I think it’s well known now for everyone that PHXL wants to push slayers on the “community side”, i mean playing with friends/randoms/guild mates instead of solo (Slayer Link / no Private Matchmaking), but the main community feature we should have available in the game to be able to play with other slayers, Guilds, is useless.

Imagine World of Warcraft with Dauntless Guild interface. Imagine Dofus (Don’t know if it’s a game known in US/Canada) with Dauntless guild interface. A LOT of games (and I would say all online games) are dependent on their guild system because it’s the spine of those games to meet friends, to organise parties/fights, to share items/golds. We need this in Dauntless.

(I don’t want to enter into the debate like PHXL should allow private matchmaking for people who want to play solo. I’m just here to talk about guilds :D)

I can read a lot about “Trial rework” but not about “Guild rework” and I truly think the game needs updates about Guilds more than Trial’s. (Sorry Trial friends).
Trial rework will impact something like 5% of the playerbase ? Where guilds can impact something like 80% of the playerbase. (Let’s assume that 20% of the playerbase wants to play solo from time to time and don’t even want to invest into guilds)

The content that can be added just by making guilds attractive for players is really huge, and I assume that PHXL doesn’t measure the impact and contents that will be triggered by adding a true meaning/utility for the guilds.

I’m not a fan of “public only” matchmaking but this doesn’t bother me too much. The thing is, I would rather have a big incentive to play with friends (Like Slayer Links but 7 days is kinda too much). If we can get some xp bonuses when playing with guild mates (Like +2% when with 1 guild mate, +10% with 5 guild mates) i’m sure PHXL will meet their objectives : We will play with friends/randoms from our guilds etc…

I understand why PHXL wants us to play with other slayers and remove private matchmaking (also the fact that it allows us to have really fast queue time) but the way it was handled was kinda … meh. Having incentives and getting “rewarded” (not necessarily getting physical rewards but friendly environment with only friends, nicely design UI …) to play with friends/guild mates will be enough for a majority of slayers to play with other slayers and not solo.

I mean, i think it’s a better way to handle this by adding incentives (XP bonus/specific events/User Friendly UI) than just forcing us to play with other slayers by removing private matchmaking.

One concrete example I have is the UI/Process to join friends : If i log and see a friend in HG. I need to text him, he then has to invite me, and when i have accepted it he has to quit his current HG to go to another one. So when i log in i’m like : Ok i will solo Esca.
We need a process where we can just check our friend list, see friends on HG and just click on join.

(UI is an important topic and we have several examples in the game right now where we are blocked/limited by the UI so people have to find another way to do things... Joining friends is a first one, not being able to purchase X curiosities or X pots at the same time is another one.)

Currently guilds are useless for a lot of reasons and need some love ! Guilds are something like a second friend list rather than real guilds.

Guild UI is really not enough developed and misses a lot of information like :

• Inactivity time of the members to manage and clean the list of members (Not being able to check members inactivity is one of the main issue for guilds currently because we cannot clean the member lists easily and guilds end up dying because we’re unable to remove inactive slayers to invite new ones)
• Activity, when you are in HG it’s just written “In Hunt” where we need something like : “In Hades HG, Weapon class lvl 15”
• Officers Highlight is not enough. They should be at the top of the screen in a different color because in guilds with 100 members it’s hard to find them.
• Arrival date in the guild to see who are the veterans of your guild
• Who is playing with who. We should also be able to check the members grouped with each other to be able to ask to group up like : “Oh Kahinh, you are 3 in your group, can i join ?”
• Join someone from the guild UI. (I think it should be added everywhere in the social tab but …). If I see Kahinh playing in Hades HG, I can just click on his name and click on “join”.

Also as i stated earlier, we don’t have any contents linked to guilds :

• No incentive/bonuses to play with guild mates
• No XP need to upgrade the guilds
• The way you can flex with your guild is really limited (No specific banner/color…)
• No special guild events (I will develop this later)

Those are the main issues I see but I'm sure redditors will be able to add some they have in mind in the comments !

Please let me add some suggestions/ideas that can be added to the game to make guilds interesting. (Sorry here i won’t put housing/gardening … let’s be realistic. The game is not ready for housing, we need basic features first !)

User Interface :

• Text chat with guild activity like : “Kahinh just joined the guild”, “Kahinh is connected”, “Kahinh just started playing Uesca 10-50, wanna join ?”.
• In guild tab :
  • Officers/Chief highlighted (Barely can’t see them, should be at the top of the list in a specific color)
  • Inactivity timer (Kahinh disconnected : Not connected since 2months)
  • Better information about member activity (Instead “On hunt” get the full information, which HG, team is full ? Can we join ?, …)
  • Being able to join a guild mate by clicking : Join “Slayer” instead of having to ask for being invited + new HG to join.
  • Being able to see who is teamed up with who so we can see where there is some slots to join
• On compass : Having a different color for guild mates to follow them easily (everyone’s is grey :( ). Also that should be added for friends with another color.

A last idea, could we also have a specific tab to have a “guild trial leaderboard”. We should be able to see who performed the best in the current trial based on our guild mate list.

Lots of people don’t bother being in the top 100 EU but better have some competitions with friends. If we can have a dedicated leaderboard just based on guild mate that would be really fun to compete on trial with funs without the pressure of being (or not) on the global leaderboard.

UI needs to be focused first. Being able to have all the features we want (even housing Kappa) with this UI won’t meet the point. We can be 100, all playing, we need to be able to see who is playing what, if we can join, …

I’m 100% sure the reason guild is so underused currently is because the UI makes it so hard to identify who gave up the game 2 months ago and who played yesterday that every guilds end with so many inactive slayers that active slayers will try to make their own guild that will lead to, again, 80% of inactive slayers impossible to manage and kick properly with full knowledge and again and again ...

