Let’s see an article about PQ’s in WAR that was published in Massively.com:

“Over the last week or so we’ve already talking about some of the most innovative features of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. We’ve covered the Tome of Knowledge, the game’s one-of-a-kind crafting system, and today we had a lengthy look at their approach to classes and races. Tomorrow will be our last day of hands-on WAR coverage (for the time being), and we’ll talk all about RvR scenarios, keeps, and siege gameplay. But we’re missing something in all this, one of the most unique elements to the game.

That element is the Public Quest. There’s a great explanation of what Public Quests are over at the official Warhammer site, but there aren’t a lot of gorey details. What’s it like to complete one, for example? How long does it take to fill up your influence bar, and how do you get loot after the PQ finishes? We had the chance to play through two early-level Public Quests during our time at EA Mythic, and we’re here to report back. Read on below for details on all of the above, plus a reflection on the question “Why Public Quests?”

Jump In

Participating in a Public Quest is so easy, it’s worth it to repeat the experience. The first time you jump into one, though, you probably won’t realize what’s going on right away. A simple, unobtrusive goals window pops up in the upper-left hand corner of the screen. It’ll let you know what the goal of the quest’s current phase is, and how much has already been accomplished. Though later PQs can get extremely complex, early game goals are incredibly easy. The first quest we had the chance to take on was described quite artfully by Paul Barnett in the famous “bears, bears, bears” production video. Very close to the Greenskins’ starting warcamp there’s a flat, low area right near a bridge leading to a Stunty fortress. Darn dwarves, always going underground just when the fun begins.

The Dwarves just won’t come out and play, no matter how many times you ask nicely. So instead, you’ll have to do some persuading. There’s this great honking giant wandering around, who’d be a big help in this encounter. To get him on your side, you’ll need to do a bit of legwork first. So, first order of business is to kill 30 squigs, which should be enough to get the giant out of his foul temper.

The Squigs come in several different puke-variety colors, rotted and fetid teeth poking upwards from their grinning maws. Despite their hellish appearance, they go down easy, like Suntory. Those reprobates out of the way, the only thing remaining is to find payment for your massive stooge. Thankfully, a nearby dwarven encampment has just what the doctor ordered: many, many kegs of beer. Wrestling the kegs around summons more squigs, which you’ll likely want to slay as well.

The giant’s annoyance salved and his thirst quenched, he moves forward with grim purpose. He grasps a massive bomb and walks it straight into the enormous doors of the dwarven fortress. Rightly peeved, the commander comes stalking out with his personal guard of Ironbeard dwarves. He orders the attack, and several waves of Dwarven soldiery comes rushing at you across the bridge. They’re stout-hearted, but surely no match for Greenskin blades. That pushes the commander over the edge, and he rushes you with his elite guard at his heels. Their end is … not pretty.

The first Public Quest in the High Elf area is even more simple than that. Valiant High Elven soldiers are desperately trying to hold back the onslaught of some Dark Elven attackers, and they need your help. Pitching in and clearing out the problem prompts the corrupt elven leader to send out some heavy artillery: a many-headed Hydra. The creature is enormous, and very tough. Luckily, the High Elves have some artillery of their own: ballistae, very conveniently placed within firing distance of the Hydra. Pumping the creature’s scaly hide full of massive bolts is incredibly rewarding, and should see you contemplating your rewards soon enough.

Get Stuff

At the end of every public quest, the participants are ranked by their level of participation. Characters that slew more baddies, did more damage to bosses, or turned in more items will be placed higher on the list. The results of this tabulation are put up on a leaderboard screen that pops up. The higher you are on the list, the better you’ve done. The top participants not only get to feel good about a job well done, they’re likely about to be rewarded. Divvying out loot from a PQ is done by a random roll.

The catch is that the top participants on the leaderboard get significant bonuses to their rolls. The result is that everyone has a chance to earn a prize, but the people who put in the most time will be most likely to get the big rewards. While the roll is random, the loot is anything but. As in almost every case where you’re given a reward in Warhammer, the loot you have access to is tailored to your class and the difficulty of the PQ. Winning rollers receive loot bags, inside of which are several shiny options. Players get to choose one item (be it armor, a weapon, or even just coin) that they want the most.

