Fan Faire: EverQuest II Guild Hall Preview
It is important to note that since this panel (Friday, August 15) Greg "Rothgar" Spence has posted some changes to guild halls based on player feedback. These changes can be seen here . Things which have changed since this presentation are indicated by an asterisk (*).
Attending:
Bruce "Froech" Ferguson, Jeremy "Jindrack" Gess, Greg "Rothgar" Spence, Noel "Ilucide" Walling, Bill Yeatts, Joshua "Autenil" Kriegshauser.
Froech teased that the Guild Hall panel was canceled, and we'd talk about cow tipping. A guild hall survey was distributed to the audience. The 2007 concept art and the current reality images were displayed.
Like other presentations at Fan Faire we were given a slide show presentation outlining the major points before the question and answer period.
Create a headquarters for guilds
- Players want to log into at the start of the day
- Players want to camp out in to end the day
Cultivate a sense of pride for guild as a whole
- Tangible representation of the guild
- preserve player housing
Make guild halls intuitive by tying them into housing system
Progression and Accomplishment
- The fun is in working toward the goal, not working to maintain the achievement
Guild Hall Tiers
Note: Audience response to these next three slides was quite passionate, giving my recording a rating of PG. Many of these details have since changed.
- Appear in all 5 cities (Freeport, Qeynos, Neriak, Gorowun, Kelethin)
- Reuse existing 5 room housing*
- Price:100 plat*
- Guild Level Required: 30
- Appears in North Freeport and South Qeynos
- Large building near Stone Stair Byway; former Hall of Thunder
- New custom interior layouts
- Price: 500 plat*
- Guild level required: 50
- Appear out in Antonica and Commonlands
- Accessed via mariner's bell on the dock
- New interior and exterior layouts
- Price: 1000 plat*
- Guild level required: 70
Upkeep is weekly
Requires coin (1% of purchase price) and status
Base Upkeep:
- Tier 1: 1 plat, 100,000 status*
- Tier 2: 5 plat, 150,000 status*
- Tier 3: 10 plat, 200,000 status
Jindrack said that the halls do not cost status to buy because status is not transferable and the guild leader would get stuck paying it if it cost status to buy.
Purchased by a guild leader
Only one guild hall at a time
He or she must have all of the plat in inventory
Status is not used to buy a hall
Halls offered according to citizenship, except for tier 3.
- ie. Freeport citizenship leader can buy in Gorowyn or Neriak
Guild Halls are purchased just like player housing. Go to the location, click the door, and you'll get the purchase window. Tier three guild halls are "citizenship independent"; the guild leader may choose Antonica or Commonlands. The guild hall is owned by the guild; the owner is not the guild leader. If the leader changes or a new person is promoted leader nothing happens to the guild hall, it's always owned by the guild.
Access levels are the same as housing levels
- Officer+ defaults to Trustee
- Member+ defaults to Friend
- Applicant+ defaults to Visitor
Visiting access is defaulted to None All of these access levels can be changed by the guild leader
Individual accesses can be set; there is a new permissions rank inside the guild window that allows you to specify which rank has default access level. In addition you can set access level to individual players. Access level may also be set to none. There's also a defulat access level that you can set to Visitor just like a player house, so anybody can come inside and visit your guild hall, or you can set that to none so that only guild members can get in there.
This is how the guild members contribute to the guild's hall.
Players can deposit any amount of coin or personal status through the Housing Window.
No withdrawal, contributions, become property of the guild.
Guild hall upkeep is automatically deducted from escrow.
Amenities are purchased using escrow deposits and funds.
Donations to Escrow are voluntary. It's noted that the "Guild hall upkeep is automatically deducted" line is not quite right. "You still have to hit your Pay Upkeep button." It's automatic in that it will pull money and status from the escrow account first, and if it's dry it will pull from the person that's clicking the Pay Upkeep button. There is a full log of deposits and withdrawals from the Escrow Account.
The player housing items do not contribute to status reduction.
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Features that provide function and convenience.
