Exactly, but a lot of people would just like it easy. This is probably the wrong forum to push the idea, seeing as most guilds here are higher tiered and have their own codeman to do the nifty job. There's a ton of guilds that don't have that, go through a lot of mid and lower tier raid guilds and see their websites. It's merely a forum and dkp site put up and that's it. I'd bet you they'd love the easy and quick choice. Maintenance on TS servers? So you think they'd be stupid enough to host TS/VT on the same servers as the realms?

I don't see why people couldn't get to modify their own stuff, I know I can on my host and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible if say Blizzard decided to set up some kind of hosting arrangement. There's those assumptions that Blizzard will do a horrible job at something so many others have done perfectly fine.

If you don't want it you don't have to get it, but it's a choice that many would probably be happy for. Like you said, consumer choice is a good thing. If you don't want the solution offered, take your business elsewhere.

Hi level one rogue with no WoW account.

The simple option for voicechat is to make a deal with some voicechat companies to handle billing for the server, take a little bit of a cut and allow people to nominate whether they want to pay in their payment options. So you may have 1 person paying or you may have 40 paying 2.5% each, make it easy to see whos paid would be nice as well.

Then down the track an mmo could integrate the voice chat program into the client a little bit, basically just make it viewable whos talking without using an overlay program or a same button hooking addon.

I would also love to see IRC implemented to connect to guild chat and host bots with the dkp system and that sort of thing. A friend made an IRC bot which uses his item cache to function a little like thottbot.

Specialization is a good thing. We wouldn't have voice comms if they were an add-on service to MMOGs. They'd still be in pre-alpha testing.

I'd be cool with UI hooks that let you interact with your 3rd party software. Let TS or Vent or whatever hook send info to the UI, and let the UI display and let you adjust that information. (i.e., no tabbing out to start and stop TS.) Similarly, let us have UI window that allows downloading and uploading to the web for realtime in-game DKP and other data entry.

While a blizzard made DKP system will probably not cater to everyones wishes, this would go a long way:

Make a shared guild database, readable by anyone, editable by officers. Let each character in the guild have a few slots of data tied to him and make this accessible through LUA. This would make it possible to write addons for DKP (or attendance, or DG wipes as suggested or whatever) which doesnt rely on outside datasources and/or synchronizing different clients.

When I think about it, this can probably be implemented today using character notes as the data field. An initially hidden field for each character would be better though.

While I like the idea of guildbound items, I dont think it should be neccesary. If a few items are important to a point where you cannot progress if you loose them, the design is flawed at a much deeper level. Guildbound could have uses within the current blizzard system though. Like implementing recipe books that drop and are guild bound. They are shared through a library with every person of the relevant profession as long as he is in the guild. Book of Greater Fire Resistance Potion. That sort of thing. It helps the guild retain important skills regardless of player fluctation, as well as distribute the work load when items need to be made. We used to have a single alchemist who knew GFRP, I'm sure he would have appreciated it while we where learning ragnaros.

While I dont like resistance based encounters, this would also solve most of the "people left with things we need" issues related to that. Replace the current system with "You need TB reputation to buy the guildbound book for resist recipes". Getting someone to exalted with TB is a guild effort anyway.


About tokenized loot. As someone mentioned earlier, there is a big difference between the AQ/Nax tokenization (one token for instant reward) and the one currently in closed beta for "casual epics" (gather 15 tokens, go trade). The player wants to be rewarded when he makes his kill, not get a feeling of "gee, I have to do this 14 more times". Using the latter system in a raid environment spells trouble seeing as DKP is *needed* in a lot of guilds to motivate people to show up on wipe days. Token gathering in the form where everyone gets a token each kill rewards unwanted behaviour. While it removes the need for DKP as loot distribution, I dont feel like it is a worthwile tradeoff.

Blizzard's own UI is the best example of why Blizzard providing services is a bad idea.