Folks who lost the roll-off need not worry, because they’ll be rewarded as well. Nearby every public quest is an Influence vendor, a guy who’s been watching your progress in the PQ and liked what he saw. Every time you participate in a given Public Quest, your influence rises. You can check your influence by looking into the Tome of Knowledge, getting the background on the PQ while checking your progress. At certain cutoff points, various items become available at the influence vendor. Lower influence items might be consumables like potions, while mid-tier items are likely solid level-appropriate weapons and armor; possible replacements if you’ve got a piece getting stale on your paper doll, but nothing to right home about.

Maxing out your influence, though, nets you a high-stat item dependent entirely on your class. High stat items are also the best rewards you can get from PQ loot bags, meaning you could end up with several high stat items just from participating in one Public Quest. At higher levels, it will take you some effort to earn the influence required to nab those rewards, but at the low levels we played at there was very little between your character and those high-stat items. Just two successful runs through the Greenskin PQ maxed out our influence bar, and sent us sprinting for the vendor.

Why PQs?

You may be asking yourself now, “what’s the point?” Why bother with all of this, given that you can get this basic sort of experience through a series of regular old quests. You can even get the nice loot, right? It’s just a matter of itemizing the quests correctly.

When we spoke to Jeff Hickman last week, he cut to the heart of the issue. Jeff said, “I truly feel that Public Quests are absolutely revolutionary in the industry. Again, a hard thing to show because … it’s not that they’re hard to get into, but they feel best as you progress through the game. As you’re doing your quests and unlocking your tome, doing some crafting, doing your thing … then boom you step into your first Public Quest and it’s like ‘oh!’”

While we’re not sure the word revolutionary is rightly applied here, PQs are easily one of the most compelling things about Warhammer Online. The reason? Quite simply, Public Quests are raids without the bullcrap. They’re getting together with other people to do something epic, having fun as a big bunch of people, and not having to wait on one guy for you to have fun. That seems to be the implicit question Public Quests throw out: “Why can’t we have fun as a group without fear of jerks?”

The result, in our admittedly limited experience, is amazingly well realized. PQs combine the best parts of raids, reputation grinds, lore quests, scripted encounters, and human behavior into one wholesome experience. There are apparently over 300 of them in the game, and our hope is that significant resources will be spent after launch to keep new Public Quests coming in our direction. In this blogger’s opinion, they represent everything great about the MMO genre. PQs, alone, are going to be worth checking out WAR when it drops this fall.”

Public Quests are the best aren’t they????Can’t wait to check them out

So guilds in WAR…..this is something that really involves us.So let’s see an interview that explains a lot:

Warhammer Online’s ongoing series of production videos are almost too informative sometimes. For the bloggers at Massively, they pretty much do our job for us. Not that we don’t mind taking it easy, but as you’ve probably gathered right now we really enjoy talking about MMOs. Thankfully, some topics are complicated enough that they warrant a second look. Warhammer’s Living Guilds system, for example, was the subject of a great video just a few weeks back. And yet, there are still a number of questions you can walk away with.

Where can you use the guild banner (now called a standard)? What kind of tools will guilds have for coordinating events? What about the big picture? How to alliances work? And, perhaps most importantly, where can guildies get drunk together? All of these questions and much, much more are explored in the latest of our ongoing series of articles about Warhammer Online.

If you’re so inclined, you can jump straight to to part 2 or part 3, or join us below as we chat with Mr. Drescher and Ms. Christian Bales.

So, what do we need to know about guilds?

Josh Drescher: Christian is currently a one-woman guild. We’ll start from the very beginning. Six players are needed to form a guild, so basically - not coincidentally - the maximum size of our groups is the minimum size of our guilds. One of the core focuses of Warhammer overall is that it is a social and competitive game. While we have attempted to build the game in such a way that a solo player will have no lack of things to do, at the end of the day, the most effective way to play the game is always going to be to engage all of it. To do PvE, to do RvR, to engage socially with other players, but we recognize that some people are very hesitant to commit to something like a guild because of some of the stigma attached. Some people also feel that it hits them with a level of responsibility, that you’re now committed to being a ‘full time MMO player’, and that you’ve gotta be a hardcore dude to play effectively, and on and on and on.

