This is a nice marketing strategy by BW. The people who are joining guilds now and pre-ordering the game were likely going to do so anyway, without this feature in place.
What I am concerned about is whether or not this leads to the ridiculous "guild application" that has become notorious in WoW guilds. It would not be suprising, considering that with its similarities to WoW, this game will attract current and former Blizzard customers, who will likely use the same process. I don't know why anyone would want to "apply" for a position in anything that is supposed to be part of a leisure activity, but it happens frequently in "L33T" guilds.
If you thought some of the people running guilds in WoW that use this method were D.B.'s, wait until you have to fill out an application for a game that hasn't even released yet.
I think this is a great idea myself. It is something I have asked for in other game forums prelaunch. While I will not be playing this game for a variety of other reasons I give Kudos to the devs on this feature. For me I always like to join a guild but I have an odd playtime and sometimes find it difficult to find groups of players with the same playtime that I have. Having the ability to search out a bunch of guilds prelaunch to find something I like I find to be very nice and the fact the guilds go into the game complete is a nice touch.
letsee what happens when packets with unique items and stuff,collectors editions,sith megaboom,jedi dark super edition pre-orders comes out .
the pre ordering only applies to having the guild imported from the site to the game for launch. all other functions of it are free and you can still go in and make a guild after launch and have access to the guild headquarters. one of the reasons for the pre-ordering is so they are importing guilds they know are going to be used and not just every guild thats made because many of them likely won't be.
not impressed......SOE did something like this......and made people pay for it......lets wait for a while now......hehe get yer checkbook rdy
4 guild members need to pre-order, is that much? don't think so.
if thats all it takes...then no.
For the fans sake i hope they offer it cheap but most of the time this is just a stunt for collecting more money from subscribers.
Nice way to get pre-orders too
Guildhalls INGAME would have been way cooler imho (like AC2 had)
Guild ships will be in at launch/soon after. The guild HQ is not meant to replace this.
lets hope soo, the fact that they are doing this (guildwebspace) doesnt realy make me think they will implement this guildhall feature (in any form) ingame soon.
But thats just my toughts......hope they do for the fans.
The guild creation on site will be taken down once the game is live. You have to do everything in-game after that.
I have no problems with the feature... in fact it's a good initiative if you want to balance server populations... we all know how 2 faction games can have pop balance probs
But honestly... you don't force guilds to pick a server type before you explain what those type's rulesets are... like how they deal with level differences... if there's a tier system... if there are any "safe zones" on PvP servers... if PvE servers have auto-flag "PvP lakes" or if it's all optional flag.
You might have lots of guild re-rolls if things are very different from expected.... and then many people signed up in "defunct" guilds.
Point is,do they have all the versions of the game available now as pre order?if not then this is awesome trick to milk money. I mean if after few months i can buy swtor box including full jedi costume etc,and people who pre-ordered yesterday didnt have that option.
Nice way to make people who aren't interested in being part of a guild feel like second-class citizens.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II "People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
wow this site is full of a bunch of losers. they offer something completely optional to help people get their guilds setup in advance and without having to worry about creation after release, and all people can do is b1tch and moan?
seriously? go crap in your own cheerios, you sad pathetic haters.
I was about to write something similar when i saw your post. I fail to grasp how are people out there still supporting SOE. After all the misshaps and after SOE %#%^&'ing up with every single MMO they where involved in. I also have the feeling that a number of SWG vets are posting here seeking even minor reasons to bash Bioware. People, the dinosaurs have long ago become extinct. It was nice while it lasted but please go die your digital deaths somewhere else. SWG forums are a good place for this purpose.
Point is,do they have all the versions of the game available now as pre order?if not then this is awesome trick to milk money. I mean if after few months i can buy swtor box including full jedi costume etc,and people who pre-ordered yesterday didnt have that option.
they have no versions avaible for preview at this time. bioware doesnt recoginize pre-orders being taken now by places like gamestop because they havent announced a release date.
this was posted by the community manager in charge of guilds:
We have not announced our pre-order details yet, however here's the basic idea - all pre-orders will have a code that you will enter on the site to confirm your pre-order, and that's how we'll know who has and has not pre-ordered.
We'll give you all the information you need regarding pre-orders once the time comes, so don't worry too much about it for now.
Will I be able to use my preorder from Gamestop to count as one of the four pre-orders needed for guild deployment, or do the preorders have to be done through Bioware/EA?
Any pre-orders taken from retailers right now are not 'official' pre-orders from our perspective, because you haven't received a pre-order code.
We'll be working with retailers to deal with early pre-orders like yours. Please understand however, we cannot guarantee anything, as we're not the retailer.
Regardless, 'official' pre-orders (ie, those with codes) will be available from a variety of sources (which we'll announce along with the pre-order program).
