Good morning fellow gamers! I’d like to open a discussion that’s been on my mind for awhile and that is guilds. What are you other games and experiences with guilds? Do the guilds here meet your expectations and why or why not? I’ll start with my history and opinion just for context. My gaming experience first began with EQ 1, to WoW, to Rift and Eso. In these games guilds are very integral for completing dungeons and raids with a familiar consistent bunch and as such the social relationships develop and grow and I like that. Here, I never get that feeling, after joining at least 4 different guilds there’s no chatter amongst guildies(from my experience). I’d like to know if this has been your experience and what your thoughts might be.
Guilds mean pretty much nothing in this game.
Their only realistic purpose is to get some extra materials every week from the Bloodstone Vendor. And those rewards are not even that great, and far less than most other vendors offer.
Guilds only make sense for people who want to treat the game like a chatroom, and in a few cases maybe as well for doing endgame content.
This have been discussed in other threads that I found, but to sum it up: in Lost Ark there is not much you can do before you get at least one characterr to lvl 50 as weekly tasks, Una’s task can’t be done on lower level character which creates a large gap for those who joins a Guild in later stage.
A large parrt of Main story quests can be done solo which isn’t encouraging to work with other on same goals. In particular if you progress without using real money in game (purchasing packs or make use of in game Shop for blue crystalls), then it start to gets very diffucult to keep players that have different views on how to progress in this game.
Add to that as a Guild leader myself, I have trouble to even use mass communication for members that aren’t online at the same time as myself and that most player can even filter chat for Guild messages (making it impossible to know if they even read what you write in Guild chat).
Sending in game email also is not easy as there is no tool to automatic list names from Guild (in open world you can use right click and “copy name”, but that doesn’t work when you use your Guild roster) to write exactly their name in email as this games built in limitation for naming character also forces people to add random letters or numbers to keep at least some part of names that they wish their character to have.
For Guild to work with people that isn’t real life friends or know each other from before there is very little motivation to get solo playe to join and start to play together which work much better in ESO or GW2.
Item level also blocks players from entering different type of content as if you haven’t done a quest which is needed to enter even main quest story line dungeons or have the right item level, then you will not be able to join a party from your Guild (which again creates a splitt in how guild could have worked). Second is also how much restriction there is on leaving or joining a guild as you will have to wait until that time period have ended to move to another guild.
Third is that how this game is based on character when you join a guild which also make it hard to change character for different type of content - maybe you have support character as an alt, but you can’t use that in guild as that will occupy one slot out of 30 that you start with in a fresh guild (it can be increased with Research, but then you need guild members willing to use their bloodstone to get there).
We also have to “fight” against how chat suddenly can block normal language (no swearing or anything offensive) at random and you now you will have a hard time to write anything in chat (which will include Guild chat) to explain things or do anything as you have cut down everything you wrote until it can be sent to chat.
To put it simple: there are good tools in game from one POV, but they don’t support mass communication within guild, especially when Guild have many offline players and add to that how chat can filtered which make it impossible to know who will see what you as Guild leader can expect guild members to see in guild chat.
This game doesn’t even let any character (alt or main) that have been created to actually do anything in a guild at level 10 (starting level) before you get to level 50 and unlock certain things like Una’s Tasks.
The amount of space to even create a Guild message that will show everytime you log in from Guild as Message of the day is also extremly small. You can’t write “Welome!” and some kind of reminder what to do in guild before it forces you to cut it down due too little space for this kind of messages.
Guilds as different as the people that run them. I have been in guilds from SWG and SWTOR. Tried one on Wow, and let’s just say the conversation and the attitude was not my style. The guild I was in on SWG was a friend’s guild and we pretty much did things together and roleplayed but we were also friends in real life first.
SWTOR, my boyfriend and I run now as my best friend started it but she passed away (after an auto accident) six years ago but we are a roleplaying guild and we sometimes will group up and do things but there are also times we go our separate ways and will sometimes speak in chat but a lot of us, like myself, are pretty quiet and shy so it takes us a bit to warm up to someone that may be new to the guild, though joining our guild is not that easy as we have specific things we do expect you to do.