Two forms: Hirelings (NPC's) and Amenities (objects)
Purchased by a guild member with Trustee access (defaulted to Officer+)
Appear at a pre-determined location and can be moved by someone with Friend access.
Cannot be picked up, but can be removed via the purchase window.
The Amenity System is how you get the cool stuff in your guild hall.
We were given a very good look at the Amenity System. There will be 42 Amenities at launch. You can't buy all your Amenities outright, you have to earn them. To do that you have to level your guild. A level 30 guild will have 15 Amenity slots, gaining 2 Amenity slots every five levels. At level 80 guilds will have 30 slots. Amenities include vendors, call to guild hall, zone to player housing, tradeskill devices*, menders, and other player-requested tools.
The mender will allow your guild leaders to to specify a percentage of money that they want to contribute to repairs. The guild percentage is pulled from escrow. And of course using the mender is logged, and you can set access level. The mender is the only hireling with subsidized costs right now.
The Amenity window will show whether an Amenity has been purchased or not, and if you're not allowed to purchase it for some reason it will tell you why. It lists the purchase price and the upkeep price. The window also allows you to remove an amenity. You may also set individual access for each Amenity.
We were treated to a memory crash, which they swore was the machine, not the hall. Loading back up took a bit as there were 1250 items in the guild hall! 1500 items are allowed to be placed in Tier 3 guild halls. There is an underground dock in the Tier 3 guild hall to set up your Mariner's Bells in.
Other Amenities we were shown was statuary, a portal druid, a tradeskill supply depot, a raid tactical flag, NPC guards, a tradeskill merchant, a training dummy, a creature tamer, fountains, a bartender, tradeskill and adventure writ agents, bells, an inter-guild hall transolcation beacon, a raid strategist, and a fuel merchant. The hirelings (NPC's) are customizable buy people with Trustee access; if you want all ratonga hirelings, you can do that.
It was suggested that you be able to bind your Stein to the guild hall bartender, and they said they'd add that.
There was no Slurpee machine.
During the above we were treated to a tour of a Tier 3 Antonica Guild Hall decorated by Domino. It's very hard to take good pictures of projected computer animation; what follows are pictures by myself and Luxx of Online Gaming Radio.
Q&A
Note: I apologize for not being as meticulous at taking the names of speakers as I usually am. It was mostly Jindrack and Rothgar.
Q: Can we see the NPC Guards?
A: You can buy up to 20 of them. The first one takes up a slot, the next ones don't. Right now all they are is cosmetic, but there are plans for the future to allow them to help you defend your guild hall. Right now they're just NPC's, no level.
Q: How do you, if you're in Qeynos and your guild is in Freeport, do you get to your guild hall?
A: If you have a Tier 3 guild hall you can use the bell that's at the Antonica or Commonlands dock. Once in, and you have a guild teleportation beacon, you can then get a call spell and call right back in. If you have a Tier 2 and it's inside you're going to have to sneak in the first time.
Q: Is it possible that you can make the fuel merchant based on guild funds as well? Because a lot of guilds to commission someone to make potions and scrolls and other stuff like that.
A: We can definitely look into that.
Clarification was requested on the guild level requirements. Guilds can buy one of any of the guild halls available to them (a level 70 guild could purchase a Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3 hall).
Q: I heard something about trophies, can you tell us more about those?
A: Trophies are what we're putting in to drop off raid mobs, like dragon heads. We're going to do two from each expansion, one from each adventure pack. They're just cosmetic devices right now. They'll drop off mobs and you can place them on the wall. Venekor, Trakanon, Cheldrak, etc.
Q: Do they [trophies] reduce status?
A: They don't reduce status right now, it's something we're looking into; we might have to reduce status in there, we're not sure yet.
Q: You mentioned bells in the guild hall. Does this mean we'll be able to put a Commonlands bell next to an Antonica bell?
A: Right, down on that dock there's a Shattered Lands Bell, a Kunark Bell. They are one-way out.
Q: There are a couple of Amenities I had questions about, the Training Dummy and the Creature Tamer.
