Focus Guilds?

[Twyla]

Hello everyone

After following Vanguard for a few months and digesting all the information I could, I wondered if we will see focus guilds forming in Vanguard?

Say a guild for hire to build and maintain a town close to a dungeon for a raiding guild? Or a guild that builds boats and houses.

With a cap on guild size it seems to me that a guild isn't going to be so effective if it tries to be self-sufficient.

[Greymain]

I understand the plan is to be a member of more than one guild so the possibility of belonging to a craft guild which builds ships and an adventuring Guild is not ruled out.

[Pirotess]

Its going to all come down to what the limit on guild size is and if its an account or character based limit. Its its character based, alt characters are going to be discouraged from being tagged to leave room for primary characters. I hope that doesnt happen as its such a crimp in communication when alts cant be tagged.

[Greymain]

The reason put forward for the Guild cap is the overhead caused by Guild chat. I must admit this is a new one on me. It has never been raised as an issue in any of the games I have played. I suspect the real reason will become clear once all the secret sauce is spilt.

[Siencyn]

Probably greymain. I for one am excited about the possible cap. I never really enjoyed alts taking up space in a guild roster anyhow. I kind of like the idea of one alt that is guilded and the rest relegated to an alternate chat channel. I suppose that is because I am not fond of my guild mates that play 43 alts and none of them well. All said and done I think it will be nice to have a new and different guild system in place.

[Cobalt Katze]

I'd be all over this, though there's a bit of hesitance from earlier experiences with a multiple guild situation. I hope that one might be able to know all guilds a certain person might belong to. Because in FFXI, you could be in as many guilds (linkshells) as you wanted, equipping the pearls to switch between them as you liked. This lead to a lot of deciet and mistrust towards the endgame when guilds needed to be raid organizations and there were many bloody falling-outs during my final months playing the game.

However, having multiple guilds is a fun thing! It just needs to be handled better.

[Greymain]

The difficulty as I see it is that one option in the game is a guild city. Surely to build and run such an enterprise, as well as adventure and craft in a world that functions 24/7. (an Army of Mobs could destroy undefended property at any time). Will require a large guild? My last guild was very active with at its peak 150 members but apart from organised activities there were rarely more than 20 online at any one time. Our guild was on the small side by choice. I felt that large guilds were impersonal. As a result we had great difficulty building our structures in Horizons. most towns were owned by the big 500+ guilds.

If the guild cap is set at 500 then I am fine with that but less than 100 and it will need innovative solutions to avoid big problems.

[Twyla]

I have read a fare bit of negativity regarding players belonging to multi guilds. People have said they would not want a guild mate that is not 100% focused on the one guild.

I think it maybe time to rethink guild structures and networking. That is why I thought it could move towards smaller focused guilds and the larger guilds may need to branch out into focus groups to keep their current membership and structure in Vanguard.

I suspect a lot of the game systems in Vanguard could very well be attempts at thwarting the secondary market structures in current games.

[Aredhel]

I can see both sides.

I've had a lot of friends who love to raid, but then they want to go do crafting, and just get kinda left alone for a while. But then, when that gets old and their "normal" guild screams "HELP", they can pretty much just say "ok" and take off! It's not like you're raiding with 2 guilds at once...IF that's the way it works. We'll see.

[Pirotess]

Hehe guild size is subjective. For example Grey feels 150 is small but my guild has always hovered around 75 people and I feel we're midsized. Small to me is the 20-30 person guild. I think a cap of 100 would be pretty much perfect. We've never needed more than that to pretty much do everything there is to do in the games we are playing.