We wanted to introduce people to the idea of social gameplay in a way that was tricky (so they didn’t realize that that’s what was happening), but that also gave them a lot of positive feedback. So that’s what the Public Quest system does, is that it basically takes a person who’s belligerent and doesn’t like talking to other people, very anti-social. They’re running through the world, they’re doing a typical quest and they stumble across a PQ. There are hundreds of them, littered all throughout the world, it’s impossible to miss them. You’re going to run into them very, very early on in your experience. The intention there is that we wanted to introduce you to the idea that it’s Not That Scary To Group With Other People. You really can play with other people, step outside of that solo gameplay mode.

For better or for worse, at the moment, there are a lot of people that really believe fundamentally that they can only play these games solo, that there isn’t anything for them socially in the game. Again, if you step back to some of the other stuff we were talking about, imagine a person who says “I love professional football. I love to watch football, I love to go to games, but I don’t like talking to people when I’m at the game. I want everybody else to shut up and just be quiet, I want to yell, I don’t want other people around. It’s only fun when I’m yelling alone.”

Part of the MMO experience is embracing the idea that the social component is part of the game, it’s a component of the world that you need to be aware of, and a part of. So the guild system is really designed to take everything that a guild traditionally has been in an MMO, and stepped that up, integrated it into the world in a way that is something other than - you know - an extra chat channel, or a roster of the other people in your hardcore superguild, and then maybe a tabard. Our guild system is what we call the “living guild system”.

What that actually means at the most basic level is that, like your character levels up, your guild also levels up. And in the same way that leveling your character up grants you new and interesting abilities, gives you access to things you don’t have access to earlier on, leveling your guild up gives you all sorts of additional…

So as your guild levels up, you basically earn access to all of these different types of things that improve the flexibility, the quality of your guild, they apply sensibly to what a guild is supposed to be doing in the world. We wanted to make sure that the ideal was that if you’re part of a guild that it’s actually seamless, the way that you contribute. When you’re in a guild, everything you do in the world contributes to that guild’s leveling. So, that’s not to say that it’s taking away from your personal experience, they’re like parallel chains that doesn’t slow down personal experience gain while you’re in a guild. It’s an independent experience pool that kind of builds in parallel with everything else. So questing, public quests, RvR, crafting, unlocking things in the Tome, everything that you’re doing in the game is contributing to your guild’s overall experience.

There is no such thing as an ‘insignificant contributor’. Anybody in the guild is helping that guild. One of the other things that is sort of important is giving a sense of purpose and direction, having the ability to see when we are currently the rank 1 guild, we know that when we get to that rank 1, we’re going to get our guild bank. But you also know that later on, you’re targeting different things. If you remember Civilization I, the greatest PC game of all time (that I didn’t work on), you would toggle into a city, and it would bring a little thing up that says “this city is building the Colossus of Rhodes”. The idea behind moving guilds is that there’s always a sense that you’re building the Colossus, or you’re building an aquifer, or whatever it is that your guild is working on. There’s always a sense of understanding there.

Obviously, there’s a lot of data that gets pushed in as well. Maintaining a guild in the modern MMO has unfortunately, for most people, basically deteriorated into a secondary full-time job. If you’re running a large relatively hardcore guild, you’re looking at 20-30 hours of time a week, probably just managing that guild. Planning events, getting things scheduled, making sure people know where to be and when to be there, you can’t just be in the game and doing it, you have to also have a website that has a forum, and you have to have a mailing list, and everybody’s instant messenger thing and blah blah blah. One of the things we wanted to do was have a feature set of events available to guild leaders that made it easy to accomplish all of the basic tasks without it requiring you to 1: leave the game. You shouldn’t have to do anything outside of the game in order to organize your guild effectively, so getting you things like the calendar (which is not active yet, but you understand hypothetically what a calendar is…) What that gives the guild leader - and it’s a stupidly simple thing you explain it, and then you go “huh? Why was this not always in things?” It gives you the ability to say “Okay guys - on Saturday, we’re going on this raid, and we’re taking 20 people, here’s a sign-up list.”

