General SWTOR
Basic Healing Theory
4 months ago
This is not about healing in SWTOR, this is a very very broad overview of healing in MMO’s in general.
Healing is all about “just enough.” With DPS, you want to do as much as possible, period. With tanking, if you have extra threat, so what? With healing, you are constantly balancing health versus your force/energy/ammo bar.
HPM versus HPS
Oh noes, scary letters! Breathe. Let me explain.
HPM = Heal Per Mana. In our case, it’s force/energy/ammo and totally not mana, because that’s so “WoW”, right? This means what is the heal going to COST you. After all, a healer who is out of mana is a useless healer and people start croaking.
HPS = Heal Per Second. This means how much health you’re delivering in a given amount of time. How fast are you filling up those health bars.
Each healer of every class has hard-hitting expensive heals (High HPS, Low HPM), and slow-ass cheap heals (Low HPS, High HPM). Your job as a healer is to judge incoming damage and balance between HPS and HPM.
That’s it. Really. If the tank is taking slow damage, you can use cheapie heals. If the tank is dropping fast, you use the big fat mana-hoggy heal-bombs and hope that you will have time later to use cheapie heals and build up your resource pool again.
It’s Probably Not Your Fault
Sure, if you ONLY use your big fat hoggy heals and run yourself out of mana early and the whole group dies, maybe you’re doing it wrong. However, could you have used anything smaller at any point? Did you need to spam those huge heals to keep people from croaking? If so, it’s not your problem. Someone ELSE was effing up. Maybe the encounter was too hard. Maybe morons were standing in the fire. Maybe the tank overpulled. Maybe the tank forgot he had cooldowns that he could have used to mitigate the damage. Maybe there was crowd control fail.
Not every death is your fault. In fact, most of them are NOT. Remember that. And if someone dares to blame you, come down with the fury of Alvis and smite his sorry ass.
Practice Healing
I know, this is DUH, but bear with me. It is FAR easier to level as DPS and switch to healing later, and that’s fine. But before you throw yourself hyperventilating into a flashpoint, why don’t you do some heroic quests with your buddies? Maybe it’s “too easy” but it’s the laboratory where you can learn.
How much of the health bar does the heal fill? How much of my mana bar does it consume? Often you’ll be eyeballing the health bars and soon you’ll know exactly the right heal for 1/4 a bar.
It’s a good way to get comfortable with the slow-ass cheapie heals. Often when you get into your first flashpoint, you kinda panic and go “zomg everyone’s gonna DIEEEE” and start throwing out the heal-bombs and next thing you’re out of mana. Practicing can give you the confidence to say “this will take care of the damage, nobody will die in the next 3 seconds, I CAN afford to be cheap.”
And finally… where your buttons are. You do not want to be FUMBLING later. Half of this is muscle memory. I am a total dork for about a day after I move any keybinds.
Attitude
The last thing you should take away is that you are super-important. You are more important than anyone else in your group. The tank may feel important, but he’s a loser. You are the backbone of the group. They will die without you.
It is totally ok to let someone die on purpose. You won’t get dark side points. Don’t do it just to be mean. Ok, you can do it to be mean, but not too often. If they can’t get their asses out of the fire, they need to learn the hard way. There are times where you are skilled enough to pull out the miracles to save someone who is about to die. Whether you choose to go to those extreme lengths is up to you.
If you are out of mana (or whatever) you can (and should) stop the entire group and tell them STOP AND I HAVE TO REGENERATE. If they wander off anyway, they are just asking to die.
DPS are a dime a dozen. You are a superstar. They need you. Never forget that.
Flashpoint Group Play: A Primer
4 months ago
In recent conversation with a guildmate who hasn’t played an MMO in earnest since Galaxies, he confessed he was afraid that his lack of Warcraft experience would hinder him as he went higher in level. This prompted me to want to write a primer for how group play in MMOs like SWTOR generally work. This is intended to help close the knowledge gap between the WoW vets and the people who skipped that. Some of the information may seem obvious or elementary, but it is all building to more complicated concepts later.