They have a UI - How many serious players, the ones that use vent/ts/dkp systems use it native?
They added SCT functionality - How many use that?
They added their own raid frames - How many actually use those?

These are all neat things, and I am glad they are in the UI, but they are of little value to the type of people who make a home in this game. I like having control over the location of my vent server, the codec etc. I like having control of our DKP, and being able to change things. My own UI has been so far removed from the default for over a year now that I can barely play on other computers... :-) I've grown into it.

Vent is far more reliable than anything Blizzard can do. I'd take a private provider than depends on satisfying customers for THAT service over a company making millions who could screw it up for weeks and not even have a blip on their income.

Things that Blizzard could add that would be of service to everyone - and vastly help the mod makers as mentioned before.
- Ingame Raidtracker logging. Up to a certain date, e.g. 2 weeks. With XML string export option, and the option to save to file.
- The ability for officers to assign a value to items, viewable on the tooltip by members of the guild.
- and of course some support for every aspect of running a guild. 2 years and all we have is 2 channels. C'mon.

If they created the option for guilds to exist as actual entities, rather than a glorified chat interface, we could do so much more.

Giriam yes some loot systems exist like that. None that i really wanted to use because of mechanics but thats not even the real drawback. Anyone with sufficient perms can edit them. And yes perms can be locked down but having to restrict dkp officers and GM to guild/officer not changing is an irritant. A bigger hassle is only so much information can be stored, id expect enough to work out who has many points but not what they have previously bought and which raids they show up to.

There are some halfway solutions which update from a website so peoples current totals are viewable ingame but its a lot of mucking around.

They'd only work as options, not something everyone would pay for. If your guild wants it, you as the guild leader enable it and the subscription of all your guild members go up as you split the costs of having this kind of stuff.

Like any hosting company, they can easily give you ftp access to your repository and you can do whatever you want with it within some guidelines. Blizzard doesn't need to provide an alternative to VT or TS, volume licensing should be no problem. Kalman brought up one of the good points against Blizzard doing VT/TS and that's the localization of it which attributes to bad ping and so forth, but it would still work for most people.

People have mentioned tokenized loot systems and I think overall people are happy about them. One thing worries me though, with tokenized loot systems you're going to pidgeonhole everyone to an incredible degree. If you use tokenized loots, that means you're basically going to drop all secondary build items. In Naxx you have the feral legs from 4H and many other items that T3 doesn't cater to. While this may seem a nuisance to many people, it's actually incredibly nice to have. I'm a restoration druid, because that's just what I have to do to function in the raid environment our guild has set up. However I, as many of our druids, would like to run around in kitty form for the weekend and have some fun I usually don't get to experience.

If you tokenize the loot system, all these secondary drops are annihilated. There's no reason to put dps plate on bosses anymore, since that's covered by the token drops already. What this does is make it almost impossible for tanks to grab some dps plate, because everyone needs to grab the plate drops first and foremost for their PvE use. I could imagine the outcry if a priest bought one token for his healing gear and later he'd bid dkp against a mage for a cloth token for dmg gear, because the priest wanted some shadow fun. Drama, drama!

The same goes for druids vs rogues, I'd like the chance to get some feralol loot. Tokenized, it won't happen until everyone has their PvE gear first. I don't know how long that is going to take, that's still to be seen, but if the current loot rate stays the same I know I'll be one sad panda. It would take ages for me to start getting some feral stuff. Granted the level 70 loot doesn't appear too shabby, but those are mostly blue items we have seen so far. Will we have decent epic feral(and other secondary raid builds) loots? As a restoration druid my raiding is two-fold, I raid to progress and get the gear it takes to progress so I can progress further ... my secondary fun is gathering nice feral items so I can slap it on and go PvP sometimes.

