Questions by: Tony "RadarX" Jones
Answers by: Associate Producer Josh Drescher and Designer Christian Bales

One of the core mechanics of EA Mythic's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is "Living Guilds," a testament of their overall importance. While such ideas communicate the old school style of guildcentric activities, this game promises to implement them in new ways. Associate Producer Josh Drescher and Designer Christian Bales sat down with Ten Ton Hammer recently and talked about Standards, Tactics, why Josh hates people, and what information we can expect to hear about with the upcoming Guild Beta.

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Ten Ton Hammer: In the last video podcast, Jeff mentioned players will be able to purchase tactics. Are these consumable? Are they lost when your banner is taken?

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Keeps Are Important

Christian Bales: The tactics themselves are actually purchased from within your guild window and the Standards from the Keep/Renown merchant in the guild stores. Once captured or planted in the world they are considered to be out of your inventory and in danger of being taken. The only penalty is you need to go back and buy another Standard.

Josh Drescher: You have a finite number of Standards available to your guild, either restricted by advancement or the hard cap that exists overall. You also have a finite number of tactics that can be slotted independently on to the Standards. Once you have learned a tactic, it remains available to you on any Standard you own.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the Tactics have the same type of swapibility players have and will there be situations where you need to swap?

Christian Bales: Tactics on Standards are going to work a little different on players. Once you actually save Tactics to your Standard, you lock that Standard with those Tactics down for 24 hours. That's a conscious decision on the part of the guild officer or leader when they put those tactics in.

There are restrictions on certain types of Tactics and where they can be slotted on particular Standards. That is more information we are going to release with Guild Beta.

Ten Ton Hammer: The last video mentioned guild dues. Does this imply there will be an administrative cost in having a guild?

Christian Bales: Guild dues and tithes is still under discussion but at the moment there is no maintenance fee associated with just having a guild. Of course that is always subject to change based on feedback

Josh Drescher: And it's important to remember there are things that will have recurring costs which are independent from the actual guild itself. For example the mercenary cost of maintaining a Keep that your guild owns is going to be something significant because accomplishing a Keep claim is going to be a significant event. The last thing you want is to get there and not be able to pay all the guards.

And there will be other guilds more focused on types of content that might not have those upkeep costs. As a result the tithing will not be as critical to them. This is why we try and give you lots of options as you are leveling up the guild to pick and chose the types of things that work for the way your guild operates.

Your guild, your way!

Ten Ton Hammer: Can that be scaled? The X number of gold might not be much to a level 40 player, but it would kill a level 20 player.

Christian Bales: Those details are still under discussion.

Josh Drescher: The tithing could be percentage based. It could be 10% of your income, not to go all papal on you. It will obviously be adjustable and scalable by the guilds but I think the option most people will probably go for is donations or a percentage based tax.

Ten Ton Hammer: What have you found most challenging when building your guild system?

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Guilds Will Need to
Band Together

Josh Drescher: *laughs* I think challenge is the wrong word for it. I think the most work has always gone into trying to communicate with people that have been out in the field playing with large guilds for a lot of years trying to find out what is missing. We have the benefit of actually having a number of people on the team, and I won't call them out because they need to maintain the safety of anonymity, who have been part of or are still part of relatively large well known guilds in plenty of games. It's an asset to us because we can go to them.

I for example, have never been a particularly social person in or out of game. I hate people. So it's always a little confusing to me what might be missing from this portion or that portion of the finalized design. Being able to go to someone and say "You've actually operated a hundred person guild before. What was missing? What would you have loved to have in game?" helps.

A lot of the utilitarian functions you will find in the design which might not be as flashy, I think is really going to wind up the most popular side of it. Those elements came directly from talking to people who have experienced lots of games over the years and have really been clamoring for things like a calendar. It sounds like a stupidly simple thing to put in the game, but it's just something people have never bothered to implement previously. It was the lightning flash where we went "That was blindly obvious and somehow we missed it for years." You have the idea of building in something like a calendar so that's been a challenge but I wouldn't say it's been daunting or intimidating.

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