26k+ guilds made so far. most probaly only have 1 or 2 people but thats still an insane amount
Hence the reason for "prerequisites" for your guild to be imported at launch. Also makes sense that guilds are filled with people that will actually play the game at launch, so thats why we see that 4 guildies will be required to pre order the game.
Cool or not, there's still something wrong with forcing people to pay for a game upfront like this. (4 people in the guild need to preorder to set this up)
This is only working for them because they have Star Wars attached to the title. They haven't even gone to closed beta or have a release date yet..
Tactics like this concern me. Is the well running dry and are they required to get some $$ asap??
If 26K guilds is correct.
26000 x 4 pre orders x ~$50 = $5,200,000
That's a lot of scratch for not a lot of game.
Why does everything have to be the result of corporate greed? The reason for the pre order's requirement may just be so BWdoesn;t have to import 100,000 guilds into the game when 50,000 of them won;t even play the game. Having 4 people pre order the game almost insures that guild will be created after the port.
I'm glad the article came out becuase I never thought of the population balancing that could take place even before teh launch.
Bioware benefits with pre-orders, advertisement, and able to balance some of the population at launch. Players benefit by being able to create guilds, have a place jsut for them to recruit and talk about waht they personally want to do in the game, and have one more tool to use while waiting for launch.
This program is win for everyone involved. And any complaints against this is just proof no matter what game makers do, some people will never be happy.
Can we make this clear... nobody is rpe ordering the game. ( at least not officially yet).
This guild hall page has 3 phases. We are only at phase one, which is guild creation. Phase 1 means anybody can create a guild and secure a guild name. This phase does NOT require a preorder. You basically create a guild, add members, and essentialy create your own guild page on SWTOR's site.
Next is Phase 2 - alignment. This is where you pick a side and can pick other guilds as allies and advasaries. Say if you ahve a republic guild you can pick some other republic guilds as allies and some other imperial guilds as advasaries. This means when Bioware picks which guilds go on which servers the preference will be that your allies and advasaries will all be on the same server. Again, this phases does NOT require pre orders.
Next is Phase three - importing of the guilds. This is launch time. Just beofre launch Bioware will have to sort guilds 1st by their server preference (pvp server or pve server so on and so on), then sort guilds onto the same server as their allies and advasaries.
Yes phase 3 is a little tricky because there will be tons of guilds linked by the advasaries and allies link and there is a chance an ally might not make it on the same servers.
And this is why the prerequisites ar present. So that Bioware can cut out the guilds that were created "just for fun" and only have to worry about the guilds that are guaranteeed to at least play the first month.
amazing how many people can comment on this without actually READING the original post. Thanks to the guy who speculated on actual guild numbers, I'm guessing about 3-5k ACTUAL guilds are signed up & will be playing which is still a very large number.
As for the application process of guilds that was mentioned- I don't understand....
If you can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes filling out an application explaining what type of gamer you are & your past experience why would a guild want to waste their time on you? If you want to just randomly join a group of people that you nothing about & vice versa isn't it basically just a pug & not truly a guild? I get it, filling out a form of your personal history is a pain in the butt but no decent guild wants to take a chance on a random who might ninja loot, never log on for events, have a bad attitude, be a 10 year old kid, etc....
Cool or not, there's still something wrong with forcing people to pay for a game upfront like this. (4 people in the guild need to preorder to set this up)
This is only working for them because they have Star Wars attached to the title. They haven't even gone to closed beta or have a release date yet..
Tactics like this concern me. Is the well running dry and are they required to get some $$ asap??
If 26K guilds is correct.
26000 x 4 pre orders x ~$50 = $5,200,000
That's a lot of scratch for not a lot of game.
First off they have tons of content and second the costed at least 100 million to 500 million dollars to make I don't think that 5 million would be much to ask.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I remember a time when we didn't have guilds in the games until well into the games' runs.
I remember when you used to hang around, team up, and get to know interesting characters that would really fit into what your guild was about.
And I remember when the guilds were about something, usually tied up into the lore, and not about the pragmatic concerns like "PvP" or "PvE" or "RP."
I recall a time when we didn't even have anything like "commitment levels" or "voicechat required." Fact was, nobody really knew much of anything about the people who were in our guilds back then. Nobody really felt the need to ask.
Some may think we didn't take things seriously back then, but you'd be wrong. We took the game seriously and our places within it seriously. We took the roleplay environment seriously. So seriously, in fact, that we didn't want the guild to get in the way of all that.
We don't take things like that seriously anymore. We take different things seriously, like guild membership, PvE prowress, PvP prowress, Ventrillo prowress, and ladders and ranking prowress. So seriously, in fact, that the guilds are up even before the game...probably because, in today's gaming environment, the guilds are more important to the players today than the games are.
I don't blame SW:TOR for doing this. They want uberguilds because they can provide a lot of ready customers with a minimum of effort. And for those cross-game guilds that can marshal hundreds of members to whatever game supports their needs, this is good for them too.