People that will solely be PvP'ing will gather their gear at a much faster rate than me anyways, so I don't think that's a valid point. I could go PvP and get some feral loot from that, but I simply don't have the time to do progress in both directions. Shaman, druid, priest and warrior PvE gear go in vastly different directoins compared to PvP gear while mage, warlock, rougue and hunter gear go in pretty much the same direction. It seems there will be some difference, just like in the current system, but overall their primary function remains the same in PvE and PvP. I know I can go heal in PvP, but I do that enough in PvE and I mostly PvP for a change in gameplay.

That is another thing that is bugging me, why are we so restricted in terms of talents? I never understood why it costs money to respec our talents. Why does it cost me an arm and a half whenever I want to go have some feral fun? Why should it cost me several hours of boring grinding to want a change in gameplay? I can't for the life of me understand why this is so. If I had it my way I could go to the trainer and respec as often as possible, it would heighten the fun I'd have out of playing a million times. I would absolutely LOVE if I could run around kitty-style outside raids if I wanted to do so. As it is now I have to wait several weeks between each time because I simply can't afford it or be bothered by grinding as a druid. To me it's completely retarded, you're purposefully preventing people from having much more fun.

A possible solution and compromise would be to charge some amount of gold for another "memory" slot - basically you'd be able to buy another talent spec and keep both at the same time, so you'd be able to switch between them. The usual fee for switching talents around in each memory slot would still apply.

All that has been confirmed so far is that PvP gear which is done on non raid time is token/honour/arenapoint based. Possibly a PvP group may get annoyed if their healer took only damage gear but i doubt it. The other thing confirmed is 5 man instances will be doable on hard mode for tokens with 1 token dropping per boss then tokens turned into gear. Again a 5 man may get upset if people take the 'wrong' things but its a 5 man.

We have no idea yet how raid loot is going to be handled. WoW endgame right now is a gearing grind forced upon us by epics/week which is forced upon the developers by the slow pace of content. If content speeds up gearing can speed up. But tokens could result in a way to allow fast raid gearing then the farm cycle of an instance could be used for fun items. Im surprised that you would advocate itemisation in an instance which is unhelpful for pve progression just so you can have some fun items to use. Use what the raid gets to help the raid first. If the raid wants some druids to be tanks and some to do dps the raid can optimise for that, maybe it wont be best to only take healing gear, maybe druid gear will be like the druid arena set. If you want to make/join a guild which uses a given amount of tokens for fun things while progressing no one is stopping you.

Its unlikely blizzard will completely remove drops from raids but possible. Even if raid gear becomes only useful for raids its not the end of the world, if its not fun for its own sake loot only shifts the balance so far.

I believe its WoW's way to differentiate between players. There was talk a while ago of 8-9 classes being a small amount for an MMO and the talents being another way to make classes unique. Playing guild wars switching skills and attributes in any town is nice, and even being simple to switch secondary classes, but it does mean all characters of the same main class are pretty much the same, which isnt the best way to get a sense of epic scope which i do not believe guild wars aims for.

Just caught up on this thread... and I'm gonna make it a 6 on 1. Even though pretty much everything against Blizzard providing services that are currently provided by third party companies or people has been covered, I think one point of it hasn't been stressed enough. That would be the choice that people get.

Looking at mods, Blizzard could provide more in their default UI, but why would they? They currently have everything thats necessary to play the game (and yes, my UI looks and feels like it just came out of the box with the exception of a few minor mods that I COULD do without). It would take them hiring many developers to provide the selection that players currently have when they go to curse gaming. Even then, someone will say I wan't this mod to be suited more to my liking so I'd like to change it around. A lot of mods are based on preference, and Blizzard does not have the manpower to edit a mod on a single consumer's request. However, giving us the info we need (as Kalman said) makes it very feasible for someone to edit an existing mod to their liking.

The same basic principles go for every service they'd provide. For ventrillo: Do you want a 20 person server? 50? 100? High quality codec? Located in the States? Europe? Canada? Do you want Blizzard to offer all those options? Or do you want them to have a standard one that nobody will use (see CS' built in voice feature)? You're basically saying that you want Blizzard to buy out a provider and slap their tag on it because... you don't want to have to sign up for another provider? I really don't see any reasoning behind you wanting your vent server to be provided by Blizzard over Nrgservers or something.

