Ideas to make guilds relevant again.
 

I don't know if I'm speaking for everyone/or most here when I say this, but when I started playing Graal, the main thing that kept me playing even when I was bored was whatever guild I was in at the time. From my first, being KoV, to The Royals, LOG, etc, whatever guild I was in made the experience awesome.

That being said, guilds are almost worthless on Graal these days. The poor implementation and (mis)use of global guilds has led to multi-guilding, an overabundance of useless/dead guilds, and has made a guild on Graal nothing more than a way to quickly chat with the people in your guild.

I suppose the entire guild system needs an overhaul, but I think it's something Classic should look into while in it's current state. I haven't really given this a lot of thought, but I would like to share and possibly have people share their thoughts on how to make this happen.

I don't have any idea how feasible any of these ideas are to implement or if they'd even be considered, but instead of saying, "OMG CLASSIC IS DEAD, I HATE MANAGEMENT." It's time we, the players, started offering ideas that perhaps could be looked into for Classic beyond, "I HAET HD, CHANGE IT" and, "BRING BACK OLD LVLZ PLZ." Because those things more than likely are not going to happen.

1. I really feel Classic should disable global guilds and set up their own Guild system. I know this is probably not an idea that anyone cares for, but the current system, as mentioned above, has completely destroyed guilds. IMO, Classic should have their own system and allow an account to ONE guild only, unless of course it's some sort of Dev/Staff tag. This instantly makes belonging to a guild worth something and will stop people from jumping tags all the time.

2. Give guilds something to do. From what I've seen since returning, it's apparent that Classic has tried to cater to guilds, which is definitely a good thing. There are guild bases up and I applaud the effort because I think for the most part, everyone realizes what guilds can do for the community. However, I think more should be done:

a) Make there be some sort of rewards/bonuses for controlling things like MoD fort, etc for a certain amount of time. Or for the guild that controls the fort the most during a month/week, some sort of extended time period. Like I said, I haven't given this much thought, but perhaps someone else has and could possibly add ideas to this. From what I can see, there really is no incentive to use the forts except to say, "My guild is better than yours." Which is fun, but after a while, it's just kind of boring.

b) Guild events - I don't necessarily mean regular events, but more like some sort of monthly guild war, or guild sparring tourney. Things like that. However, maybe guild 'events' that GCs could host would be neat too. Again, I don't even know if this is feasible, just throwing it out there. I don't know what the rewards would be, but having SOMETHING to do where guilds could get geared up for and look forward to would be nice.

c) Keeping track of guild stats. I don't know if this is something that could happen or not, but being able to see how many kills/deaths/on tag time/average guild spar rating, etc, guilds have and having them ranked would be nice. My guess is that it would encourage PKing, sparring to a degree. Of course, this would no doubt make some guilds go for quality or quantity, but others would go for the latter as well.

I thought I had some more, but I guess I they've slipped my mind. Please, anyone else who sees that guilds are an important part of the Graal experience and that this area is lacking, give your thoughts. Unless we get together and start working as a community to fix Classic, nothing is going to change, but we all must learn to give and take a little.

1. Agreed, would have to talk to someone higher tho
2. Agreed
2. a) We currently don't have enough players to do this.
2. b) Agreed with the weekly part
2. c) Agreed

I agree with everything.

Expanding on b..
Medals could be given out for the winner of each weekly spar. Each guild's metal has an icon or letter representing the guild, Ventrue would have a "V" or fangs and US could have "US" on it.

Guild forts should be removed and remade, gates should be able to be knockdown (Rufus's idea) and there would be a throne room or something your guild could take over. At the end of the month a chart could display which guild has taken over the most forts and a prize would be given to each member automatically when they log on.

I've said similar things for a year or so now, and perhaps something can finally improve with enough good ideas.

Point A is the biggest thing IMO, since I've always felt that guild wars (for example,) have no definitive way to "win," nor do they really give you anything other than finger exercise and a reason to gloat for a while.

Nice thread.

Guild wars are also fun if there is a lot of people and competition

Local guilds seem so fake, I am strongly against them.

So who's going to do this?

The problem there is global guilds have piss poor support. So you can't limit the amount of guild joins or provide rewards and such easily.

I'd say suck it up and get local guilds and a local guild interface even though they aren't "Classic".

Global guilds have to be dealt with by Global Staff. With local guilds, the local staff can help oversee guild activity and what not. I think Era still has a great guild system.

I think it would be great if Classic could get hold of the global guild database and make local equivilents and then have a button to sync your guild with the current global guild system. Like if you're a global guild you could run your guild through the guild CP and then sync the local guild up to the global guild version. If you know what I mean.

The big problem there would be that you could recruit people locally and then sync up and lose them.

So if you're going to be a local guild exclusively you'd have to use in game systems. Or if you want to do things on a global scale you'd have to use sync with database and the global guild website.

Unless the best possible solution would be to make a php/mysql global guild equivalent with it's own webpages.

Personally, I would love to see local guilds implemented using a system like global guilds, only through the http://www.classicgraal.net/ website.

GL with getting anything on that site.

I don't expect it. I suppose I was daydreaming...

Woah woah woah, Zip, you're confusing me here. It'd be nice to manage guilds in game, but that can easily be done in a future graal version. Shouldn't really be focused on the local level.

@Website: I'm sure if somebody wanted to develop it like that, Master Storm would let you. (Under the right pretenses of course).

Also, Classic is down :cry:.

Was talking about the ability to take a global guild into Classic's local guild system with the sync thing.

That way you wouldn't have people making (BTK) or other server's global guild tags because there would be a check to see if that global guild exists. And it would make it easier to integrate already existing guilds.

I think Midi wanted to and asked Storm but he didn't reply, not toally sure though