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Ingame guild feature


Volin

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Hello all,

the proposal has been brought up from time to time in recent years, but as far as I know it has not been discussed or followed up in any detail. This suggestion came again up during a brainstorming with like-minded.

One of the strongest factors that keeps players in a game for a long time, besides intrinsic motivation, will probably be the community. And this is where this suggestion comes in: Most games (at least) have 2 "types" of community, once the common big whole, in our case represented by forum and the official Discord - and then the small, the circles of friends and families: guilds, clans, kinships, whatever. This binding factor is missing in SR so far. In actually all games I have played over many years, or where I have returned again and again over many years, there was something like that.

Of course you can organize something like that unofficially in the background but having such a system implemented directly in the game will bring more people into such communities. You do quests together, help each other, master challenges together and chat and spend time together, well organized something like this creates cohesion. This led to long term friendships for me with people I met regularly in RL. And I heard other stories like this from friends here.

Of course, I have no idea of the technical feasibility, but it would actually not be so much needed here: A small guild window for organization (similar to the Friendlist), a guild chat, a guild tag on the name (creates common) - done. In the long run, many more features would be conceivable, but even this basic framework would be a great start, right? I don't want to overload this with the ideas from our brainstorming, but if you want more input, more features are conceivable without end.

I just wanted to bring this topic up once again, as I personaly think that this could probably help to keep players longer in the game.

 

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I used to play some MMORPGs, and at some point people would log in purely to meet and talk, doing some grinding in the background was just an excuse. In-game mechanic supporting such behaviour would be awesome.

 

17 minutes ago, Volin said:

In the long run, many more features would be conceivable

From what features guilds could have, I can think of shared decks or similar. People could donate cards to the guild and guildmaster could create decks out of those; the decks would be available for all guild members regardless of their actual cards (like free PvP decks). I would find it an interesting way of introducing some particular playstyles or decks.

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Creating Guilds on server side, with tags for players, basic administration capabilities, and chat is very easy task.

Shared storage and deck sharing would be much more complicated features, because I guess you did not actually mean "like free PvP decks" that can be used by as many players as they want, that would mean each guild would need every card only once, instead of once per player.

The real challenge is is the client UI, not only that it needs someone with time to do it, but right now I would even say that to me it sounds almost impossible.
To be more specific the player tags, there is no place I can think of in the current UI where it can be added. The first obvious place would be before name, but some player names are already too long to fit in these small rectangles, so taking space that is already not enough is not a good idea.
So even if you find someone who have enough time to do the UI, there is still the design problem where to put the tag, because without it, the guild seems weird (at best).

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7 minutes ago, Kubik said:

Creating Guilds on server side, with tags for players, basic administration capabilities, and chat is very easy task.

[8< snip]

there is no place I can think of in the current UI where it can be added. The first obvious place would be before name, but some player names are already too long to fit in these small rectangles, so taking space that is already not enough is not a good idea.

I think it would be cool to focus on the basics, since a chat, a tag and a "guildlist" (aka friendlist) is all we need for some social effect.

About the guild tag, since it works with the {GM}-Tag you could limit the Guildtag to 3 Letters and be fine I guess?

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@Kubik Thanks for the insight so far!

 

17 minutes ago, Kapo said:

I think it would be cool to focus on the basics, since a chat, a tag and a "guildlist" (aka friendlist) is all we need for some social effect.

About the guild tag, since it works with the {GM}-Tag you could limit the Guildtag to 3 Letters and be fine I guess?

Strongly agree with every aspect, Kapo. If the team likes the idea, probably some basic basic features would be better then nothing for the begin and if there is ever time (and even more important - the  technical feasibility is given) for more, then more features could be added over time.
And max 3 Letters is kind of standard for such "tags".

I already guessed that everything beyond basic features would not be easy at all, that why I wanted to share the basic idea first - and the reasoning for the proposal - and wanted to see what happens 🙂

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8 hours ago, Kapo said:

About the guild tag, since it works with the {GM}-Tag you could limit the Guildtag to 3 Letters and be fine I guess?

GMs are given an option to change their name if they do not like it. First one I can Can think of is MephistoRoss, have you seen his name in the game? and that is not even longest name possible. Problem is the font M is larger, then I so it is not that hard to create name that does not fit already.  Handling this on case by case basis for GMs is fine there is not that many of them, and even less with longer names.
But can you imagine the amount of rename requests if players would find out that their name no longer fits?
Can you imagine that people on your friend list would start changing names? How crazy that sounds?

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@LEBOVIN that would be no small task to create 100 or maybe even more tooltips, and the issue still stands, because not everyone will be fine with the name being cut off.

And "x characters" is really bad metrics:
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
MMMMM
MMMMM
you see the difference? (not even talking about RU using bigger font, so just used bold to give some idea, it is not meant to be accurate size comparison)
So should that "x" be based on "i"? and be 16, or "M", and be 4?

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4 hours ago, Kubik said:

But can you imagine the amount of rename requests if players would find out that their name no longer fits?

I think if you get 200 name change requests to enable this feature, it is worth it.

And 200 is a very conservative high-end guesstimate based on active and semi-active players.

If this is the _one_ thing that stops this feature, that would be very, very sad.

Edited by Kapo
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It is really hard to estimate how many names would have to be changed. But this should not be the reason this feature is canceled or discarded in my opinion. Changing names from a workload perspective is easily doable, especially with the 3 GM's we have. 