Guild members can sign up for events straight from the calendar?

Josh: They can sign up right from the calendar. And so not only do you know when the event is, you know whether or not you’re a part of it, you know who else is going to be there, you know if you need to go out and recruit more people from the guild, or if it’s already full, the guild leader obviously has the ability also to say “We don’t want Bob, we want Susie!”. Now, I’ve always been of the view that if you don’t want Bob, you should just kick him out of the guild, because that’s just mean to Bob, but whatever, you might be running a really mean guild. And that’s totally up to you. But the calendar feature’s very, very simple and straightforward but also extremely powerful. It eliminates the necessity for all sorts of additional time-wasting secondary stuff, to free you up to play the game. Because it’s not Schedulehammer, it’s Warhammer. And then obviously the calendar will notify you when your events are coming up and so forth, and you can track things within your alliances as well.
Is there going to be an out of game component? Are you going to provide guilds a web-based component as well?

Josh: If you’re familiar with what we did with the Camelot Herald, that was actually one of those features we think started to evolve that game for us. There needs to be more server-front-facing information that’s going out there, because there are going to be people - you’re going to be at work - you’re wondering how the war is going. You can’t have a persistent world conflict and then disconnect people from all the information, so your guild will have a page that’s automatically generated, on the Herald, that’ll have certain types of information.

I don’t have the final list of what we’re probably going to display, but it’ll give you things like - what your guild rank is, do you have a keep currently, what’s the status of the keep that you’ve taken over, what is the overall status of the Realm war - and so on and so forth. So in terms of the top of the fold front-page information, if this is a newspaper, that’s all on there. Below the fold Op-Ed information, that’s all - once again - inside the game.

One of the good examples of that is the News Feed. Guild News operates like an RSS feed, again, it’s all about getting information to players in a way that doesn’t waste the time of the guild leaders. So, you take all the basic information that people would normally be telling their guild, you know - “Hey everybody, just wanted you to know I’ve added something to the calendar, please go ahead and take a look at it” - or, “Hey, we’ve recruited ten new people” - or “Hey, there’s a recruitment drive going on, we need to recruit ten new people” - or, “We’ve taken over a keep”. That’s all stuff that traditionally the guild leader would be responsible for disseminating that information to his guild members, either by email or in a forum post or message of the day or whatever else.

This automatically generates it. It basically goes through and says “Major events have happened in the guild” and it auto-populates in that window. What that also means is, if you log in off hours and nobody else from the guild is around, you still get informed. Or maybe you’re the pariah Bob … and nobody wants to talk to you for some reason, you notice they’re recruiting lots of people that serve your function… that information is there for you, so you’re never disconnected from what your guild has accomplished and what’s currently going on.

A question - and if the answer’s yes, it might make us giddy. Can you actually get that information as an RSS feed? That you put in an RSS browser?

Josh: That I don’t know yet. Not at the moment. But it is definitely on the list of “Wouldn’t it be great if…” Basically, that’s kind of how the Camelot Herald functions, like I said, it’s the top of the fold version of that information will populate in the Herald. So you’ll know if you’ve got a keep that you control, like the really significant stuff that will make you actually go “You know, I do have some PTO… maybe I’ll leave work a little bit early…” that sort of thing.

We note there is a website and an email address down there at the bottom of the tab? What are those?

Christian Bales: That’s just my web, that’s test for now, but that’s when the guild leader wants to set the actual guild’s email address and the guild website.)

Josh Drescher: You can set that to be whatever you want, so … Obviously, one of the cool things that you really want from a guild is a sense of belonging, the team jersey, you go and dress up in your Redskins jerseys or wherever you’re from. It’ll have the guild heraldry. The heraldry is a customized, unique sort of heraldry for your specific guild. So a symbol on it, specific color scheme, shape, patterns and so forth that’s applicable only to your guild, that your guild will have the ability to place on various things.

