First let me apologise for yet another 'OMG Guild Housing Idea!!!' thread. Secondly, i've read a lot of these threads both here and the us boards, I haven't intentionally stolen from anyone if an idea in here is the same as yours, I'm not ripping you off, either I read it and liked it (and forgot/didn't read the whole thread) or we both hit upon the same idea.


Guild Houses - Why Bother?

Apart from the RP aspect, the question is why have a guild house, most of the time people are raiding, grinding, questing. Is there a real need for them other than a status symbol? After a fair bit of thought the real reason is obvious, a guild house should serve the guild who own in, as in it should serve some purpose other than simply sitting there. More on this later, see Upgrades.


How to get one? - 5000g for epix mount I'm not paying more for a house!

From an Npc, amusingly named no doubt and present in all capital cities. Putting him next to the NPC's who sell Charters and allow you form a guild crest seem the obvious positions for them.

The obvious way is to purchase a house gold. This presents certain problems, one obvious being the buying/selling of gold. An alternative approach would be to use the game mechanics the AQ event introduced. Have an NPC who requires x amount of different types of materials, ideally all the gathering professions (ore, stone, leather, cloth, herbs?) as well as items created using other professons (engineering surely) this would allow a guild to 'pool' their resources, everyone would be able to help out in achieving their goal. Plus it also means more trade in the game, both in AH and /2 Trade.

For this method, it might be wise to introduce profession specific items used for creating houses - Jewelcrafters could carve cut gems/glass, Engineerings could make various frames, Miners could provide and cut stone etc. There's lot of potential, i've just explored 3 I'm familiar with.


Where will they be?

I played another game a long time ago, Ultima Online, I had a house. So did everyone, everywhere you ran you ran into one. Annoying as hell. Instancing these player structures would be the only way to stop azeroth being ruined.

Stormwind has a Portal behind a gate, obvious location for the housing district. Darnassus has plent of areas where you could slip another portal in or open up the mountains to fit one in (behind the Cenarion area or the temple of the moon) think of how the Portal to the fishing village works and you get the idea.
Ironforge is built within a mountain, so their housing area would most likely be within some giant cavern, small path out of the Forlorn cavern perhaps leading to a housing portal.

By implimenting them this way they are unobtrustive and have a low impact on the rest of the game.


So I've been through the magical housing portal, what now?

I've thought alot about this, whether single guild instanced housing plots or player run cities. TBH I like the idea of having multiple guilds have houses in the same area, the game is built on community so why buck the trend. In order to do this I'm guess the developers need to do a bit of their maths magic to work out how many 'plots' for houses will be needed. there's nothing to stop them simply adding another 'portal' to the housing zone (in the same way the Sims used Neighbourhoods) as need increases. Put an inn in the middle of the area where people can set their hearth stones to and you're sorted.


Types

Lack of customisation is one thing that gets to me in this game, I understand why I can't have armour thats different coloured from a friend with the same, or why I can't paint my horse with stripes.
But noone wants to have a house that looks like every single other guild. To combat this have different styles, Darnassian, Dwarven, Human and Spacecow. We see plently of examples of each style in the game. Thrown in 2-3 version of each architechual style and there you go, plently of variation.


Upgrades

I said at the top the point of this ever growing post that they should serve a purpose for their guild. In order to do so, each room/section/building/whatever should have a function.
My warcraft knowledge isn't as high as these boards usually demand so I'll give the buildings a basic name, I know almost all of these will have a similar counterpart from WC1/WC2/WC3 which could be used
A few examples:-

Basic Guild Hall
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Nothing but a barn really. It would be nice if a message board could be implented, simpliar to how the wanted posters work. That way important information could be left for all to use, be it Guild Rules, Raid Timetable. Limit it to 10 Posts, Officer and GM only and you have a room with a function and a purpose.
And most importantly a guild bank - See final part of post.

Crafters Hall
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An upgrade, costs mats/gold/whatever to construct.
Comes with or can be upgraded (how ever its going to be done) to have profession based objects, Forges, Anvils, Loom, Moonwell?