A: The Training Dummy is a chest you can set down and it will spawn any number of training dummies out of it. Creature Conjuror is sort of like that, it's a hireling that can spawn Arena champions.
Q: Is there going to be a guild writ giver to the actual City Raids?
A: That's something on my list to put a door in that will go to those city raids. The thing is they go to an instance, the hard part is getting back to your guild hall from that. It's the same idea with the Arena. We can put an Arena door in, we can get you there, right now we've got to work out getting you back. What it will do is dump you to a default area in the parent zone of your hall. So we want to work out getting you back before we put that in.
Q: There's a rumor that eventually there will be training halls to let you go up against Nameds you've already killed, like Overking? Is there any truth to that rumor?
A: No, not at this time. That's something we can look into, I like the idea of it.
Q: You talked about menders, when someone uses the mender in the hall the guild will contribute to mending,have you thought about something like, when they go to use the mender a percentage of what it cost them to mend would go to the subsidizing of the guild hall itself? So that if they use their own money it actually goes into the guild?
A: Yeah, that sounds like an idea we can look into. I like that idea.
Q: Is there a mechanism in place for moving guild halls?
A: It works pretty much just like moving a player house. You go to the new guild hall that you want to buy and say you want to buy it, and it says since you've already got one, do you want to move, and if you click yes then the Gnomish Moving Company packs all your stuff up into a little crate and it puts it in the foyer of your new hall. Now, the thing about Amenabilities, they don't get moved. So all the Amenities go poof when you move, but all the purchase price of those Amenities get refunded into your escrow account so you can rebuy them. So you won't lose that money. Your escrow balance in your old guild hall will move with you to the new one. Also that brings us the idea of player items being dropped in. You can drop items in, but they become property of the guild because you won't have any access to pick them up unless you've been flagged for it.
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Q: You mentioned earlier that current status reduction items will not work in this location. Are you in the process of putting any other new items in place that we can use to cut back on that status cost?
A: Yeah, it's an idea for the second phase of stuff we want to put in. Right now with launch there won't be, so you'll have to use your status as-is right there. You can imagine with the numerous status items out there already if we allowed those then status would mean nothing, we'd have to make the upkeep costs so high that it wouldn't really work well.
Q: With the Raid Strategist, how many rally points can exist at one time?
A: One. It lasts for two hours or until a new one is planted.
Q: So you're building the guild halls. Will there be any sort of world-wide event like the Spires?
A: You'll just go buy them. In GU 48 we're putting in an event where you can contribute to the building going on in Antonica and Commonlands. There are Harvesting Writs, you talk to one of the two directors out there you tell them what Tier you want, and what nodes, they'll tell you how many to get of that type. You do 10 of them, you get a house item that reduces your player housing status; you do 20 you get a statue, a mini version for your house; you do 30 you get a title of "the Constructor."
(They gave us a look at the Tier three Freeport guild while Q&A continued)
Q: There were some NPC's called Harvest Hunters, Gatherers, what do they do?
A: Okay, there's the Miner, the Gatherer, and the Hunter. What they do, they're guys who gather for you, you hire them, you talk to them, what Tier (they each specialize in the nodes their names reflect), in two hours come back and talk to them again and they'll give you 100 random harvests (pulls) of that type.
Q: Are there any plans for Deity altars in guild halls?
A: We're talking about that. Right now you can't drop them in there for reasons, but we're debating on whether or not we can put them in there.
Freeport Guild Hall Commentary: The outside was designed to look like a skull if you looked down on it. They're highly decorated already on the walls.
Q: For the broker, I saw there was a broker window, are we going to have broker windows and access to the bank, and also, will Odyssey Stone and and will the druids be able to port in.
A: We don't have the druids porting or Odyssey Stone yet, but that's a good idea we can look into putting in. The first part about the broker, yea, the world broker will you can buy, you can buy a banker or a hireling and there's also going to be, one of the things we were looking into putting in here is an intra-guild broker. So you can put something on him, but it will only show to your guild members. But that probably won't be launch feature, it's something we're kicking around.
Q: What's the recast going to be on call of guild hall?