Basic Group Theory: Division of Labor
In group play there are three main roles that people play. Either you are designed to take damage, heal damage, or deal damage. We commonly refer to these roles as Tanks, Healers, and DPS respectively. Unlike in single player games, where at some point you become a god, MMOs divide up the jobs over different classes so people specialize in something and have only moderate abilities if any in the other areas. Tanks for example have talents and equipment designed to reduce that 1,000 point hit down to 750 or even 500 points. They tend to focus on having more health than other roles as well. But the cost to those abilities is they can’t heal themselves and their damage is mediocre compared to a character designed for DPS. Let’s take a look at what the roles do.
Tanking in a Nutshell
If MMO combat was a dance, the Tank would be the one leading. They often plan how the enemies will be pulled, they designate which ones will be crowd controlled, and they decide the kill order. But a tank’s main goals are two fold really:
- Stay Alive
- Keep enemies hitting them and no one else
The staying alive is partly up to the healer who we will cover later, but also up to the tank. Tanking in general is a very equipment focused role. Your gear directly influences your health pool, armor rating, and your ability to dodge, parry, deflect, or absorb attacks.
In addition to the gear, they also have talents designed to increase their survivability. It may be a talent that adds a debuff limiting the damage output of an opponent. Or it may be a talent that massively reduces incoming damage. Some will be passive requiring now work at all, while others will be something you want to use in special circumstances.
The final part of the staying alive job is knowing when to use your cooldowns. Cooldowns refer to special abilities that cannot be used more than once a minute. These tend to have big effects and should be used judiciously. Warding Call for a Jedi Guardian is an example. It reduces incoming damage by 40%, but can only be used once every three minutes. You would want to save this for when you need it and not just use it every time you can.
Keeping enemies hitting you is the second job a tank must master. Think of enemies (or mobs as they are often called) as having little lists of who they hate most. They will generally always attack the one they perceive as being the biggest threat. If the enemies were rational they would realize that the healer should die first, then the DPS and save the tank for last. But mobs are not terribly rational and we have tools to make them think the low damage guy in heavy armor is way more of a threat to them than the sneaky smuggler who just two shot his friend. Having the mobs attacking you is often referred to as having threat or aggro. One of the key skills a tank must master is when to use his taunt. A taunt forces the mob to switch who it is attacking towards the tank. This is really useful when an enemy is pummeling your healer and you want to redirect it to yourself.
Healing in a Nutshell
Healing is key to any advanced encounter. A good healer can keep bad tanks standing and dumb DPS alive through some rough patches, but a bad healer can let the tank die from simple neglect, wiping the group. The key to healing is knowing your priorities. A healer’s first job is to stay alive. A dead healer does no healing. A common ‘ailment’ of healers is tunnel vision. They get so focused on keeping everyone else alive and watching health bars they neglect to notice they are standing in the fire. The second job is to keep the tank up. Remember tanks are so much better at taking hits than anyone else that in many fights a good tank and healer can finish a fight long after the DPS has died. It may be close, but barring a fight mechanic like an enrage timer or the healer running our of resources (force power, ammo, energy etc), the tank and the healer can often finish the fight. That said keeping your DPS alive really does help.
The key to being a good healer is knowing how much to heal and when. Some fights are just a steady trickle of damage which can be responded with a regular heal. Other fights have large spikes of damage, but they are less frequent. Those might require a large powerful heal to respond, after which the healer goes easy in order to restore the resource pool for healing. Each healing class has strengths and weaknesses. Some are good at AoE heals (an area of effect heal that can heal multiple targets at the same time), others specialize in heals over time (HoTs) which are good for keeping people topped off. Some have really good single target heals but might not be as strong in other areas. It is important to learn the playstyle for your healing class and knowing which heal is the right way to respond to a given situation.
