was irritating imo. I felt it defeated the purpose of having multiple guilds attached to one character, but still forced you to be on the list, the intent of their system confused me.What I ended up doing was just having each alt represent a different guild so I would not switch, then it was a little easier to manage.
Amongst all of these little problems, I found that guilds lacked a sense of community and tight knit behaviour, because peoples' loyalties were scattered and multi-tasked all over the place. There was no real incentive to feel loyal to your 'one' guild you'd joined and decided to focus on, so people were just flippantly all over the place without really forming a bond with their main group.

I will keep in mind Sony's forum system is bent on making me look like a terrible person.
The poll itself is one thing, but as the devs and community managers do read the threads and note the up and downvotes on each comment, I figured they'd make a difference. It seems I may have jumped the gun a little.

I really like the idea of Alliance guilds too, and think those work great for other chat channels to talk in alongside your own guild with that sense of togetherness

i usually dont join guilds as the seem to be to much drama. id perfer a different level and type of guild structure like guilds, families, trade guilds, etc. i think it would add more realism an adventure guild and crafting guild i dont think would care if you belong to both. also alliances between guilds and different types of guilds would also be nice where as an adventure guild and crafting guild can work together with shared resources and whatnot to complete things

Different guild types sounds good to me. That makes the guilds more concentrated at what they are doing. For example if 1 guild is raiding almost everyday and you feel like raiding 3 days a week you can take all that time into that guild, and the other days you want to do something else you just put time into those guilds chatting. that makes it clear for people whos joining what the guild is doing aswell, so for example HC raiding people dont join a social one vice versa. Cause if too many social people join a raiding guild it will become too much chatting and playing around, if they have a social guild they can do it there. it will also prevent guild arguments and deletion of guilds since mixing people that not sure what they wanna do makes it more complicated and more job to kick and invite players and avoiding people that want their friends to join that dont know what they are gonna get in to etc so if their friends wanna join its simple as its a raiding guild, they will know that.

I wish I could change my answer after reading your post.

This is fantastic. I'm 100% down for a complete drop of guild systems. Let's make a friends list, and have EQn be an entirely new social system! You want to get people for a boss raid? Find adventurers who want to go! Can't find any? Try hiring people to go!

This is the best idea I've seen on the 5 pages of this thread.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo....................


Must not think of PVP threads.

I am of the one guild per character persuasion. On the other hand I do NOT want all my characters automatically made a member of the same guild. However, reading thru the posts having built in game guilds for things like crafting,would be nice as well. You can develop all trade skills, yet only be allowed to join one trade skill specialization guild. Benefits of doing so would allow you special recipes and ingredients etc. For instance maybe the only way you would be able to make Misty Thickets is to join a Cooking Guild.

I only want one guild but I like the idea of having groups based on other activities as well. Someone before said "I could also see crafters forming "unions" of some sort so that they could also pool resources to help progress both their own skills and world content." I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure how these rallying calls are going to work, but it sounds like there may be tasks that would be well suited for people who are specialized in one way or another. It would be nice for those specializations to have some kind of channel they could coordinate in. In my guild on Rift we just make channels (mages, healers, etc.) that everyone of a type can join so we can coordinate stuff that not everyone else needs to hear about. I don't see why it would have to be much more complicated than that.

I voted for different types of guilds.. However, I don't want exactly what was listed. This would be more like something I saw in one of the Into the Portal podcasts... where beyond your "guild" you could join like say a crafters guild as well. Also depending on how they do factions... I believe guilds should be faction neutral so that you don't have to exclude people.. which of course leads into something like a faction "guild" as well. That way you can easily get together with people that have a like minded goal but are not things generally focused on by a traditional guild.

Let's actually consider the features of EQN as we analyze what kinds of guild structures and memberships to permit.

EQN will supposedly have a feature where your actions have an impact on how the NPCs react to you. Will this extend to your guild??? If so, then it becomes very important for a guild to know its members, and to keep in touch with what they are doing. I think that ideally your actions should not only impact your own reputation, but that of any of your associations, e.g., characters you are grouped with when you do things that improve/degrade your rep, guilds you are a member of, cities you are a citizen of, crafting societies you are a member of, etc.

Given the above, and based on past experience in guilds, I not only want each character to have only one guild affiliation, I want to know ALL of the alts of a player (both current as well as past-deleted), as well as all of their voluntary game affiliations (guilds, families, alliances, whatever, both current and past). Not having this information has caused problems in every game and most guilds I have ever been in.

There are far too many players whose main source of amusement is "conning" other players and groups into trusting them and then betraying them by either looting a shared treasury, sabotaging a project, or otherwise causing trouble in excess of the normal friction that normally accompanies groups. [see EVE for many examples]

The lame excuse such people normally use is, "it adds to the realism of the game". But reality and a game are different environments. Reality allows for a person to be in only one place at a time and to have to move linearly from place to place, while games allow a person to easily and cheaply have multiple personalities and to move from place to place non-linearly. One can track and trace people in reality -- not so in games.

The "fun" that such people derive from their activities is dwarfed by the misery and "not-fun" that they cause for others.

The vast majority of game players are NOT looking for such drama and strife in the games they play.

Guilds are groups that often offer unique or hard-to-get benefits to their members, and, in return, demand some degree of loyalty and participation in helping the guild grow or progress. Few guilds will willingly keep members who simply take without giving back in some way. Adventurer-oriented and crafter-oriented players usually can help one another enjoy the totality of the game without having to be experts in all aspects. But trust and cooperation are critical to a successful guild. That can only come over time, and only if the guild leadership doesn't have to spend more time running the guild and trying to guard against "bad actors" damaging the guild than it does playing and enjoying the game itself.

So, in concert with limiting guild memberships, any guild management and integrity tools the developers can provide will be well worth while.

people don't PuG in EQ2 because they are tired of people being whiny babies or jerks or other such problems brought over from the WoW crowd...that combined with SoE making it so your repuation means absolutely nothing in EQ2 (race change potions/name change potions) means I won't pug with folks even if you put a gun to my head.

the guild setup is a great system for finding like minded players to what you want to do. you can still create thriving cities. in fact, isn't that was SWG did? a guild can create thier own little cities..and other guilds or folks can come there to exchange goods or ideas and what not. there's nothing from stopping both those ideas from being in game.

the reason the cities and hamlets are empty in EQ2 is, like it or not, most the playerbase only stays in an area as long as there is quests or loot of value to them there. same in the cities. before guildhalls, you found people in only 1 spot. the closest place to a bell that had a broker.

heck more people visited more spots in the city when they introduced those new questlines then I think had seen the full cities through the entire games run till now.