Christian: On your standards and on your guild cloaks.

How many icons are there available for guild Heraldry?

Christian: There are a lot. I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head.

Josh: A trillion!

Christian: … but it’s in the hundreds, definitely.

Josh: It’s … sufficient. One of the problems we run into is every single one of those symbols has to be run through GW, so we can’t just put like “the Bunny Rabbit guild!” because they’ll be like “pfft! No Bunny Rabbits!”, so it really is a matter of - we have hundreds of IP-appropriate guild emblems, that are then obviously also appropriate to your faction, and so forth.

Christian: And what we also did, which was in Camelot, is these emblems actually have color variants within each emblem, so there’s 1 to 10 color schemes. So you don’t actually tint this, it’s actually baked into the emblem itself. So you and I could have the same emblem, but mine might be green and yours might be black.

We assume pink, for example, would probably not be an option?

Christian: There’s definitely a color palette that is approved.

Josh: We are trying to stay away from ridiculous clown colors, but at the end of the day, one of the things that the Warhammer hobby has always kind of leveraged really effectively is the idea that you and I might have the same army, we might have the same army list, but we have the ability to go and paint them up in a very unique and different way.

So while we’re trying to stay away from the totally insane - we’re all a bunch of Chosens painted up to look like Hello Kitty - we don’t want to limit you too much, because really - you know - there are some audacious color schemes out there that look silly to some people but are going to be fun for other people. So especially, seeing as we’re really trying to be evocative and interesting, we’re giving you as many options as we reasonably can, without actually tripping the GW anger switch, making them go “No no no! No pink dwarves!”

Christian: Anger switch?

Josh: They don’t actually have an anger switch. To my knowledge they have never actually gotten mad and said “No no no”, but it’s because we tend to treat them with respect, rather than handing them pink dwarves, “What do you think?” “I think you’re stupid.”

When we spoke to Jeff Hickman earlier, he noted that using standards and standard gameplay is a part of the Open World RvR as well as just scenarios. We thought that it was only a scenario element.

Josh: Any time that you’re playing against other players.

And you can also use it in PvE situations?

Josh: It will have very specific and limited functionality in PvE

Christian: It’s still under discussion.

Josh: So, for example, there are things that the standard can do… an AoE knockback? We don’t allow you to knockback monsters, because it’s too exploitable. They’re too dumb to know not to stand on a cliff, and so the boss monster, if you’re able to guide him over to a cliff and then somebody goes “Standard!” and knocks him off a cliff… yeah. You don’t wanna do that. The idea there is that Standard really is intended to be for an RvR thing. It really is like the battle cry.

Again, it’s like football. It’s … you’re running around, you’re the team captain, you’re The Guy. You’ve got the flag, you’ve got the ball. And while you’ve got that ball, you’re the most important person on that field. And that might mean that you can’t shove a man in the face because he got a hold of the ball, but all focus is on you, and really there are things that only you can do while you’ve got the ball. It’s a very iconic thing that’s drawn from the IP. The idea of the Standard-bearer marching into battle in front of the army, and kind of planting that flag, and then “We hold this spot”. And it also creates a visual rallying point.

It’s shockingly efficient, where you go “Guys, we rally actually right here. Not over there, right here.” and then people run back and are like “Am I supposed to be over there? Oh! I’m supposed to be next to the Standard! ‘Cause that’s where we planted it!” …and so on and so forth.

Then you add tactics onto that. Are those the tactics that you earn on the rewards tab there?

Christian: Yes. Those are actual tactics that were built specifically for standards. They’re not from your player tab, and you actually unlock tactic points and tactic slots through the reward progression. Each standard - I would show you the Standards tab, but it’s not really ready to be revealed yet. I unlock a tactics slot, I unlock a tactic point, and then I can actually see a tactics list, and then I go through, just like the player, and I choose which tactics I wanna buy. And that does allow your standard to have customizable bonuses on it at that point.