DPS in a Nutshell
DPS gets the reputation of being the easy job. People will rag on you as being a dime a dozen and easily replaceable. And while there are a lot of DPS players out there, the difference between a good DPS player and a bad DPS player is huge. A good DPS player will stand out for the small things they do that help a group out. The fundamentals of being a good DPS player are as follows:
- Minimize unnecessary the damage you take
- Crowd Control wisely
- Focus Fire on the right target
The first thing to know about being DPS is minimizing your incoming damage. If you are the Jedi Knight who insists on standing in the lava for some reason, you are going to irritate your healer who will have to choose between throwing heals at the tank or you. In that case you will lose and you just made the rest of the group’s job harder. Now you can’t always avoid damage. There are plenty of reasons you might take damage. Grenades have splash damage, things fall form cave roofs, and you might have to off-tank something for a second until the tank can pick it off you. Put the important thing is to try and keep it to a minimum.
The second fundamental is mastering your crowd control abilities. The tank may think they are indestructible, but I guarantee you that if enough enemies are hitting him, they will die. Crowd control makes this easier. Before a pull the tank might mark up mobs and tell you to crowd control (force lift, cryo grenade or something else) a particular mob. That essentially reduces your number of enemies everyone is fighting for some period of time. The tank is happy because they have one less thing to worry about, the healer is happy because that is one less source of damage. Keep your target crowd controlled as best you can until the tank turns the groups attention to it. Which leads us to…
Focus fire on the right target. The thing about mobs is they do the same damage output usually whether they are at 100% health or 1% health. The most efficient way to get rid of them is crowd control up some of them and then focus fire one mob at a time until it is dead. Sometimes with many weak mobs it might make more sense to just use area of effect abilities, but when dealing with strong, elite, or champion level mobs, focus firing is the best way to go. Make sure you stay on the right target, and don’t break someone else’s crowd control.
If you do those three things you will get a reputation as being a good DPS player and people won’t think of you as easily replaceable.
Final Note on Kill Order
It seems like Bioware likes to mix the difficult of mobs in flashpoints and heroic quest zones. A strong mob might be surrounded by a few regular mobs. An elite or champion may have a few strong mobs surrounding it. It has been my experience that the best approach towards killing them is to work from weakest to strongest. Crowd control elite mobs and strong mobs if you can and focus on the regulars first wiping them out quickly. As soon as you cannot crowd control the strongest mobs in the pull, have the tank focus on that. A DPS can easily offtank regular mobs since it is just a few seconds of incoming damage before they drop. Stong and elite mobs however generally need a proper tank to absorb the damage.
I hope this helps lay a foundation for group play for players who are new to mmorpgs and want to make an impact in group play in SWTOR.
The Church of Alvis defeats SD-0 and Other Doings of Early Access
5 months ago
Early game access has been with us for about a week and guild chat has been filled with comments like “Hey guys I just saw….”. Here are a few highlights of my week in early access.
Celebrity Sighting
We are on Juyo and one of the guilds on our server is named Porkins Pigs. I don’t know if this guy is aiming to join them, but quite frankly his look was well done and I wanted to give him props.
This man is on a mission
Lieutenant Porkins if you ever read this, I salute you for all your hard work and dedication to the Republic.
Alvis Defeats SD-0
Thursday night I was questing on Coruscant when I stumbled upon a world boss known as SD-0. Being the guild spammer I am I said “Hey guys I found a world boss.” I didn’t expect anyone to act on it since people were focusing on leveling at the moment. But to my surprise Jeezbus offered to come and tank it. The team of Jeezbus (level 33 tank), Dashl (Level 18 dps), Bulwark (level 17 dps who was healing), and myself (level 12 tag along) gave it a shot. It took us a few times to master it, but once we got the fight mechanic we got it down.
4 maned the world boss. Props to Jeezbus for tanking.
The key for us was me calling out who had the linking debuff and directing them where to run to minimize damage.
Crafting is Fun
I’ve played SWG and WoW and crafting has always been somewhat tedious to me. The reason I have figured out was I hated gathering things. When I’m out in the field I want to be shooting and looting, not looking for flowers and rocks. In SWG the resources you needed required a lot of work to get and quality mattered. In WoW my problem was the people I were shooting were always surrounded by materials I couldn’t gather yet. SWTOR has succeeded in helping me enjoy gathering crafts. Namely by allowing me to outsource.