Well, we have seen quite a few of the token rewards. It's probably not all the items that are going to be available, but what we did see was only non-armor pieces.

Just because I like raiding doesn't mean I don't like to do things outside raids. So far raiding has enabled me to do things outside of raids too, because of those offspec loots I gather on my way. I'd like to keep it that way and with the heavy tokenization I can see a threat to that. It's true that with the tokenization the time it will take to gear up a raid is going to go down, but if we cut down on raid sizes and keep the same loot flow as we have in Naxxramas (2 per boss, in TBC being 2 tokens per boss) then I could see the raid gearing up quite fast.

I think Guild Wars is just trying to aim for something that is the best it can be on a gameplay level. While I agree that World of Warcraft tries to aim for having an epic scope, I will have to say that having to destroy gameplay to achieve an epic scope is probably the worst way to do it. I know I'd personally love WoW many times more if they'd give me the freedom to switch around. I love my druid in raid PvE, but outside I hate my character because I feel so incredibly gimped. I just remember back when I heard all the promise from the developers that all classes would be able to compete somewhat in all fields and you'd have no more healbots, unfortunately that's what it comes down to at the moment. I'm a healbot, when I get out of raids I can't spend 100g for whenever I want to fuck around. It's just not feasible when trying to raid at the same time.

You seem to make some unfair assumptions about Blizzard. In terms of their UI everyone can, or should, agree that their main UI was horribly undeveloped. It lacked so much functionality that it is really mindboggling to compare what we have with mods today and what you had back then with the standard interface. I never said they should cater to every single taste. Even the stock UI we have today compared to the first stock version, the improvements are immense. And honestly, aren't you taking this to a bit of an unreasonable extreme? I'm not even sure why you got the UI mixed up into this.

You should already know the questions to those answers yourself, I don't get why you even ask those questions. Why wouldn't people use the standard one? Counter-Strike has a shitty codec, at least that's my memory of it, and clans usually don't want to be forced into being inside the game to use voice comms. These are all unimportant technicalities that are irrelevant to the discussion. Yes, it can be done wrong and it can also be done right. You're just assuming that it can not be done right in such a way that the majority of people would be satisfied with it.

This is business, profits - this is not something they'd do for free. They have every interest in getting you to buy their product, so they can make more money.

If they had a decent solution for forum, dkp and TS/Vent hosting I'd bet you a lot of people would use it simply because you could share the costs of running it with your guildmates. Basically it'd come down to one guy, to get those few extra options, that would have to choose to take on the full financial burden of keeping a website and a TS/VT server. That's at least 40 times what you'd currently be paying for some extra options. There are exceptions where some might know each other in real life so they could split the costs easily, or someone might have free hosting for the website and so on. These are exceptions though.

I'm wondering if they could fix this "tokenisation problem" by simply offering multiple sets (designed for different purposes, but same ilvl of course) from a token turn-in. I mean, that's a simple enough answer, isn't it?

Crafting guild functionality.

In order to reduce the tedious process of crafting things for your guild it would be nice, given already having a guild hall, of being able to hire a guild crafter which would be analogous to a repair bot in functionality. Here though, this guild crafter would be able to craft anything that a member of the guild can already craft that isn't a BOP item for anyone in the guild. They would require some kind of commision just like a repair bot as well in order to balance out their usefullness but nothing too outlandish. In addition this could take away the feeling of needing to sign on, or even needing to continue to play the game because of some rare craftible you can make. This also free's up other players in a large guild to switch to farming professions in order to help in the farming process.