Guild tactics and player tactics are completely independent. Player tactics are divided up into - you get those in three distinct ways - I don’t know who reiterated this, but I’ll reiterate it now. The standard tactics pool comes from your general advancement throughout the game, as you’re leveling up you’re getting new abilities, you’re getting morale abilities, you’re getting tactics. So those are generally useful everywhere. They’re good in RvR, they’re good in PvE, you need ‘em to do your job. Then you’ve got your renowned tactics. Renowned tactics, obviously, you earn through the renowned system, via RvR. Those are tactics that are specifically targeted for RvR use. They’re not going to be any good to you out in PvE.

Then we have Tome tactics, that you unlock through the Tome of Knowledge. Those are focused squarely at PvE. So an RvR tactic, or renowned tactic for instance, would be “I do some percentage of additional damage against Dwarven players”, versus a Tome tactic that would be “I gain experience faster by killing humanoid models”. And then Standard tactics - career tactics - would be something like percentage increases to actual abilities, percentage improvements to specific types of functions that your character engages in and so forth. And then Guild tactics are obviously very focuses at group playing, morale generation increase for the entire guild, increase morale generation for people that are close to the Standard, and on and on and on.

The tactic points - does the guild leader choose which tactics are selected, or can each individual guild member choose which one they get?

Christian: Only if the guild leader chooses to give other members that permission. It’s permission-based. Once you actually slot tactics onto your guild standard, it locks for 24 hours as soon as you hit save. At guild rank six, you get access to a number of standard-related things. You’ve unlocked two standard bearer titles, the only people that can carry standards are the guild leader or whoever it’s assigned at the standard bearer title. Then I unlock a tactic slot, which means I can slot a tactic under my standard, and then a tactic point, and then I actually unlocked my Recruits-Battle standard.

You unlock your first standard, you unlock your first tactic point … and then further down the line, you unlock more tactic points for the standards.

Christian: And more tactic slots.

Josh: Everything sort of drives back to the core for lots of the social interaction, cooperation and so forth. One of the things that we’re trying to get away from is the idea that you can be part of an uber-guild and that as a result, you can basically be anti-social as a Guild. You can go “We are the top badass dudes, and we ignore everybody else! We go out every night, we go on raids, and we ignore everybody else. You can’t get into our guild … you can’t talk to our guild, we don’t talk to you, we don’t look at you, we’re impossible to deal with, we’re terrible, just ignore us.” Because this game is large-scale world-spanning conflict-oriented, one guild is not going to be able to accomplish everything on their own.

They need to cooperate on a macro level, on an alliance level, and so in an effort to re-train people back into the idea that World War II wasn’t just the Americans, or just the British, or just the Russians, that’s the case. That was a coalition, sometimes a little tenuous, it was a group of people that came together, formed an alliance, strategically worked together - and obviously their sensibilities were different. The Americans behaved differently on the battlefield than the British, and everybody behaved differently to the crazy Russians, and that sort of thing. There’s a place in that coalition for everyone. And so even though the United States and the Russians don’t necessarily get along that well, they can come together for a common cause. So we’re trying to remind people of that in subtle ways.

Guild halls are located in capital cities. Within that guild hall there are all sorts of special vendors and NPCs and so forth, they are only for people in guilds, and then there’s actually a room upstairs, a special room that only the guild leadership can go into. It serves the purpose of a guild hall, access to different things, vaults and NPCs and all that other stuff, but it’s communal so you’re going to see people from different guilds that are all, effectively allied with you in a general sense. They might be specifically allied with you in that you actually have an alliance with that other guild, but then actually decisions are being made upstairs by the guild leadership.

In my perfect little vision of this, what you’ve got is hundreds of people downstairs getting drunk and punching each other in the face, and so on and so forth, and upstairs in the smoke-filled room, you’ve got the officers bickering over what are we going to do, how are we going to attack. Who’s going to go for the Bright Wizard’s College instead of the Temple of Sigmar when we breach the gates of Altdorf? And then they all come downstairs and they announce to their guildmates, “All right! We’re allied with so-and-so now, we’re going out on Tuesday, we’re doing the thing … check the calendar!” and off they go.

