How Guildhalls SHOULD have been done

Okay, guildhalls. As mentioned in the previous post, the EQ2 ones look lovely (though perhaps impractically large). They are, though, probably a little too functional for my liking.

Now, that sounds like a ridiculous statement when you first hear it. The thing is, though, you don't want guildhalls that have too much functionality in terms of game mechanics simply because its divisive in the community. Firstly, because it means that guilds will lock themselves away from the rest of the server. Secondly, because it alienates and disadvantages the players who don't want to be or who just aren't in a guild.

In my mind, guild halls should be a social thing, a manifestation of the guild's successes and achievements in the gameworld. A lot of a MMORPG is about social status, so I don't think this is actually entirely unreasonable. The trick is to do it properly, so the guilds see it as something to work toward. To do this, you'd have to make the guild hall something that was progressively unlocked through the guild's progress into the game. Perhaps each major raid boss downed would unlock a new room, or new furniture or a new NPC or something. Maybe each raid boss killed would appear as a head mounted on the wall in the main hall of the guildhall. There's plenty that could be done to show the status of the guild, and working together to unlock the various parts of the guildhall would probably bring the guild together a great deal.

Trashing some other guild's stuff is always fun.

The thing, then, is how to make it useful. Instanced guildhalls with no functionality could easily become as useful as the EQ2 player housing - not very, useful only for personal enjoyment. This is not a good thing, really. There's no point having a status symbol that nobody sees. Thus, you need to make them quite visible in-game, else they will only be used for guild meetings and rallying before a raid etc (these are quite important functions). You don't want to force people into them by making them more convenient to use than normal transport, so you'd only put transport to all the major continents there, which would mean it wouldn't be an inconvenience to use the guildhalls but it also there wouldn't be much of a advantage to doing so.

To make them visible in-game, you'd put them in the cities. If each guild hall was instanced, you'd have some kind of ranking for the guilds (perhaps in terms of who has been the most successful PvP guild, the most successful raid guild etc), and then you'd have a series of buildings in the cities. The most successful guilds in each category every week would occupy one of these buildings for that week (the more successful, the more prominent the location), with their heraldry being displayed on the walls and the front entrance being a direct entrance to their instanced guildhall. To see your banners flying across the capital cities shared by everyone would be quite something, and it'd encourage more inter-guild competition and provide the ultimate fix for those seeking social status.

Whether or not you think the high-end game needs more powergaming and competition between the ulta-hardcore players, the only practical use I can see for guildhalls (beyond roleplaying, which you could still do with my system) is to give guilds another prize to fight over. Anything else would involve the guildhalls being too useful in game mechanics terms, the knock-on effects of which would likely lead to the cities being abandoned.