A: The same timer as your call to Ro, or Call to Qeynos, Freeport.
Q: Normal houses with like 10 little pets walking around, you walk in and you have a whole bunch of stuff on the walls you get bit by a lag monster right when you walk in. What's it going to be like for a zone that's this huge with guilds on every server to have?
A: It's loading appearances, so the number of guilds or guild halls isn't a criteria. It's how many items you have in there. If you keep the loading area, at the front cleared it might help that. But you have 1500 items, so.
Q: You said Tier 1, guild level 30, and made reference to the five bedroom house. So this [the one we were seeing at the presentation] is a Tier three, so would the Tier 1 look like the five bedroom house?
A: Yes, Tier 1's do use that same layout and stuff, it's to give the lowest just entry level stuff. * Tier 2 have all new layouts like this. They're smaller, 10 rooms, but they're new layouts. There's 20-25 rooms in the Tier 3.
Q: Someone's already talked about the training dummies and that stuff? We'll we be allowed ot make then raid mobs to practice strats on? I remember there on the forums there was talk about only allowing the training dummies to be raid mobs if it tied into the trophy room so that if the guild had already defeated the mob the hard way they could train new guild members on the strat before they went in.
A: That's a good idea. Anything you've read on the forums about guild halls though is complete rumor that players have said. We haven't said anything until now. So all that's rumor but I like the idea, we can definitely look into that.
Q: I wasn't too clear on the different tiers. If you're already guild level 80, do you automatically go for a Tier three?
A: Yes, if you're guild level 80 you already qualify for a Tier 3. You don't have to though.
Q: Will we have the ability to "try on" or see Amenities before we purchase them?
A: We have prose in there to explain pretty clearly what they do. For what they look like, we need to look into whether they'll show up in the window right now. We're not sure yet.
Q: We have an item there, a portal that allows us to go back to our player housing, but do we have anything that can take us from player housing back to the guild hall?
A: That would be your call spell.
Q: So there's no plans to implement a second item we could put in our player house, because otherwise people are not going to want to go to their guild hall.
A: Right now we don't have a plan to go back to the guild hall from your house.
Q: You mentioned that there will be brokers in the guild hall, but what kind of commission will they charge? 40% both alignments like the black market broker, or will they check the player's alignment?
A: They should be 20% for your side, 40% for the other side.
Q: You were talking about a limited amount of Amenities. You said there was only room for 30. Will there be more Amenities than we will be able to purchase?
A: Right, we're going with 41, 42 Amenities at launch. So there will be 12 you won't be able to get yet. But guild level will be something that can always go up and you can always earn more Amenities as it goes.
Q: So suppose we're like guild level 68 when this launches, and we buy a Tier 2 guild hall. Can we apply those costs to our Tier 3 guild hall when we qualify for that?
A: For the Amenities costs yes, for the cost of the house that was bought at Tier 2 you'll have to buy Tier 3 at full price.
Q: Are you going to be able to, with the sieges, are you able to place the flag in an instance?
A: No, it's for static zones, it won't be inside instances. You can plant it right outside the door.
Q: How are the guild halls going to work in PvP, are cross-alignments going to be able to go into each others' guild halls? Also, are the bells going to let us go to all the docks, say you're in Antonica, you're good aligned, is it going to allow us to zone to the Commonlands?
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A: Yes, you'll be able to zone in there like normal bells. For PvP, like we said here, your access would default to none. If you want, you could set it to Visitor and let people in. We might have to look on PvP and line those up, that your zoning into the right places using those bells, just so we can keep the integrity of what was set up there.
Q: Your guild status upkeep, is that calculated with the 10% like guild status or is that personal status?
A: That is personal status. That is everyone's personal status and they dump it into the escrow.
Q: So if you do a writ you get full credit.
A: If you do a writ you get personal status, that personal status would then have to be deposited in the escrow.
Q: Are all the Amenities available to every Tier?
A: Yes, all Amenities are available right away. If all you wanted to get was the Strategist, and you're level 30, even at Tier 1 you could get that.
* Indicates something which has changed since Fan Faire. See: Guild Halls