NPC - Blacksmith, like any blacksmith anywhere in the game, sells the basic tools, repais and fluxes etc.

What would be very usefull would be a crafting list. Rather than having to spam guild chat, or wait till x logs on, I could check his list in the crafters hall, see what he can make and what materials he needs.

Mage Tower
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An upgrade, costs mats/gold/whatever to construct.
Highly expensive, but highly usefull. Contains a static portal to another capital city. Or if possible, a portal to the Guilds current Raid instance - Would assist in the organising of raids etc.
If it was done for raids then the portal would only have to be active if you were currently save to an instance to prevent people using it as a quick portal for griefing.

Hall of Legends
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An upgrade, costs mats/gold/whatever to construct.
The guild show off room, kill a boss? get a throphy. Be able to see your guilds progress.

Exalted with BG's? perhaps a 'Listed of Honoured' from AV listing all the guildies who have attained that level and thus are 'heroes of AV'. Another potential for this room could be item sets, complete Dragonstalker? upgrading/vendoring/throwing away? Give to an NPC who mounts it like a suit of armour. Considering all those sets it could look very impressive.

Courtyard
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An upgrade, costs mats/gold/whatever to construct.
A walled Courtyard. In the center a free for all PvP ring on the outsides training Dummies and Archery targets. Why? Respeced/got new gear and what to test damage etc, go to the range and let of a few shots. Bored guildies want to go battle royal? jump in the arena and take on all comes. The mechanics are in the game, STV arena springs to mind.

I'm sure there are other upgrades that can be done both usefull and vaniety. Perhaps certain scematics could be drops in raids/high level dungeons/world drops, still requiring the materials to make.


Guild Bank

Finally the Guild bank, a difficult thing to design tbh. I picture it as looking like the AH, but rather than having a final tab where you put an item up for sale, you have a 'deposit' tab. You deposit an idea and you are credited with 'guildpoints' or what ever. These can then be used to withdraw items from the guild bank.
Having a Simplfied AH interface would make searching for items a lot simplier.

Example: I put in 10stacks of rugged leather and get 10GC, there's a nice blue I want for 8GC, I get that and have 2GC left.

The points could be either be:-
Manually assigned per item - Annoying, long, lots of admin. Automatically assigned - Use some cost calucalation such as vendor price x1.5
Tweakable - All points are given as vendor cost but different items can have their values adjusted to reflect needs of the guild.

Certain controls should be available to the Guildmaster, allowing him to turn the whole 'points' system on/off as well as assigning individuals to have different rights (guild crafters etc) and being able to set certain items to be not accepted.

But Why Bother With Guild Halls? - Just go play the SIMS

Anything that can make the 'admin' side more ingame has to be a good thing, most guilds have websites, forums, mods/raid calenders etc. I raid lead and Web Admin for a casual guild anyone else who's done either of these jobs knows it's not as simple as saying right we're going to x now, give us the tools to help us play more and do less adminy stuff

But i'm sure more of it could be done in game.
Potentially Guildhouses could offer something to everyone, be it raider, nonraider, casual, hardcore or rp.

It's a long post, yes. I've purposily not gone into too much depth so that theres room to work on/with it. I've not mentioned PvP as i'm not sure Guild v Guild can really be done in WoW other than organised BG/Arena matches. Being able to storm/attach other peoples how's would be amazing, but I know a lot of people would hate it when their 3243243243243432423g house got burnt to the ground by the tier 9 raiders who live next door.

Sorry for any typo's, hopefully they're not so terrible the word/meaning is lost. Thanks for reading, if you didn't bother then *shrug* i'm not going to lose any sleep over it. If you like the ideas add more, if you don't tell me, let me know what works/doesn't work.
And if you work for blizzard and think 'OMG this is how to do it!' then find me, gimmie a job I think i'd probably enjoy working for you.
I could learn french, probably.

We read :)