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Fan Faire 2008 Guild Hall Preview

Breaking News

This article is already obsolete, or, at the least, badly in need of rewriting. For now, I will leave the main part of it (between the horizontal lines), in so that you can see what was initially announced. Below it will be some of the changes that the very hard-working dev team will put in place, based on the huge amount of feedback received in the few days since the panel was presented.

I'll make up a totally fresh article once the dust settles, with a link to this one for posterity.


The informational panel on guild halls let out just a few minutes ago, and some of the first solid information on them is now available.

As you read this, be aware that some details may change a bit before these are released, and that not everything will be available at release. (There was brief mention of a Phase 2 for some features, for example.) The information was also coming at a pretty rapid pace, and my notes had to be sketchy in order to keep up.

That having been said, this information is hot off the presses, and there's enough in here of interest to crafters that I felt I should put something up now, instead of waiting the few days it will take to get then to send me art resources and the like.

The Basics

Any guild of level 30 or higher can purchase a guild hall. The level of the guild will determine what tier(s) of hall the guild can purchase. (You can always purchase a lower tier hall.)
  • Tier 1: Level 30+ guild. Halls are available in every city, and use the current 5-room house model. Purchase price will be 100 plat.
  • Tier 2: Level 50+ guild. Halls are in North Freeport near Stonestair Byway, and in South Qeynos in the Hall of Thunder. They will be 10-room halls, and will have a 500 plat price tag.
  • Tier 3: Level 70+ guild. Halls are in Antonica and Commonlands, accessible via bells at the docks. They're absolutely ginormous, with a huge courtyad, a docks area where bells can be placed, etc., etc. Purchase price is 1,000 plat.
There will be a 1500 item limit.

Purchasing and Upkeep

Your guildleader will be able to purchase the guildhall for the guild, and their citizenship will decide which zone the guildhall is located in. Since the purchase is made by a single person, there will be no personal status cost involved in the purchase of the hall, but a lot of uses for status within the halls. Only one hall can be owned by a guild at any time.

There will be weekly upkeep costs for the guildhall amounting to 1% of the purchase price, plus status. Using the same sort of interface as player homes, guildmembers can donate money and personal guildstatus to the hall's escrow, to be put towards maintenance and Amenities (more on amenities in a bit). As with personal home escrow, once money and status is placed into escrow, it cannot be withdrawn.

Moving to a new guild hall, such as moving from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2 guildhall works mostly the same as with player homes - go to the new place, click to buy, it says you already have one, and do you REALLY want to move? If yes, then it packs up the furniture into a moving crate, transfers the escrow, and fun stuff like that. (See the Amenities information on important info about Amenities and moving.)

Access

Just like player housing, there will be Trustee, Friend, Visitor and No access settings. However, you can set it so certain ranks in the guild have certain access right off the bat, you can choose to allow no non-guild visitors, or allow them, as you wish. (Default access will be Officer+ as Trustess, Member+ as Friend, Applicant+ as Visitor, but as mentioned, this can be changed.

Amenities

Amenities are items or Hirelings that can be puchased for your guildhall, from an interface available while you are in the hall. They will cost coin and status, and there will be a limit on how many you can have, based on guild level.

Once amenities are purchased, they can be moved around the hall by folks with Friend or higher access, but they cannot be picked up and placed in inventory. They can be removed from the hall from the amenity purchase panel.

There will be 42 different amenities available at launch of guildhalls. A level 30 guild can have 15 of these amenities in their hall at any given time. A level 80 guild will be able to have up 30 amenities.

Every amenity will have a coin and status cost, and a weekly upkeep cost, except for the courtyard statues. The statues are just meant to be massive and impressive, and will cast coin and status to purchase, but have no upkeep.

So, just what are these amenities, and why would you want to spend on them? They are various items or NPCs that will make your guild's life easier.

Various things that were covered were mariner bells for various locations, a druid portal NPC, banker, broker, mender, portals, guild strategist, crafting equipment, fuel merchant, guild strategist, harvesting storage depot, creature conjuror, a harvesting NPC and much, much more.

Please, watch the saliva, folks. It is bad for your keyboards! Let me cover some of these in a bit more detail before I rush to another panel.

There will be a world broker. Eventually, they hope to also have a special guild broker where you can sell items that only your guildmates can access and purchase. (This is phenomenal for guild crafters who want to have items for guildmates available at-cost, or at a cheaper rate than they'd sell it to strangers, etc.)

There will be a harvesting depot, where you can drop off harvesting resources for other guildmates to access. (A guildmate of mine has much fun mailbombing me with a ton of surplus raws, which I often then bounce around to other guildies in need, so one of these will be divine for us!)

The mender can be set to take the full cost of mending from the player, or partially pay for it, and part come from the escrow.

The "guild strategist" will allow a player to purchase flags that can then be planted in any non-instanced location. The rest of the guild can then use the strategist to travel from the guild hall to that location. The flags will stay planted for 2 hours, and only one can be planted by the guild at a time. This is a great way to prep for something big, but the purchase price of the amenity is also going to be pretty big. :)

The creature conjuror will allow you to summon various arena champions for you to practice fighting with them.

The harvesting NPCs will be of a specific type (miner, gatherer, etc.), and you can tell them to go out and harvest for a certain tier of resources. In a couple hours, you can then check back in with him and get the results of 100 random pulls from the proper node type.