You’re not going to be able to operate as a completely independent organization. To access everything, you’re going to have to go and play nice-nice from time to time. You’re going to have to work with other people, you’re going to have to cooperate, you’re going to have to socialize, we’re going to force you into communal areas … all the things that you do to children, basically, on the playground. You organize “You’re all gonna go play dodgeball now.” “I don’t wanna play dodgeball!” “Play dodgeball!” …and that sort of thing.

Is there a formal in-game mechanic for alliances?

Christian: There certainly is. We do allow formal alliances in the game, you can form an alliance with up to ten guilds, and you can assign officers within that alliance structure, though that is very limited. We actually have a roster for the alliances, you form it just from this window, and then it populates with your alliance roster. Note that every member from your alliance is not displayed in this roster, only your guild, the alliance leaders and the officers, because that would be - if you had ten guilds in your alliance, that would be a lot of people.

Is there a cap for the number of people that can be in a guild?

Christian: There is not, actually, at the moment.

Josh: We’re looking at tuning that probably when we get to the guild beta. We want to make sure that there isn’t a way to game in the system, making sure that randomly bringing in a thousand people isn’t somehow efficient because there are diminishing returns for how much guild experience and individual player can contribute, based off of the actual size of the guild. We want to make sure there’s not this kind of disparate variance, where a six or ten person tiny guild never gets above guild rank 5, so that the diminishing returns there were obviously never in habits of somebody that’s not offering anything to the guild progression.

We want to make sure that there isn’t a way that you can go “Well, I’ve added a million people to my guild, and now we just generate, each of us offer one point of experience a week - but we generate a million experience a week!” So, there is no cap currently but that’s something that the system allows us to cap if, we will make that decision once we’ve got guilds there.

Do calendars work across guilds in an alliance?

Christian: That’s under discussion. It’s definitely one of those “We’d love to do this…”

Josh: It makes sense, when you think about it - because otherwise what you wind up with is each guild leader having to independently schedule an alliance battle, and it makes more sense for an alliance leader to be able to schedule an alliance event.

Just make sure we’re clear … A six-person guild is obviously not going to gain experience as fast as a hundred-person guild. At the same time, there’s no cap per se on how high they could get? So if those six people are really dedicated players, they could easily level up to and beyond the hundred-person guild …

Josh: Absolutely! You’re going to have people that join on day one that basically play in a committed sense with the same 10-15 people for years, that are going to slow and steady win the race, vs. a brand new guild that comes on, two or three years down the line, and says “Hey, let’s form up with 100 people, and run through the guild’s leveling system”. You’re going to be able to advance past where that guild is, just based off of time. The idea again is to try and avoid the sense that you’re punishing people for not being in a huge guild. We’re trying to again get away from the idea that enormous super-guilds are the dominant force in the world.

They will be a force, a really strictly regimented, extremely talented group of players is always going to be somewhat more efficient and effective than a comparable group of people that are maybe a little more casual. So we have no problem with saying there’s going to be a difference between the speed of leveling across the board for casual players and hardcore players. The idea is not to build in abusive systems that disproportionately reward hardcore play. So you give them a tiny bonus, congratulations, your 40 hours a week dedication to the game has given you this additional sort of experience, but it’s not exponentially greater.

Broadly, how fast do you expect guilds to be leveling up?

I was saying that what you actually have are multiple sort of experience pools for you. So the easiest way to think about it is almost visually - you’ll have your 40 levels as a player, and we actually want you to get through that relatively quickly. Even for casual player it’s not going to take them years, it’s going to take them months, to get from 1 to 40. Hardcore gamers will do it much more quickly than that. The idea is that the game really sort of kicks into high gear at that 40th tier. Between the 35-40 territory is really where you’re finally in the thick of it. You go back and forth between capital cities, you’re fighting for territory, you’re in the NFL Championship, back and forth and back and forth.

