Guild System

A couple of weeks ago on their Pax Prime panel, Arenanet announced the first details concerning the guild system for Guild Wars 2.  In case you have not heard any of the information, here is summary:

• Membership- You link your account to a guild, not just a character, and you can belong to as many guilds as you want.
• Representation- At any time you can choose to represent, with any character on your account, one of the guilds you belong to.  While doing so, you display any guild motifs (flags, banners, colors, etc.) and are able to participate in guild chat and enjoy any perks unlocked by that guild.
• Influence- Doing almost anything within the game, while representing a guild, will provide a currency called influence to the guild being represented. Influence can be used to unlock an array of perks in a “tech/skill” tree that will enhance your gaming experience.  The skills unlocked will range widely from buying items like a guild banner, which gives its members an experience bonus while standing close to it, to being able to fortify a keep conquered on world vs. world vs. world (WvWvW) game mode when the appropriate guild skill has been unlocked.

I am not going to lie; I am very excited about this information.  I believe it to be an amazing example of Arenanet’s design philosophy.  They told us they were making a game for the players, right?  Why not let players socialize whenever and with whomever they want to? It sounds good to me.  There are some that believe that this is a negative direction for the guild system.  Some worry that having access to multiple guilds will not create a strong sense of community within each individual guild.  If this were to be the case I would expect Arenanet to address it in some way, however, I do not think it will happen.  I think many players will help in creating different amazing guilds and, by doing so, will help encourage a greater sense of community within their server as a whole.  Everything in the game design so far has been done with a goal in mind; to create unity within the server.  I firmly believe the multiple guild system is another tool to achieve just that.

Speaking for myself, and probably most of you, this has always been an issue amongst my real life friends.  The guild we created has to be disbanded at some point since we did not have the necessary player base to do many in-game activities.  Yes, we still used whispers or used a specific chat channel to communicate, but we lost our identity as a group within the game.  These are my close personal friends; we like having our own guild.   I know now that we are going to have a blast creating our guild colors, banners, guild words and everything else Arenanet will give us to further customize our guilds.

Another reason I am fascinated by this announcement, which I am sure most of you have experienced, is having to decide between two or more aspects of the game simply because there wasn’t an option to belong to two different communities, or guilds.  When this happens many of us tend to gravitate towards one aspect of the game: the one where we have persons readily available to play the content with.  Not with this system. I get to be a part of the guilds I want to be involved with. In other MMOs, you could just add some of the members to your friend list and whisper them regularly in order to join a dungeon run or play a PvP map, but you would be missing out by not having access to guild chat, perks, and other features that the game provides.  For example let’s say I belong to a PvE guild, but I want to play WvWvW with my PvP buddies. Yeah, we go into the field and capture a keep together, but not as a team.  We would not be recognized as a group, not by our enemies nor our allies.  I want our flag telling every enemy that we took their keep.  I want to create a symbol that makes them think twice before trying to take it back.  Without the flag, well, it’s not the same.  Like Eddie Izzard said “Do you have a flag? No flag, no country. You can’t have one.”  The flag is important, okay?

With the proposed guild system I can still keep my personal friends’ guild active for whenever we feel like playing together while also being part of other guilds that focus on doing exploration-mode dungeons, structured PvP, role playing, or any other aspect of the game.  All the while playing the game with perks appropriate to the type of content I want to play at that particular moment. Bottom line, you get to be in as many varied guilds as you decide, letting you play the game however you want.  I think that freedom will let us enjoy the game even more and that’s what counts.  That’s what counts, right?