Moo Tang Clan: guild housing vs the urban sprawl

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

guild housing vs the urban sprawl

I've been thinking about guild housing again, and remembered that one of the arguments against non-instanced guild housing would be that the world would be very quickly cluttered. There are lots of other arguments against guild housing, instanced or not, but it's this one issue I want to discuss for now.

But then I wondered just how many guilds there are on my realm, and I wondered what if perhaps guild housing was something not available to all comers, but instead required some basic qualifications to be overcome first. That is, you can't simply go to a vendor, pay 10 gold, and bingo you've got urban sprawl.

For example, say for discussion sake guild housing was only available to guilds who are up to the level of raiding Karazhan or better. If so, then according to WowJutsu my realm would have only 34 potential guild houses horde side, and up to 52 alliance guild houses. If guild housing is restricted to being placed to only outside the faction cities, then things are looking pretty good. Even if the distribution between cities wasn't even it would still look good.

Personally, given those numbers, I wouldn't limit guild housing to only outside cities, but instead allow them just about anyplace within faction controlled territory. Given those numbers too, I can imagine that the process of siting guild housing could be mediated and vetted via Blizzard peons - maybe the guild leader goes to a vendor to purchase a surveying kit, picks a site, returns, and submits a land claim to their faction leader. Twenty four hours later they get notified via in-game mail whether their claim was successful or not.

OK, a couple of questions:

  1. what are the numbers for the above scenario for your realm?
  2. how might the raiding-guild-qualifier scenario be implemented? I'm thinking maybe a semi-rare drop from raid bosses, or even an accumulation of token drops to ensure against lucky one off pugs.
  3. what alternative limiting factors would you want to see? I know there are large guilds that would want guild housing but never raid .. so maybe allow guilds of 200+ members to get guild housing too?
  4. where would you locate your guild housing? I've got some sweet spot located out of the way in Mulgore in mind.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

For one thing, not all guilds are posted on WoWJutsu. Yes, many of them are, but there are also plenty of guilds who don't raid, so does this mean that they don't deserve to have a guild hall? I don't necessarily think so. Does this mean that they should have less priority over those that are raiding Black Temple. Again, I don't think so. While I do think that players and guild housing would be really neat, I think Blizzard built WoW in such a way that it wouldn't be possible outside of cities. That's not to say that they won't do something to change this with WotLK.

Garumoo said...

I don't fully trust WoWJutsu either, and in any case I agree that guild housing should also be made available to non-raiding guilds.

The key point though is should it be available to every guild, regardless of how inconsequential that guild is? Should guild housing be as easily available to a 1-toon bank alt guild, as it would be to a 50-toon guild of active mains?

Where would you draw the line?