With the announcement of the next major patch in Age of Conan centering around enhancing the guild experience, I started to think about some major features that I find lacking in the day-to-day operation of a guild.
Craig Morrison’s letter to the community gives us some interesting hints to an in-depth and competitive guild experience system, but what I hope that will be unveiled later is a comprehensive plan to give more control to the guild concerning, flexibility of AoC’s government system and the guild rank permissions.
The above photo shows the drop down menu (1) that contains the different government types there are to choose from in Age of Conan. The game has a huge amount of lore and each government (2) has a large amount of backstory and can be tied to one of the many cultures in the game. It may be for a roleplaying purpose but you are not able to create your own government or ranks. I find this to be one of the major things lacking about the system.
When creating a guild, in previous MMOs, I’ve really enjoyed having the ability to create prestige rankings for people that have been members in our guild for awhile. I also have used the ability to create ranks as a means to keep track of alts in the guild. We are a casual guild so the more flexible we can be with these features the better.
I don’t know if being able to create ranks would be as critical if I had the ability to adjust the permissions of each rank provided to me.
The list of available rankings (3) increases in responsibility as the list descends to Lord. AoC does not allow you to adjust of of the permissions (4) for any of the ranks though. That means, using the Nemedian government as an example, Aspirant to Squire have none of the listed guild permissions. Knight is given a large amount of permissions including inviting, kicking, promoting (no more than one rank below them), and demoting. Commandant, which I assume to be the officer rank, get the permissions of Knight and also the ability to make our guild city vulnerable to attack. This is used to initiate guild city siege warfare.
I’ve learned to work around the issues that spring up from these limitations. I would really like to be able to allow someone to invite a person but not promote, demote, or kick them. I think this is more important in the long run than creating or renaming ranks. Right now we run a pretty tight ship for a casual guild because of the huge jump in responsibility that we hand over with the rank of Knight.
One thing you may not think to notice is missing in the list of permissions (4) is something in the vein of “Can place things in guild bank.” and “Can take things from guild bank.” While the first seems to be trivial, the second one has been a source of a good bit of frustration. As of right now, the only ranks that can access the bank are the officer, and guild leader positions. I want to be able to give a longtime guild member the ability to take things from the bank, without making them an officer.
Being able to adjust the rank permissions would also allow me to use the government theme that fits us. Acheronean seems to be the best theme for our sinister sounding guild, The Creeping Darkness. I can’t justify using it though because of the way the permissions are set up.
These features are standard in most other MMO’s. I don’t think they, in anyway, take away from AoC’s uniqueness. They would just give guilds more options when it comes to management.
A few other knit picks:
- If I can’t create a new rank to keep track of alts, please allow for notes to be place next to guild members names. It would also help to keep track of a characters current crafting professions. Again, present in many other MMO’s.
- Fix the issue that sometimes causes a new guild member to have to relog their character in to be added to the guild chat channel.
Now off to Bear Shaman it up…by Crom!
No comments:
Post a Comment