Since the Tier 3 guild hall is so amazingly huge, there will also be a portal amenity that will allow you to buy and place 5 portals in various spots in the hall, for faster travel between them.

You will be able to customize the various hirelings (NPCs) to set name, race, and gender. You will also be able to purchase a uniform amenity if you wish, so that you can dress them in matching uniforms if you wish.

What About Player Furniture?

You can place the current player furniture and house pets in a guild hall, but here comes a big BUT or two:

Any furniture item placed in the guild hall is likely to then become the property of the guild, so if you don't have trustee access, you may not be able to get the item back.

The rent status reduction on player housing items will NOT reduce the upkeep costs on the hall and the amenities. It would just be too unbalancing, with the 1500 item limit and so on. They may look into some other ways to reduce in Phase 2 - time will tell.

Setting the Stage - the Next GU

The next game update should see a few more world events as they build up to releasing guild halls. There will be building and harvesting writs to be run, with rewards for certain levels of completion. (The rewards mentioned were: 10 times and you get a house status item, 20 times and get a statue, 30 times and get a title)

What Next?

I'm sure this just scratches the surface of the upcoming guild halls, and I saw notes being taken based on various little bits mentioned by fans attending the panel. We do not have a release date for guild halls yet, but, as you can guess from the above, there's some amazing progress done, and halls finished enough that we got to see a bit of a tour around the inside of them. As more information becomes available, we'll keep you posted.

I'm one VERY exhausted halfling, but hopefully this will get you a bit of information on the halls until more formal writeups can be done and art assets obtained.

Added Notes:

August 17: While guild halls are not part of the expansion, during the question and answer session of the Expansion Panel yesterday, a dev kindly clarified information regarding access to the guild halls. On your first visit to the guild hall, you will need to get there on foot. After that, provided that your guild purchases it, there is a Guild Translocation Beacon as an Amenity. Once the Amenity is purchased and placed, guildmembers can click on the beacon to earn their call to guild hall ability.

During the "Anything Goes" panel yesterday, we were taken on another tour of guildhalls, including our first views of the tier 2 guild halls. While the T3 halls are outright ginormous, the T2 ten-room halls are pretty doggone big, too! I can't wait until we have access to screenshots and/or tour videos, as they looked pretty sweet!

There was also mention at this point, that only the T2 and T3 halls were part of the original development plan, but that they added in the T1 homes as an extra "bonus" that would allow lower-level guilds access to something.


Updated Details

This is taken directly from this thread on the SOE forums.

Since our unveiling of Guild Halls at Fan Faire we've heard lots of feedback, over 60 pages worth! This morning we discussed a lot of this feedback and have decided to make some changes.

1. Zone Art

One of the issues that concerned you was that the Tier 1 guild hall made use of the existing 5-room house. Initially this was added to give us another tier that originally wasn't in the plan. However, we can certainly understand that the effort and cost involved in obtaining your first guild hall is significant, especially for smaller guilds. Tim "Haohmaru" Heydelaar, our zone art lead, made a huge commitment to guild halls this morning and agreed to building a new 5-room guild hall using the brand new zone geometry and textures that are used in the larger guild halls. He will also be making changes to the Tier 2 guild halls, adding a new atrium and expanding their size slightly over what we showed you at Fan Faire. The Tier 1 and 2 guild halls will still be located inside the city. If you're concerned about travel, see #3 below.

2. Pricing

For some of the smaller guilds the pricing of entry-level guild halls was a barrier. We've decided to leave the pricing of the Tier 3 guild halls alone, but have lowered the price of the Tier 1 and 2 guild hall. Below is the new pricing table.
Tier 1
Purchase: 50p (Lowered from 100p)
Upkeep: 50g, 50k status (Lowered from 1p, 100k status)
Tier 2
Purchase: 250p (Lowered from 500p)
Upkeep: 2.5p, 100k status (Lowered from 5p, 150k status)
Tier 3
Purchase: 1,000p
Upkeep: 10p, 200k status

3. Accessibility

Many people were concerned that guild halls located in other cities would not be very accessible. You will have several methods to get to your guild hall very easily, regardless of its location. First, you'll be able to purchase a house item from the city status merchant that will allow you to port from your personal house straight to your guild hall. Secondly, we've reduced the cost of the "Call to Guild Hall" amenity greatly. It will now only cost 1p, 250k status to purchase instead of 10p, 2 million status. In addition we've lowered the recast timer on Call to Guild Hall so you can use it every 15 minutes instead of once per hour.

4. Tradeskill Tables

Another concern was having to purchase amenities for each tradeskill table when you already have them available in your personal home. This made it difficult for small guilds because they'd have to use most of their amenity slots for tradeskill devices. We've decided to allow you to place your existing tradeskill tables in the guild hall and have removed them from the amenity list. Now smaller guilds will be able to use those slots for new features like the supply depot and harvester or convenience features like the fuel merchant and writ giver. Keep in mind that this removes 7 amenities so the original count of 40+ amenities at launch is now around 35.

We hope that these changes will have a positive impact and resolve some of the concerns expressed so far. Smaller guilds should have a much easier time getting into a Tier 1 guild hall and now have an easier upgrade path moving into the Tier 2. The amount of upkeep required to maintain a guild hall still greatly depends on the choice of amenities you decide to purchase.

We're always interested in hearing your feedback so let us know what you think of these changes.

Created: 2008-08-15 04:54:00          
Last Modified By: Niami Denmother          
Last Modified on: 2008-08-19 05:50:45          

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