Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for more visibility with guilds. I live and breathe guilds. However, I don’t think your solutions actually address the issues you’re actually raising here.

Does that mean I think the idea of a large, central Guild recruiting market pr a central application repository is a bad idea? No, and in fact, I’ve suggested just such a things several times myself. But ideas like guild barkers and billboards, especially in the way you’re suggesting them here, would almost certainly only serve the largest, most organized guilds – who are already doing a fine job of self-advertisement.

Here’s a few questions that I often ask would-be developers, when given the chance:

-Does your game concept handle the concept of player guilds proactively in your tutorial?
-How prominantly do you display/advertise the creation system for guilds in your game concept?
-How easy is it for players to find guilds in your game concept?

Everquest II has, by far, one of the most advanced suite of guild functionality in any MMO on the market right now that I’ve spent any significant time in. In fact, most of the announced features of EA Mythic’s “living guild” system already exist in some form within Everquest II. It just doesn’t go far enough.

Ideally, games should have a strong “Looking for Guild” tool. Most games are keen to create strong group building tools in their feature set, but I almost never see a similar effort put into building such a tool to help players find guilds (or vice versa). Everquest II has a guild recruiting tool which lists out guilds for players, but even this isn’t quite what I mean.

I want a method by which a player, such as yourself, can open a UI window and check off boxes to indicate your preferred guild features. Maybe you’re not quite interested in raiding, so you leave that box unchecked. You are interested in regular groups, so you check that. You’re interested in questing, but not tradeskilling, so you make sure to note that. In the appropriate areas, you point out that you’re looking for a guild with a more open guildchat (as opposed to strictly family friendly), that roleplaying isn’t necessarily important to you, and that you’re based in the GMT-5 time zone. The game automatically notes that you’re a level 60 rogue.

When you click the “find a guild” button, the system automatically filters through the heavy roleplay guilds, the heavy raiding guilds, the guilds which have minimum level requirements you don’t meet, and the guilds which aren’t looking for rogues. It sorts out the remaining selections in order of relevance for you, and let’s you look through some relevant stats that include everything from total guild size, average nightly activity levels, most active nights, least active nights, rosters, leaderboards – you name it.

From a guild standpoint, guild leaders have set up similar filters on their end to help weed through potential applicants who might be looking for a guild in the first place. Generally speaking, the system is set up in such a way to allow players looking for guilds and guilds open to new players a way to find each other in the first place. From there, an actual application window might open up (which has its own system/criteria backing it).

How would players know about such a system? Because they’re exposed to it during the game’s tutorial…as well as being exposed to how to create a guild, the benefits (and some common pitfalls) of guilding, and any specific features of this particular game that revolve around guilding (guild halls, keeps, etc.)

As the guildmaster of a moderately sized guild (60+ average members) which has existed in multiple MMO’s for the past 10 years (we were founded in 1998), I can tell you that the features I just listed would be pretty much everything I could hope and dream for within an MMO. In-game billboards and guild barkers just seem like unnecessary gimmicks that still won’t address the issues I’ve seen regarding guild recruiting/applications.

All we really need are simple, elegant methods to put players in touch with the guilds that want them, and more in-game education on how/why to do that in the first place.

The thing that I most desire from systems like this is visibility; regardless of how it’s done, I think it’s criminal that guilds are such a background element. Unless you’re willing to go trolling the forums, a casual player might not even know who the major players on the server are. In-game, or at the very least web/game integrated, systems like these would go a long way towards making players on a given server better-informed about their guild options.