Welcome to my crating workshop.
Being a GM I find often I have to take time away from the action to get involved in helping guild members. The SWTOR crafting minigame allows me to truly do both with competence.
Guild Launch Alliance Offer
5 months ago
The implementation of the guild launch program has assigned The Church of Alvis to the Juyo server. Unfortunately we did not have nearly as many guilds coming along with us as we would have hoped. As a result members of the following guilds are being extended an offer to relocate.
For those guilds we want very much for you to locate on Juyo from your assigned server and play with the Church of Alvis. We are prepared to give your members temporary use of our guild to coordinate until such time that you can form your own guild. And that is not all we are prepared to help raise funds for your guild charter as well.
Please be part of the growing Juyo server culture and take us up on our offer. Use our forums to coordinate the transition or the comments on this post.
An Important Imperial PSA
5 months ago
by Blackferne in General SWTOR
With Beta Closing I went to Nar Shaddaa and picked up the Slave Girl Social gear for Mako for the picture of her below in a cut scene. The idea popped in my head to make a WW2 style anti-VD ad and this is what I came up with.
Remember every time you sleep with your companion you are sleeping with everyone they slept with and since there were 2 million people in Beta that is a lot of people.
Ghosts From MMOs Past
7 months ago
Games always get compared to other games. Checkers and chess get compared since both are played on board with 64 squares of alternating colors. Hearts, Bridge, and Spades get compared to each other as they are four player card games involving tricks. So it is natural that Star Wars the Old Republic is going to be compared to other MMOS. For SWTOR there are two that will linger around for comparison for a long while after launch. First is Star Wars Galaxies and the second it World of Warcraft. The interesting thing to speculate on is what lessons Bioware has taken from these two games.
Lessons from Star Wars Galaxies
The comparisons are easy to draw. Both are part of the same universe. Both are MMORPGs. Both have huge expectations at launch about their ability to change the genre. But Galaxies has plenty of lessons I hope Bioware has taken to heart and employed in their game. First is that having a finished product matters. Talk to anyone who played SWG at launch and they can no doubt tell you stories about having to find work-arounds for various issues of gameplay that weren’t fully tested and fixed before launched. For crafting a common one was having to be very careful with how much money you put in your harvesters because if you screwed up you could lose a lot of credits or your harvester. It was a very careful game of balance. In combat things that targeted the mind bar were generally viewed as the best so there was a whole slew of flavor of the month templates all focusing on getting the biggest bang for your buck on attacking the mind pool stat of mobs and other players.
But after the bugs and the slow pace by which SOE fixed them, there is a lesson about content. SWG was a great game for sandbox type players, and as far as a player driven economy there are few that are in the same league as SWG. But there were a lot of Star Wars fans who came in expecting a story, and were disappointed in the lack of things to provide the Star Wars experience. MMOs tend to plot somewhere on the spectrum of pure sandbox to pure theme park. Sandbox is about world building and interaction while theme park is go see the sights everyone else has seen, get your digital “I slayed the rancor at Jabba’s Palace and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” badge. I think SWG was too sandbox for many Star Wars fans who were used to games providing a story for them. The question that pops up for me is whether an MMO with an established lore from another source (movie or book) can really be a sandbox MMO? I’d venture to guess they have to err on the side of themepark, or you get the fan base, that came to you because they love the source, disappointed at the lack of things to do.
Finally the last major lesson from SWG is the importance of community. SWG veterans wear that fact like a badge of pride. They look at less buggy games and think, “They don’t know the horrors I’ve seen.” Despite the lack of content, or maybe because of it, the players of SWG bonded and formed a real and honest to goodness online community. The fact that Alvis is still together after 8 years is a testament to that. And we are just one of many SWG guilds reforming for SWTOR. But with the development of a solid community, you also have to communicate and work with that community. Many SWG vets left at the launch of the NGE in 2005 because they saw the NGE as a betrayal of the trust the community had put into the developers. I sometimes wonder if the NGE had been the game that was there at launch if people would have liked it better. Ultimately we don’t know, but we do know that players who had invested time and effort into their characters over two and a half years felt like they suddenly didn’t have the same game anymore. And the developers lack of communication leading up to it was a major scandal.