I really like this idea. Anyone with patterns/plans/recipes that the crafter doesn't know, could be taught to them by a member that knows them for a small fee. You no longer have to deal with: A) The member leaving the guild and taking their rare pattern/recipe/plan with them (leaving the guild high and dry) B) Giving exclusive control to a single person/entity (at this point neither the guild nor the member with the rare recipe wield any sort of power over the other) C) As stated prior, no single person could leverage control, as the crafted item would be freely available to anyone with the mats, and a small fee, any time they're logged on.

I'd actually like to see the ability for the guild leader and officers have the ability to "train" the crafter anywhere, using any available recipes/patterns/plans that guild members already know (through a mail system or something). This would eliminate the paranoia factor of leaving it up to members to teach the crafter, preventing members from intentionally keeping their rare craft to themselves (not that you'd want that kind of a guild member anyway).

I'm also for the idea of a guild chest, whereby you can directly loot dropped items into while in a raid (only officers and the GM could do so). Anyone in the guild could look at the guild chest and request items from it. Item requests require approval from at least 3 officers before they can get the item. The chest also shows "pending" when an item is in process of approval, with some kind of "cooldown" (a day maybe?) preventing players from requesting too many items in a short amount of time.

Yes. The forum auth server seems to be the same as the main auth server. I see no reason to believe they'd be smart enough to move TS/VT to a different server if they didn't even think to themselves "Hey, maybe loading down authentication to core game services with non-core forum access is a REALLY BAD IDEA".

Seeing as Blizzard borrowed and improved from a whole host of MMOs, I see no reason that they cannot do that to EVE's corp-alliance system. Player-owned (and operated) housing with corp hangers that *gasp* provide equipment/consumables to corp members has been done and is workable. Instance it and BoB's your uncle.

That said, the last three pages of this discussion are (arguably) moving away from the areas that WoW still needs to be improved in. Now that I have experienced some of the other communities outside WoW, I am really seeing the limitations in the guild system as it is currently implemented.

Voice chat will be provided by EVE (starting with Revelations), but they went with a third-party solution. However, that "solution" is still outside the game and CCP is working on the game not something extra. Also, I prefer Vent (solely my preference), what happens when Blizz wants to go all TS on me? Choice is good.

In game DKP is nuts because it takes away all the choices that we have to run NDKP/Jerk Points/Majer gets everything (my favorite). I would like to see better loggin options as was mentioned earlier where you can see for a raid the join/leave messages, the boss kills, and the total time. That's all we're really looking for in our administration, right? Again, choice is good.

As far as the default UI goes, I really appreciate the fact that Blizzard gave us a vanilla UI and we can do a metric-asston of mods to how it looks and make it comfortable for how we like to see things. For example, I don't want to be there when Kaubel blows up a metropolitan area because the default UI (which we can't modify) won't let him organize the raid frames by class instead of group. *boom* For several thousand people, choice is good ;)

In short, guild ops need to be fixed (ala EVE possibly), DKP/Voice/UI stuff should remain at the choice of the user with some generic support.

Edit: Well sheet. If I'm going to name names in examples I may as well spell them right.

The auth servers work fine most of the time, I've never really had any more problems with them over the game servers themselves. They're slightly slow at times, but what the hell. Splitting them up also provides some issues as you'd have to have two servers basically doing the exact same job, but unable to help each other out at all.

At the moment if there's a run on the game servers, the portion appointed to logging in users on the forums is helping out as well. The only fault on their part is they were idiots on structuring their hosting properly or miscalculating the power to handle both. Who knows, maybe their miscalculation was on the game-servers and not the forums? Then their setup actually helped. It's difficult to tell.

These are things I would like to see myself:

User Interface changes
Calendar - Raid and group events interface which covers at least 3 months (curent,past/future) and includes:-
1/ Separate event types - Raid/Instance/PvP/Personal/Private ect.
2/ Sign up features for raid events which allows people to indicate availablity.
3/ A good sized 'notes' section for the raid for instructions.
4/ Private events are only shown on the owners calendar.
(Note: The ability to limit the creation of guild events needs included in the guildleaders function for guildranks)
----> A calendar feature would be useful for both casual and raiding guilds and well implemented I can see it being used extensively.