That progression actually in no way represents the lifespan of the game or the experience for an individual player. Your renowned ranks, which as you saw earlier, start with you at level 1, and from the moment that you start fighting RvR, extend well beyond in terms of the amount of time and effort that it’s going to take, well beyond the actual experience level cap for your player. So that extends well out beyond level 40. And then guild advancement is another one of those examples of something that extends well beyond the character leveling progression. So a group of people who start at level 1, form a guild, and then level through the entire game to 40, when they all get to 40, their guild is not going to be topped out. There’s a substantial amount of additional material available for them, additional advancements and leveling and so forth.

There isn’t a hard cap in terms of what we’re thinking of, the time sink hours played sort of thing - and we can obviously add to it at any time, so the idea will be that there will always be something new and interesting that’s available to you guys to work towards. You’re eventually going to move to the point (again, to return to the Civilization example), where you’re going to move from “Hey, we’re building an infantry unit” to at the far end “We’re building the Colossus of Rhodes”. And so it’s going to eventually be this epic undertaking, but guilds that accomplish really super-high end stuff will be very high-status, high-prestige, significant entities in the world.

Christian: So - we were talking about standards a little bit, and how they’re used in RvR, but one of the very strategic points of standards too, is that your guild actually takes that standard out into RvR and claims keeps with it. So I go in, I defeat the Keep Lord, I go up and I plant my standard at the top of the Keep, and therefore that is my guild’s keep.

And then the guild’s heraldry perpetuates out to the keep guardian NPCs, correct?

Christian: Yes! And also there can be additional bonuses that can be applied to the guild just by claiming that keep. And also, that banner will radiate out bonuses that actually affect not just my guild and my group, but also any friendlies within the area around that keep.

Josh: When we were refactoring the RvR experience, initially we just started with the open world system, where it was just sort of control points in the world, and you tag ‘em when you’re done. We actually think that that’s a decent mechanic for early experiences. We want it to feel like that area is always in flux, that there’s always a back and forth fight there, that there’s something going on that it’s easy to understand what you’re doing. What we didn’t want to do was go “All right! Level 5 player, you’ve worked your way through the first zone, now lay siege to a castle!” - because the the difficulty curve there would be too extreme. So we actually, like everything else, we trickle it to you in increasingly complicated and difficult experience as the game progresses.

By the time you’re actually in the areas where you’re engaging in sieges and so forth, you understand your character, you understand their weaknesses, you understand the RvR experience, you understand the back and forth of zone control, your guild’s role, you’ve had time to join a guild, and on and on and on. So that by the time you actually are defending those structures, it makes sense in the game. Early on, what you’ll see there are like lower-level fortifications. Fences and blockades and so forth that are put up to funnel enemy players as they’re fighting their way through a zone.

Is there any way for a guild to lose levels?

Christian: If a guild does experience some sort of upheaval, where it’s a very large guild, lots of progression, and it’s relatively high level within the guild system, and then it sort of fades away, trickles down and suddenly there’s only a very small number of people left, we don’t take away any of the benefits they’ve earned. They keep all of that. It’s what they’ve earned as a guild!

Josh: Which, in its own way, is actually a mechanism that simplifies rebuilding the guild, because if you were a once-great guild that has all of this stuff, you have the opportunity to go to new people that are brought into the game through whatever means, and say “Look, would you like to be part of something that has a significant history, that we’ve already done a lot of this work for you, wouldn’t you like to join our guild now?” So I don’t think we’re actually going to see - except in very specific cases where people really want to contract the size of the guild and keep it small, I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of guilds that level way up and then lose all their population, because the incentive to join that guild is simply going to be too high to make it not attractive.

You mentioned recruiting drives … is there anything ingame that supports that?

Josh: There isn’t like a recruiting system of any sort. But obviously, there are going to be things like being able to point people to your guild page on the Herald, and say “If you want to know what we’re all about, check us out! We have a keep, this is our standard, this is our heraldry, you can see how many people are in the guild, you see where we rank, you’ll understand who we are, and so on and so forth” and that’s what that’s all about. But no, there isn’t like a recruitment system.

Many thanks to both of you for your time.

OOOhhhh that was surely a big interview but it was worth the time…..this banner feature really rocks….All these things with the guilds really make me mad that i cannot play WAR yet!

Taken from www.massively.com