So to sum up Star Wars Galaxies shows Bioware that you have to have a mostly bug free game at launch, you have to have things for people to do to get their immersion, and you have to work with your community.
Lessons from World of Warcraft
For as much as people think that Star Wars should be compared to Galaxies, it is going to be compared more to World of Warcraft. Since its rocky launch in 2004 WoW has grown into the 8 ton gorilla in the MMO market. In fact WoW’s success has had some industry commentators muse that they crowd out other games to the detriment of the genre as a whole. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I can say that they definitely raised the bar of what players expect from an MMO.
Customer Service is important. The rocky launch had some people not able to play for days or even weeks at a time. Blizzard responded to their screw ups with, you missed playtime we’ll give you playtime. That was something that wasn’t exactly common back in 2004. But since then the Blizzard customer service has been rather good, even accommodating to players. When accounts were hacked by gold farmers, Blizzard generally was pretty quick to get the player “whole” again. My wife’s account got hacked, and she missed a raid, but overall it was a decent experience. People who were hacked multiple times, refusing to get an authenticator, were still made whole time and time again despite the stern lecture on account security from customer service.
Polish goes a long way. Personally I started playing WoW one year into its life span. So I don’t know first hand about the rocky experiences, but I do know that in November 2005 when I started playing I was blown away by the fact you never had to find a workaround for doing what should be routine activities for your class or profession. Since then the polish has gotten better with each expansion to the point where looking back at Vanilla WoW I’m amazed that we put up with some of the dumb quests we had to put up with. QA clearly matters and if you don’t have serious or widespread problems with a patch or an expansion people tend to be more patient about waiting for the next bit.
You will have casual and hardcore players and you can’t ignore either. Blizzard for all of their polish has not been without fault in their run. The original raids were a nightmare to organize with forty people and the number of people who saw Naxrxamas in Vanilla was a tiny portion of the population. Their initial solution to that was to make raids smaller and so the Burning Crusade was more accessible for the first tier, but the higher level dungeons weren’t seen by many people either so their expansions chief bad guy most people hadn’t seen at all. Wrath of the Lich King seemed to find the solution by making the villain pop up all over the place and it was widely regarded as a pretty great expansion. It took time, but Blizzard seems to have found a way to give casuals a way to see almost all the content made, but still giving the hardcore the ability to get shiny toys for their accomplishments.
Will Bioware Learn These Lessons?
It is impossible for me to know for sure if Bioware has learned the right lessons from their MMO ancestors, but we have a lot of reason to suspect that they have.
Bioware enjoys a reputation among game developers that is top notch. When you ask most gamers what Bioware, Blizzard, and Valve have in common, the response is usually something to the effect of “They will not release a product until it is ready”. It is amazing what kind of leeway gamers will give developers with that kind of reputation. Most of Alvis is very very eager to get their hands onto this game. We read about it, we obsess over the latest tidbit said at a con or a Friday update. But almost everyone I’ve talked to has said something to the effect of “I’d rather wait for a finished game, than pay to beta test a broken game.” Bioware has been very clear that they want to make sure that launch goes smoothly, that the game is complete, that it runs well, and that the bugs are gone before 12/20/2011. Their reputation is on the line and they know it.
The second main lesson revolves around content. Since they announced the game they have gone on and on about how they are really giving “story” the center stage in this mmorpg. If they needed a tag line it would be something to the effect of “SWTOR: Putting the RPG back in MMORPG”. Podcasters have joked “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently this game has story.” If they pull this off it will be a new bar for the genre in a significant way. I’ve been playing WoW for almost 6 years and despite killing the Lich King, and seeing most end game content for years now, I never really knew why we were doing any of the things we were doing. I mean I guess that guy in that castle/cave/palace is a bad person, and he needs to be stopped, but I was in it for the game play not the story. If Bioware has succeeded it will add a whole depth to my game playing experience in that, not only will I do things because I like the game play, but I genuinely care about solving story problems. That has the potential to up the genre bar the same way WoW did.
