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The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of VGGEN.com as a whole or any of its affiliates. This is simply one writer's opinion, and should be accepted as such. Weekly World of Warcraft is usually updated each Tuesday.

Unless they’re just really adapt at solo-play or don’t mind dealing with pick-up groups, almost every player will join a guild at some point in their World of Warcraft tenure. Ranging from a small collection of friends to the 200+ member raiding behemoths, guilds provide players with a network of allies that can help with dungeons, enchants, quests, or crafting. Blizzard installed a guild menu into the game, and it provides a guild-specific member list and chat channels for both members and guild officers. Yet, the guild features included leave quite a bit to be desired to both the casual small guilds and the giant behemoth raiding guilds.

My main character is in a fairly strange guild. We aren’t a serious, weekly meeting, DKP, raid five days a week guild, nor are we one that just wanted a stupid name above our characters. While we do have a fairly large amount of accounts in the guild, the core is made up of a handful of level 60 characters. About three months ago, we started taking steps to build up our guild and start gaining at least a foothold into the endgame content. Here’s where we started to notice problems. At this point, we decided to place the characters at levels 45 through 60 into a separate guild. Within three hours, we quickly discovered that having two guilds to separate the low levels from the high levels is a double-edged sword. While both halves have benefited and gained more members as a result, communication is a complete hassle. Our current stopgap solution was to create an in-game chat channel for our guild and get members in both to join, but this can only go so far. Really, the simple detractor would point out that it was our decision to split our guild and that’s the downfall of doing so.

Naturally, I’m going to provide a solution. Simply put, the guild interface and friends list needs to expand. There should be built-in support for guild alliances. For example, the guild member list would have a tabbed or expandable list sorted by guild names. Guilds that were aligned with your guild would be listed in this, thus providing a stronger tie between allied guilds. This would be extensively used by guilds of all sizes, ranging from the mega-guilds that constantly team up with each other to the smaller guilds. The coordination alone would completely benefit casual guilds and allow them to at least field an attempt at large raiding dungeons with friendly guilds. See, I don’t understand why this wasn’t in to begin with. If I can run five different instant messaging applications in one small program, why can’t World of Warcraft allow guilds to form alliances to make those 20 and 40 man raids a little more appealing to more of the gaming population? List management can be applied to the standard friends list included as of this writing. I cannot create groups, and instead every friend I have is lumped together with no method or organization at all.

We recently decided to make it mandatory for everyone to install a calendar user interface add-on. The add-on is great for guild organization; it allows us to set up appointments, raids, and general guild events. After I installed it and played around with the features, I began to wonder the obvious. Why was this not a stock feature for guilds in the game? This isn’t a niche feature that 90% of people can do without. If anything, this makes the game better for everyone involved. If Blizzard implemented this feature, it could tag everyone’s calendar with info like raid resets, server downtime, and when the Darkmoon Faire or Battlegrounds have double honor. Even the guildless players could get some use out of it.

Moving on to the weekly dead horse to parade around and flog, I’m going to address the lack of guild housing. Many have been clamoring for housing since the game’s release, and Blizzard has at least mentioned it is in the pipes at some point (I’m sure in the same pipe as Hero Classes). Yet, almost two years since release, there is no word on player housing other than it is confirmed to NOT be in The Burning Crusade and it is something they eventually want to do (to see quotes, check WoWWiki). Look, I understand that it isn’t realistic to have a player neighborhood like some people were talking about and rumoring, but why can’t guilds at least have an instanced guildhall? This would at least allow guilds to have a place to store all of the communal loot, like trade supplies and Bind-on-Equip loot. I’m sure every guild just loves their mandatory level 1 alt named “Banky” that has all of the bank space he can possibly get, but I’m sure they’d drop Banky in a second to get a true guildhall. The biggest problem with a guildhall bank would be who has access to it. Obviously, you can’t give access to everyone because you’d almost instantly see thieves spring up, join a guild, and rob them blind. The other major issue with housing is how guilds should acquire it. If the bar were set too high, say a 40-man raid, many guilds would be left behind. A gold sink makes more sense. Much like mounts costing a figurative toe at level 40 and an arm and leg at 60, guildhalls should have a high initial cost to get one and then possibly have a small periodical rental fee. These ideas are not new, and have been discussed extensively since the initial release of World of Warcraft, but they’re still worthy of being shoved out into the public space until Blizzard actually implements these suggestions in some form or another.

Upcoming Raid Interface Changes in Patch 1.11

Well, the test realms went up recently and have given gamers a glimpse of what to expect in patch 1.11. Perhaps one of the more interesting things they’re introducing (aside from a much stronger Burning Legion presence) is improved Raid controls. While many organized raid groups were using 3^rd party programs to provide these features, having them in-game helps to coordinate with pickup groups. One of the most useful inclusions is the ready command. By issuing this command, the raid leader sends every member a ready prompt. This certainly will help players from prematurely rushing into a boss encounter without everyone being on the same page (or back at the keyboard from a bio-break or kitchen-break). Another good inclusion is the Raid Warning channel. This channel broadcasts a message that displays in the middle of the screen, so the suicidal fighter that keeps trying to "Leeroy Jenkins" bosses has no excuse for ignoring the plan. To further help the raid leader, all text sent by the leader will be displayed in red font. Unless you changed the font to red, this should help separate important information from the chatter and loot rolls.

The biggest question is when the patch will hit. Attentive players may have noticed that the Blizzard Downloader ran in the background last week, preloading parts of the patch. This is an indication that Blizzard is at least preparing to launch the patch sometime soon. If I had to bet, I would guess that we could see it as soon as June 13^th. I’m not sure its been tested enough to go live on the 6^th, although I could see it slipping closer to July.

Be sure to send any thoughts, comments, opinions, or flames to the World of Warcraft Mailbag: Weeklywow@vggen.com

Posted: 06/05/2006

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