Guild upgrade :

Currently, guilds are limited to 100 members. I don’t know if there are some technical issues behind this.

Upgrade is a common feature for guilds in video games by the way.

Guilds can have a specific level from 1 to X, every level you earn Y slots for members to invite.

We can also imagine unlocking some features for the guilds like banners/bonuses for all members in a “Guilds Path” …

Leveling a guild could be done by sharing xp you get from Behemoths or investigating rams. Each slayer could spend rams for his guild that the officers will be able to spend for the guild to select the upgrades they want.

Having a way to have our own “Hunting Grounds” for the guild (that we should pay for ofc) would also be a nice idea. I don’t know if it’s doable or not but i saw some partners talking about this.

Hidden behind some criterias like : “Need to have more than 80 members”, you can buy “HG servers” where only your Guild mate can go.

Each upgrade can be locked behind several criterias like : “ Lvl 20 / 2 000 000 Rams / 40 members “ whatever, but the possibilities are important here.

Features :

Guilds are suffering from the same ailments than Titles : Noone can see it and you can’t flex with it enough.

One of the reasons people want to join a guild is to be able to flex (alongside the opportunity to organize parties, discuss etc… but i already discussed those points in UI/Upgrade part). I mean : I joined a guild, we make it to the maximum level, we have unlocked all the upgrades, we are well known by slayers because we have good results in trials, … I want to be able to show that when I'm in Ramsgate or in Public HG or in Trial leaderboards.

First of all, Guild Tag should be displayed on the Trial Leaderboard with Slayer names.

We then need to have blazon/banner shared by all guild members to be able to share the same colors/identity for all the members. “Ho ! This color and sigil, isn’t it the “Crab Worshiper Guild ?”

We could also have an option to share our blazon/guild name in a better way next to our nickname because currently it’s 4 small letters below the slayer name and you don’t even pay attention to it, never.

Finally, as i stated above, having some HG servers dedicated to guild would be great (if doable and if that’s something PHXL wants to do) but at least matchmaking could try to match guild mates in priority in Ramsgate/HG to make sure you will find your guild mates as much as possible in the game.

I will just add one last thing about sharings ressources. I really don’t think we should be able to trade rams/aether hearts/merits… with other people because it would break the game for newer slayers.
But what about having a way to share pots with the guild ?

• I play a lot and have 4m rams, almost the full Slayer Path done and won’t need all those rams. By playing I will continue gathering rams that I don't need.
• I have some friends that play a lot of trials but don’t have the time to farm pots + farm trials.

What if I can buy some pots, put them in the “guid inventory” so that my friend can take them to be able to farm ? It would lead to some guild efforts for people who want to perform in trials and people who don’t want to to also participate.

Sharing pots won’t break the game as it won’t allow newer players to be able to progress too easily or too fast in the game compared to being able to share aether heart or rams.

I played WoW for a long time and some members were dedicated and happy just to farm to make sure raiders will have enough consumables to raid.

Events / Rewards :

Slayer Link & Slayer Path have opened a lot of possibilities for the guild and I will try to share some ideas about events/rewards that can be added to the guilds to give them some utilities also.

A system near Slayer Link can be implemented at Guild level on a daily/weekly basis.

With one or several objectives linked to specific rewards like :

• Earn X hunt pass xp
• Kill X umbral behemoths
• Getting X members succeeding trial dauntless difficulty
• Gather X consumables

Each objective will unlock rewards for all members. Classical rewards like bounty tokens, rams, pots …

It will ensure guild members to participate in those weekly events to make sure objectives will be hit and rewards will be distributed to all members.

Second idea will be something near Slayer Path but for guilds. I already talked about this in “Guild upgrade” part but to sum-up. The idea is just to make people invest time/resources in guilds to be able to invite more members or just to unlock specific bonuses like “Gathering bonus” or “XP Bonuses when playing with guild mates” in something close to Slayer Path.

Those bonuses don’t need to be that big but can be locked behind some grind/lots of resources needed to, again, give objectives for guild mates to farm and create/upgrade their guilds with friends.

TL/DR :

PHXL, you want us to play in teams and not solo ? Please give us the tools to make it happen ! Removing private matchmaking will hit the point but it’s the hard way to do it for the playerbase. Give us community features, ways to play all together !

I have the feeling that guilds have been forgotten by PHXL as we cannot hear anything from them about it and i deeply think PHXL is missing a shot here as guilds will add :

• Incentives to play with friends/guild mates
• Add contents to farm in order to develop guilds and unlock bonuses/features
• Create real community guilds with lots of slayers (impossible currently and no need to do)
• …

Currently guilds are locked behind a User Interface badly designed (at least incomplete) and preventing us from being able to manage efficiently members activity (Joining guild mates, checking inactivity, being able to see who is doing what).

Guilds are also locked with a limit of 100 members max but that could be increased with a leveling/upgrading system of the guild to add some grinds for people/community to make their guilds the guild they want with special cosmetics/rewards to flex around Ramsgate and other game modes.

Guilds can also be the way to add dedicated servers for HG (near private servers but not for only one player, for a guild !) and to add new features like “Slayer Link” for guilds with achievements to make every week/day and share resources such as pots for people trying to make it to the leaderboard !

PS : OFC there are a lot of possibilities with guilds such as housing, guild leaderboards, gamemode around guilds … But I wanted to focus on “doable” and “easy” things to add to the game that can be done in a reasonable timing. (Not a dev so, sorry if it’s not that easy :D)
Feel free to share your ideas if you have some to share !

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