The final lesson is about community and communication with the segments of your player base, and this is the part we can’t know for sure for a while. Ideally Bioware has gotten the resources lined up and the ability to help customers feel like the company values their subscription. And hopefully Bioware has fun activities for the whole spectrum of players. PvPers, raiders, crafters, socialites, and altaholics. If they do, then the player base can settle as a solid community. There are many promising indications this is already happening. Devs are very interactive already with players. They work with fansites, blogs ,and podcasts on a regular basis. They seem to get that people are excited, and that working with the community goes a long way towards having a lasting community.
Bioware has had lots of tests thrown its way. It has to prove it can be a viable game and succeed where a whole list of other MMOs have failed. They have the potential, they seem to be learning from other people’s mistakes. If they live up to their own expectations they could emerge out of SWG and WoW’s shadows and become a giant of their own.
The Case for Surnames
9 months ago
by Blackferne in General SWTOR
At Comic-Con the following exchange took place during a Q&A:
jorussher asks: Will our characters be able to have surnames?
James Ohlen: No answer at this time.
This comes from this thread.
I personally believe Bioware should allow players to have Surnames. I hope to make the convincing case here.
Bioware has bet on and doubled down about their intent on making story matter. They have bolstered this with voiced acting to all quests, drawing us away from skip reading go find my rats to kill. They have released three cinematic trailers tracing a major character over significant parts of his life. Clearly they care about story and immersion.
They have also wanted to make your story feel epic and like it belongs in the Star Wars universe. They have made eight class quests guiding you from level one to level fifty providing plot elements and twists along the way. They have promoted this with eight class trailers.
With all this focus on creating an epic Star Wars story, they need to touch on one of the simplest tools at their disposal, the creation of a Star Wars name.
When you ask people to name who the characters are in Star Wars some of the names that come to mind quickly are Luke Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, Obi Wan Kenobi, Lando Calrissian, and Boba Fett. Something you will notice is each and every one of them has a Surname. While I will quickly concede that there are those without surnames such as Chewbacca, Wicket, Yoda, Palpatine, R2D2, C3PO, or Jabba the Hutt, it should be noted that most characters have family names, and those surnames can be very important for their stories.
The main story of the original trilogy follows the rise of Luke Skywalker on his journey to become a Jedi Knight like his father before him. He also learns about his relationship to Leia. Family clearly matters.
In the prequels family matter again with Anakin dealing with the loss of his mother Shimi Skywalker. Also he has to deal with his secret marriage to Padme. In addition we see a subplot where Jango Fett has a clone made to be his son, and we see young Boba dealing with the loss of his father to the Jedi forging his path in the future. In the novella Boba Fett: A Practical Man you see this loss really does a mental number on Boba Fett.
So clearly in Star Wars, families matter. They matter a great deal. So Bioware in wanting to create an epic story for players that meets the Star Wars ought to allow players to have that tool to expand and develop their characters. Family dynamics can allow for some really fun role play opportunities. For example in SWG players were allowed to have surnames and I chose to make an alt who was my main’s father. Jounville Blackferne was young, charismatic, and generally optimistic. Arillius Blackferne by contrast was old, balding, had wrinkles, and was generally grizzled.
Not all players will take the surname option. Arrican and Furiel both were single named players who were fine with that. Others just used the last name for a little flair but nothing else.
I hope Bioware makes the smart decision and allows players to have a surname as part of character creation. It fits the lore, it helps make the stories players create better, and can be a lot of fun all around.
Star Wars the Old Republic: Deceived Book Review
9 months ago
by Blackferne in General SWTOR
The key figure in the three cinematic trailers they have released for the game has been Darth Malgus. From the first time we saw him in the Deceived trailer we realized he is a force to be reckoned with.
