Guildbook

[Slamz]

*shrug* Or you could just fire people who everyone hates

Well, obviously. If there was someone everyone hates -- meaning literally everyone hates them, not just a few people -- then the job practically does itself. The harder case is the one that's far more common, which is a couple of people can't get along, but they each have common ties.

In real life, we all know how to handle this. You just sort of avoid that person. Game guilds don't let you follow the real life model, though (or at least, not very well). Guilds are more like your workplace. Don't like your coworker? Tough shit. Quit or hope he quits or wait for a rule violation bad enough to call HR, if you're into that sort of thing. That's basically how guilds end up operating too.

It is necessarily less friendly than your Facebook friends list because you have less control over it.


Basically this topic came up on the Camelot Unchained forums, along with a lot of other crazy ideas on how a lot of old MMORPG tropes could be rethought from scratch.

Like, what about just not having groups? What if the MMORPG was more like DayZ where you just kind of run around with whomever and there is no formal grouping structure? Or what if, instead of forming groups, you were able to select people to "monitor". Monitoring them put them up on your screen as if you were grouped (health bar, map location) but you aren't grouped -- they don't see YOU unless they also monitor you. This means that very large groups can more freely associate rather than having to form formal groups and warbands. This healer might have 12 different tanks on his screen and that's it. The tanks might be monitoring each other, or maybe they don't monitor anyone. It's a more flexible system.


So that got me thinking about guilds.

My "Guildbook" profile would kind of be like my Facebook profile, but for "Slamz". Here's a photo of my troll, here's my stat sheet, my interests are killing gnomes and defending castles. I have 87 friends, here's links to their profiles, you can post to my wall. Like me? Wanna group for stuff? Send me a friend request. We'll see who's online in our chat windows and hook up. No formal guilds.


I don't really expect any game to try this anytime soon but I thought it was an interesting idea on how a game might work the social aspect. The traditional "friends list" is too rudimentary and is barely useful, but a Facebook-style version could be so useful that you no longer need formal guilds, and the side effect is it's a much more natural way of letting people create social links.