That said, I think every game has hurdles to overcome in the area of player groupings. Witness, if you will, a posting by Stargrace over at MMOQuests. She’s working on her endgame crafting works, and she needs a bunch of crafted content to complete the quest. So she works at getting in touch with some crafters, makes some headway, but it sounds like she’s a bit daunted. Then:

“I get a tell, from Omay, who says they have ALL the crafters, and can make every piece for me. I sat there stunned for a second, it sounded too good to be true. Not only do they make all of the pieces, they are a guild dedicated to crafting, and helping others craft … After they’d crafted every single piece for me, they played fire works and congratulated me, and on my way I went for the turn in … Here I’d thought there was no crafting community on Najena - the channels are practically always silent. Low and behold, an entire guild dedicated to it.”

One of the (many) features players really need in these games is the ability to know what their options are on the guild front. This guild that helped stargrace, “Wing and a Prayer”, sounds like a fantastic outfit. But because the playerbase is so scattered and segmented, she had no idea they were even out there. WAR’s keep-capturing elements are great, and I look forward to that a lot. At the very least, players who come across a captured keep will know *those* guilds exist. But we need more. We need something even more meaningful than that. You know what we need?

We need guild recruiting stations. I’m envisioning buildings that stand in the capital cities of every faction/race/whatever your game has. This building would be in a central location, one heavily trafficked by players. There, guilds of all stripes would be able to hang out their shingles and show off. To accomplish this, I think you’d need to offer a variety of recruitment methods.

• Leaderboard advertising: The inside walls of the place would be covered in guild banners, tapestries, and plaques. The top X number of guilds (let’s say 10) for a variety of different criteria, have their banner hanging in the guild recruitment center by default. There’s nothing to it - it just shows up there. There’d need to be a number of different criteria, to entice a number of different types of players. The EverQuest 2 players site offers numerous axis on which to compare yourself. I think, with four walls you should go along four axis. I’d pick “Top PvP kills per guild member, top quests completed per guild member, most crafted items per guild member, and fastest raiding progression.” Those seem like they cover some of the big player interests, and showing the names of these guilds off in-game would at least get a dialogue going. Stargrace would have known about “Wing and a Prayer” already, or would have known where to turn to find out about serious crafting guilds.
• Guild Barkers: Guilds who complete certain criteria would have the ability to place a guild barker in the recruitment center for a period of two weeks. These criteria would be achievement based; taking down an instance for the first time, getting an epic weapon, completing an amazing crafting quest. After the barker has been used, they can’t make use of a barker again for a period of two months. Barker slots are scarce (maybe 10 in the whole center), and you have to enter a queue to make use of them. The catch is, they’re really impressive. You can configure your barker to look like a PC or special NPC and shout out your message to the world. Messages must be chosen from a list of pre-made “types” and then filled in using dropdowns. Guilds could use them to do everything from recruit, to shout their latest achievements, to publicize player-run events.
• External Billboards: The outside of the center has a series of huge billboards, one to each side of the building. These billboards can be rented by guilds for in-game currency, and will prominently feature their guild emblem. The messages that can be put up on the billboards are similar in tone to the barker messages, but are even more restrictive. These would primarily be used for recruitment purposes. Unlike the locked-in barkers inside the center, I see these operating just like web adverts; you pay a premium per appearance of your ad. The more gold you pay, the more the ad shows up.
• Application NPCs: Throughout the recruitment center are NPcs that will allow you to search through every guild on the server. You can see if they’re recruiting, what their roster is like, raid progression, server standings, the works. You can also apply for any of these guilds, using an application template tweakable by the guild leaders. Guild leaders can reference applications, adverts, barkers, and guild standing from a web-facing site.

That’s the thing that always surprises me about sharded MMOs - on a microcosm level they’re small places. A single server is only going to support a few thousand people at peak, which is a relatively manageable community. As much as I love the idea of a serverless ecosystem, if we’re going to have a micro-world why not make use of it by bringing people together in a more directed fashion?

Age of Conan, Mario Kart, Grand Theft Auto IV, Rob Off The Rails, Your Emails and more! Michael Zenke joins us for our in-depth impressions of Grand Theft Auto IV. Does Sean still hate it? Will the vein on Rob’s forehead burst? Can Michael inject some sanity into the conversation?!

The answer? Probably not. But it was fun to try.

For me, the Massive genre itself is my ‘comfort game’. It doesn’t really matter what game I’m playing, just as long as I’m online in a persistent space. WoW has its obvious draw, but I’ve recently found Guild Wars to be particularly comforting; running quests with a forest of henchmen and heroes is incredibly appealing. collaboration between the Eye of the North Heroes with those from Nightfall leads to evocative mental stories. Interesting stuff.

What I’m interested in is how the online experience extends this ‘comfort level’. Playing GTA IV this weekend I basically finished Raph’s Koolaid cup; in ten years every game is going to have some sort of online/MMO element. I think it’s a given. Nick Fortugno, at IMGDC, talked about the ’semi-multiplayer’ elements of Pogo.com games; I’m curious as to how much the human element is involved for comforting people as they play.

Even with the help of other players, making it to the top is long road. That journey is one to be enjoyed, as leveling a character in WoW is (for many people) the real game. That said, once you have your first character at max level, retaking those same steps to the top can be frustrating. Going over the same content for the second, third, fourth time is just never quite the same.

Today we have on offer a few simple tools to help you make it through ‘the grind’ in a reasonable amount of time with minimal hair-pulling. Some of these are technical in nature, some are simple techniques, and some are simple platitudes that we’ve found helpful in the past. Read on, and make sure to grasp the handrail tightly up the escalator.

• Not technically from today, but instead earlier this week, a fun retrospective on the two most recent Guild Wars boxes.
• Catching up with Warhammer. I sat in on another one of those EA Mythic conference calls, which you may recall from here on the site. Made me a little sad not to be putting it up here. Times they are a changin’, huh?
• Lots of AoC stuff on the site today, as the NDA dropped for press folks. I put in a sort of thousand-foot view on the game, and a heaping pile of videos and screenshots.
• It’s also a Thursday, so Massively Speaking #3 went up. Yay for consistency! #5 or bust!

I wanted to take a sec to throw back some links, though, because I’ve gotten a lot of love recently. Actually (and don’t ask me why) the posts from last week got a really warm reception from folks - I even got email about them. I never get email about MN.

• I’ve gotten LOTS of feedback on my Bullet Point List, which I am not too surprised about. I jotted it off in a hurry, probably should have thought more about it. Still: fun to write. The -gards of 38 Studios commented on the post (thanks, guys!), and Grimwell even offered up a way to make my dreams of shard-free gaming a reality.
• My back-of-the-napkin poking at numbers got a lot of good-hearted flack (though nothing like poor Cameron got back in the day). My favorite comment about this post wasn’t even here on the site; Angus made it the topic of an entire post. I didn’t even know Angus knew about MN. (Heya Angus!) It’s really hard to dislike someone disagreeing with you when they do it so *well*.
• My post a while back about Microsoft and Sony’s duel over console MMOs has reappeared on CMP’s network, polished up a bit and wearing a bowtie. Make sure to read the comments; Sony hate knows no professional boundaries.
• Stephen was nice enough to mention me on the MTV Multiplayer blog after he, myself, and Chris Grant had a spot of the GTA IV multiplayer. Y’know, I think you should ignore what everyone else is saying … it’s actually a pretty good game.

Thanks for reading, folks.