What the novel does is flush him out more than just a force of rage slaughtering Jedi left and right.
For anyone yet to read the book
and wanting to avoid spoilers
please stop reading now.
Everyone else follow past the
break.
(more…)
Not All Troopers Are the Same
11 months ago
by Blackferne in General SWTOR
By now there is a good chance you’ve seen the Trooper Armor Progression Video:
Over the weekend Furiel and I were talking about it as we both intend to play troopers. What struck me as amazing was they showed four different models of advanced class troopers in the 2:34 clip and Furiel and I were really excited about different ones. Furiel was really excited about the Trooper shown from 1:10-1:28 or so. A man with a large gun mowing down droids and blowing stuff up. Maybe not the cliche glass cannon so much as a cannon of cannons. For me the excitement really started at 1:30 and lasted the rest of the video while they showed two different kinds of Vanguards (Trooper Tanks).
The take away here for me is that Bioware is doing a really good job of signalling to players that there is diversity within a class. When you compare Furiel’s dream Trooper versus mine, they play very differently. Furiel’s is about big explosions and doing damage, while my dreamy Trooper is much more about securing location and maintaining control (key aspects of tanking), and to think both play styles originate with the same basic class is pretty cool.
We still have a long way until a launch date, but I will applaud Bioware for amping up the excitement and finding tidbits of information to tantalize the fanboy/fangirl in each of us.
Guild Systems: A speculative post
1 year ago
by Blackferne in General SWTOR
Recently I was directed to David Bass, Senior Community Coordinator at Bioware for the SW:TOR team. His job is largely based on trying to assist guilds looking to form up for SWTOR and asked me the following question.
We haven’t quite begun talking about guilds in an official manner yet, though that’s coming fairly soon. Right now, I’ve been getting in touch with guilds mostly to gather some initial feedback. What sorts of features do you and your guild feel are an absolute necessity at launch? What features are those that you consider “nice to have”?
Well this got me thinking about what are the core game features that a guild needs, expects, and in my case what I would like to see based on known aspects of the game we are all anticipating.
This was my response.
David,
I’ve been putting a lot of thought into guild management having run a guild twice (The Church in SWG and an unrelated guild in WoW), and the prospect of what a guild needs and wants can be daunting. Considering my experience and upcoming responsibilities I have to say the way the guild system will work is of particular interest to me, though I realize that while nearly everyone joins a guild, a minority are probably concerned with their mechanics. Here are some of my thoughts divided into needs/wants/wish lists.
Needs
Formation: I’d consider the ability to form a guild quickly and inexpensively to be a need, especially for a launch guild before anyone has any credits. The prospect of a “guild charter” being either prohibitively expensive (forcing players to forgo spending credits on other things like training or gear) or the charter requiring unusual effort (I heard Conan required players to all be present in some far off location to form up) seems like an undue burden to place. Something akin to the WoW play 10silver/1G and have 4-5 charter signatures now seems reasonable. I would prefer that the ability to sign a guild charter (should you have such a system) be able to be done remotely so I could use the “holonet” to secure any necessary player commitments if such a system is what you guys intend.
Communication: I think it is expected and standard to have an intuitive guild chat channel members have access to immediately upon joining the guild.
Access Levels: The ability to set ranks, and permissions to those ranks (ie ability to invite, gkick, promote/demote)
At its core this is all that is really absolutely necessary for a guild to exist in any MMO. Everything else just enhances, strengthens or flourishes those core aspects.
Wants
Shared Resources: Ideally there will be some kind of guild vault/storage locker. I don’t really mind if it starts small and grows with costs associated with it as a money sink. Ideally we would be able to have members who are operating in a cooperative crafting arrangement, or helping to gear the guild in craftables, could use the
guild storage space as a safe no hassle transfer point for hard goods. And in a manner which doesn’t affect personal storage space (ie self bank/mailbox quotas)
Titles: The ability to set intra guild titles. These don’t have to be seen by those out of guild, but when I walk by a guildmate and see in front of his name above his head “Bishop Furiel” that would be really cool. If you could also have a vanity title which would be applied to one person and not require a rank like Arrican the Sith Slayer or
Dentist Cuspar that would be awesome. Allows for community building if somebody did something really memorable in the guild and you wanted to immortalize it.