Address book - Guild interface needs to be expanded this could be done in a number of ways but the ability to add notes is needed. Things I would like to see:
1/ Guild listing done via accounts, a main would be designated (guildleader function on which guildranks able to do this). All other characters would be linked the main. Online fuction shows the current character.
2/ Ability to go to a character sheet which details their tradeskills and allows for input of notes (guildleader fuction as to which guildrank can edit these).

Raid/group function -
1/ Ability to sent main tanks and targets target added to the UI
2/ Raid function which allows custom logging of information. Including allowing the user to datamine some raidinfo that blizzard already has in storage. This fuction would include ability to select time of raidformation/joining/leaving/loot dropped (selectable as to which level of loot, all vs only purple drops ect)/time of boss death ect. The ability to dump this information to a special file or browse it online.

Guild changes
I really liked some of the suggestions on how to make being part of a guild more than just a chat channel (inso far as online game is concerned). Things I'd like to see included:-

Guildhousing - Various levels available with different guild ranks/objectives to upgrade them. These could be instanced. Each type guild house in a major town could have a NPC which allows you to enter your guild's house which would be the same shape as the building the NPC was in but customised to your guilds needs.

Guild bank - possibly accessiable via your guildhouse. Permission for adding/withdrawing form guild bank settable by the guildleader.

Guild trainer - again possibly accessiable via your guildhouse, special raid drops which are 'guild only' reciepes and are able to be given to the guild trainer. These reciepes can be trained into a special section of your reciepe book. Leave the guild and all 'guild reciepes' are lost. This fuction could be tied to the guild itself not the leader.

These would all have consquences if a guild splits however, as the people that keep the guild name keep the house/bank/trainer.

I'd love to see most of these idea put in.

Especially the Guild Hall, the guild crafters, and also the trophy room from Daos is great.

I also think a voice support should be implemented, as well as more advance loot system like a customisable DKP system, and a automated website/forum support. Of course these could well be options to be paid.

To the people here, complaining that they prefer their freedom, those wouldn't be mandatory, just because there is an ingame voice function doesn't mean you can't use TS or Vent, just like just because there is a in-game DKP system doesn't mean you have to use it, you can still use whatever you want, it's just one more option, to falicitate guild life.

i wanna choose

*guildhousing/rep/bank(but this apply to wow mainly, eve is god for these)

*simple XML extract from IG informations: Roster(with full informations)

for everythinh else, you should be free, as or loot system is something like /random-attendance-Homogeneity, as we use one system for calendar, another else for forum, etc etc, the only one and main difficulty is to say to guildies: "hey, get the roster updated"

As the modding community is doing some mervellous works for IG interfaces, several months after a release like this you should see appearing some RDX-php or major mods like this



May you pay for a full sevice for your guild? website, DKP-Raid system, TS/Vent included, image-video hosting, raid recap hosting?

As far as DKP/raid attendance/guild management is concerned, the ideal solution i think would be to:

1) add a built-in raid tracker - it doesn't need to do anything fancy, just record joins/leaves/boss kills/loot. Keep the data server-side (might have to limit the lifetime of it, though, to keep the storage required down).

2) provide a web-services interface to the raid-tracker records, and guild rosters (and possibly some limited, bare-bones way of viewing the data).

Leave everything else up to us, as there's no way any built-in system would be able to come close to pleasing a majority of players. Just provide the information, and let us access it and use it as we see fit. If anything like guild banks, calendars, etc are added, make sure the data about contents/events/whatever are available as well. With all of this, they'd probably want to set it up to require a login, with permissions on viewing stuff like guild banks or rosters settable via the in-game guild interface (raid info should probably just be accessible to any account which was on the raid, as it wouldn't be anything you couldn't log via in-game means anyway).