A random idea I had, why does the guild tags need to be in front of the name like the {GM} tags? Why do we not place it at the end of the name? That would solve the whole aspect of people wanting to change their name due to readability reasons. 

An example could be {GM}Dutchy {LOL} or Volin {LOL} instead of {GM}{LOL}Dutchy and {LOL}Volin. 

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16 hours ago, Kubik said:

So even if you find someone who have enough time to do the UI

By this I mean lack of people to do the UI changes, which is the blocking factor.

And to the point about names, I did not mean that there would be too many requests to change names that can not be handled. I mean that changing names is bad in general. How many people in the real words you know changed name? Yes woman do so, and it cases issues, that mails can not be delivered, because mail was send to the old name...

Putting guild tag behind the name, does not sound like an good idea either (at least not to me), because that way some players will not see the guild.

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Nice Idea, i have to agree i played a lot of games much longer just to not loose contact to guilds.

Just starting with the Basics would be nice.

 

My personal wishes for Guild features in the FAR Future:

Guild Achievments 

a bonus to draining your BFP reserve when playing with guildies

Maybe a guild leaderbord? "Wich Guild played the Most Rpve 5+ Games in the last Month" etc.

What would be cool but i guess really hard to implement: a "Guild Forge" like a place where all Guildies may spawn stuff and try things

 

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Love the idea of guilds but I would recommend caution as well.  While guilds can help retain a player base they can also divide it as well. I would recommend putting a cap on the amount of people that can be in one guild. Something like 20 people or less. Besides you can always be friendly towards other guilds but nobody likes a super guild that controls everything.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I like guild idea also and going to tossing more ideas out there...

 

I would be happy to just have some indication in chat messages. And if people wanted guilds to be more apparent, maybe when players join 2+ player games, the info can be in system messages? This can be disabled later if UI solution is implemented and people want to see less text...

 

On UI front... How about color coding names or something? Like current/default of white for regular players with no guild and something else for players in a guild? If the tool tip idea is not too bad, then people can hover over player names to see guild info?

Edited by Lans
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image.png.d92da89d443898fd88bc5e03f0043007.png
even with my short name adding 3 letter tag would mean only few words will fit to an line, and imagine how bad it would be for players with over 3 times as long names. 😞 
I already seen messages that have no word on first line, or worse have only 1 word on first line, which is really terrible to read.

If color would be used to signify guild, how would you recognize which guild it is?

Shortly I think tooltip is too bad 😞 (blame EA)

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I get not being able to fit too many words in a line is annoying but until other workable ideas are on table, I'll let others decide if that is acceptable price for having guilds or not.

 

Is it possible to make use of profile picture slot? Like replacing that with guild icons instead?

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What other ideas? I do not think there was any other ideas for chat 😞

Well using picture slot is possible BUT:

  • what pictures to use?
    • if currently available pictures would be used how would you recognize player image from guild image
    • if new set of pictures would be added, what to do when we run out of pictures?
      • tell players it is not possible to create new guilds right now?
      • have many guild use same image? how would you recognize them?
    • let players upload pictures? That would mean there would need to be an game update on every guild creation.
  • Would players want to lose this customization?
  • still not solves the chat part 😞
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Well, a compromised solution for chat part is maybe to only have system messages when joining 2+ player games. Like:

    [System]: You joined games with [player 1][tag 1] ...

    [System]: [player][tag] has joined game

 

As for pictures... I would think most people want to be able to choose for their own guild. Maybe creation of new guilds is a weekly process so as to limit how often game updates are needed?

 

I think ideally players can chose to use current profile pictures or use guild picture and let them decide.

 

Is it possible do implement like a '/whois' command over chat message box to show complete guild (or lack of) info?

 

PS: Not that important to discussion but you can right click name and select 'Whisper to' in UI to get '/whisper name' filled out for you so you don't have to type full name yourself.

Edited by Lans
minor new info
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it is easy to implement that command because there already is `/who name` command, but typing players name is terrible idea, it can be quite long, and there are 100s of players, and I can not imagine some typing out all their names to see what guild they have.

Weekly process even if I ignore the infrastructure for automated upload of pictures, someone would need to manually inspect those pictures, because when players are allowed to draw, you always find some that draw lest say inappropriate things.

The system messages are possible, but when just 2 people will be spamming trade chat you might not even be able to see that system notification if you get trade messages just after it 😞 so I do not see that as an practical way to show the guild

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6 minutes ago, Kubik said:

The system messages are possible, but when just 2 people will be spamming trade chat you might not even be able to see that system notification if you get trade messages just after it 😞 so I do not see that as an practical way to show the guild

Then we simply dont show the guild on the chat until we find a solution.

We could still implement all the rest of a basic guild system and not get hung up on "how do we show who belongs to what guild". All other features, like a guild-chat etc. are way more important. We find a place on the "Banner"-Version of the Player (when joining games etc) for sure, there is enough space on it. A and if its not on the chat, who cares.

Dont know why we are making this so complicated.

Edited by Kapo
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Just now, Kubik said:

I care, feel free to implement it yourself 😄

By saying you care, you are saying that such a feature that connects players, facilitates player retention etc. should get stuck on "BUT WE DONT SEE IT IN THE CHAT" ?

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