Taxes: I don’t know how it would play and effect the overall gameplay, but if a guild could set some nominal tax rate to go towards the guild bank account. “Maybe set a max rate allowed of 7-10% to prevent officers interfering woo much with their members money making”. And ideally this would be something that would happen automatically off credits received via missions/quests/looting. Within my guild specifically it would just be called a tithe, but the basic principle is taxation. The real decision is how you’d implement this. Option (a) you get paid unguilded 100cr for a mission, but in a guild with a tax you get paid 90cr and 10cr go to the bank. Option (b) you still get paid the 100, but the guild gets “bonus” money like the current WoW guild perks system. Lore justifications could be, especially if you have a guild level system, that NPCs are paying a “premium” because your group of heroes has a reputation for being so good at their jobs, and as we all know if you want “Havoc Squad” you have to pay what Havoc Squad is worth.
Security: I don’t know if Bioware is going to take a cue from Blizzard, but authenticators (either keyfob, or as an app for smart phones), and the ability to set restrictions on shared resources based on whether an account has one is a huge feature I personally would like. My wife’s WoW account got hacked while I was GM and I was really
worried about the amount of damage that could have been done.
Guild Perks/Levels: I don’t know if you guys are thinking about it, but I think that these type of systems help keep people from guild hopping as much, and can help build community. I’ve been pretty impressed with the WoW guild levels/perks they have implemented in Cataclysm, and would love to see similar things in SWTOR.
In Game Calendar: Having the ability to have a group calendar in game I have found very useful in games. Especially if that calendar can be used to send event invites to people. Features like the ability send event invites based on rank, or some other division would be useful.
Alt Linking: In a game with the anticipated replay of SWTOR I forsee many players including myself playing multiple characters. If there was a way that when a player joined a guild on his alt that it would have a note field or something just listing “Oh hey Arillius is the alt of Jounville” it would be very nice. I would say the default would
whichever toon linked has the longest standing membership in the guild. The ability for an officer to break that link (ie mom and kid share an account and play at different times) would probably be necessary.
In Game Want Ads: This isn’t something I’ve seen in another game, but probably wouldn’t be hard to implement on a player’s guild menu UI. A place to put in guild in game ads for in game products or service. For example a guildmate could put an ad up “Want to run Flashpoint XYZ, hoping to get the blaster from third boss” and if people see it they may do it, or decide to plan it. Or maybe “WTS: surplus scrap metal. I have 100 units of titanium. If anyone in guild wants it let me know before friday or I’ll just AH it” Basically it serves as a concise short in game BBS to get guild interaction where the guild calendar would be inappropriate. And would be useful for guilds that have a player base where some players frequent the guild forums, and other people don’t and instead just log in and play.
Wish List
Capital Ship Guild Halls: Yeah I know everyone is asking for them, but that would be really cool. I don’t see my guild getting massive, so we could settle for a smaller cruiser or frigate.
Shared Factory: I’m not sure how this one would work out, but if a guild could coordinate and automate some assembly functions for cooperative crafting that would be awesome. What I’m thinking is let’s say Furiel and Vesp are working together. Furiel’s crew makes subcomponents for some other item Vesp’s companions do final assembly on. It would be great as part of the crew skills system for Furiel to say “Okay Vette I need you to make X of these parts” like he would normally do, but be able to add the command “And when you finish deliver them to guild member X”. This would also be great for players who are helping out their guild crafters by being gatherers of raw materials.
EPGP: As I’m sure you’ve played WoW I’m fairly certain you know of EPGP, if not you can google it and get the gist. If there was an in game configurable EPGP/DKP system for raiding guilds that would be great. I know that there is no “perfect” loot system, but having something that was more sophisticated than need/greed would be great.
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