But that's because today's game, today's guild, and today's player is just so much different.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Today's games are much more fast-paced than before. I'm not saying it's better, but there it is. But part of that is also that a player tends to have objectives and quests that pull them through the content and game world. There seems to be scarce time for the random socialization of previous game. But then, maybe that's where guilds come in. What functions like this one offer is a chance for groups of friends to create their guilds and groups before hand, allowing them to resume their previous social circles, while also giving them a chance to expand that based on their chosen game-play style.
Have things changed? Drastically. Is it bad? Being an older gamer, I'll admit it has made certain aspects more difficult, but when all is said and done, I think the majority of gamers have gotten as much benefit from it as loss. Trade-offs. That's all.
Cool or not, there's still something wrong with forcing people to pay for a game upfront like this. (4 people in the guild need to preorder to set this up)
This is only working for them because they have Star Wars attached to the title. They haven't even gone to closed beta or have a release date yet..
Tactics like this concern me. Is the well running dry and are they required to get some $$ asap??
If 26K guilds is correct.
26000 x 4 pre orders x ~$50 = $5,200,000
That's a lot of scratch for not a lot of game.
Why does everything have to be the result of corporate greed? The reason for the pre order's requirement may just be so BWdoesn;t have to import 100,000 guilds into the game when 50,000 of them won;t even play the game. Having 4 people pre order the game almost insures that guild will be created after the port.
I'm glad the article came out becuase I never thought of the population balancing that could take place even before teh launch.
Bioware benefits with pre-orders, advertisement, and able to balance some of the population at launch. Players benefit by being able to create guilds, have a place jsut for them to recruit and talk about waht they personally want to do in the game, and have one more tool to use while waiting for launch.
This program is win for everyone involved. And any complaints against this is just proof no matter what game makers do, some people will never be happy.
I would say don't preorder if your so angry about them asking for money up front?
5.2 Million dollars doesnt even begin to put a dent in the amount of money they have invested in this game. They have spent hundred of millions just on voice actors.
Needless to say I fully support them asking for preorders as I don't want a bunch of rubbish names and guilds being imported, as well as some guy who made 100 forum accounts to reserve 100 different names, yet he doesn't even play. That would totally ruin guild and communities in the game.
Comments
This is a nice marketing strategy by BW. The people who are joining guilds now and pre-ordering the game were likely going to do so anyway, without this feature in place.
What I am concerned about is whether or not this leads to the ridiculous "guild application" that has become notorious in WoW guilds. It would not be suprising, considering that with its similarities to WoW, this game will attract current and former Blizzard customers, who will likely use the same process. I don't know why anyone would want to "apply" for a position in anything that is supposed to be part of a leisure activity, but it happens frequently in "L33T" guilds.
If you thought some of the people running guilds in WoW that use this method were D.B.'s, wait until you have to fill out an application for a game that hasn't even released yet.
Nice Kotor 3 been waiting for this.
I think this is a great idea myself. It is something I have asked for in other game forums prelaunch. While I will not be playing this game for a variety of other reasons I give Kudos to the devs on this feature. For me I always like to join a guild but I have an odd playtime and sometimes find it difficult to find groups of players with the same playtime that I have. Having the ability to search out a bunch of guilds prelaunch to find something I like I find to be very nice and the fact the guilds go into the game complete is a nice touch.
awesome
so people had to pre-order ?
letsee what happens when packets with unique items and stuff,collectors editions,sith megaboom,jedi dark super edition pre-orders comes out .
Generation P
the pre ordering only applies to having the guild imported from the site to the game for launch. all other functions of it are free and you can still go in and make a guild after launch and have access to the guild headquarters. one of the reasons for the pre-ordering is so they are importing guilds they know are going to be used and not just every guild thats made because many of them likely won't be.
The guild creation on site will be taken down once the game is live. You have to do everything in-game after that.
I have no problems with the feature... in fact it's a good initiative if you want to balance server populations... we all know how 2 faction games can have pop balance probs
But honestly... you don't force guilds to pick a server type before you explain what those type's rulesets are... like how they deal with level differences... if there's a tier system... if there are any "safe zones" on PvP servers... if PvE servers have auto-flag "PvP lakes" or if it's all optional flag.
You might have lots of guild re-rolls if things are very different from expected.... and then many people signed up in "defunct" guilds.
I mean if after few months i can buy swtor box including full jedi costume etc,and people who pre-ordered yesterday didnt have that option.
Generation P
Nice feature! We´re making some progress towards the Go Live!!
We are Phalanx, the biggest SWG (and now SWTOR) Brazilian guild:
http://www.swtor.com/guilds/4159/phalanx
- Branco -
LOTRO
Captain from House of Telperion
@Landroval
Nice way to make people who aren't interested in being part of a guild feel like second-class citizens.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
I was about to write something similar when i saw your post. I fail to grasp how are people out there still supporting SOE. After all the misshaps and after SOE %#%^&'ing up with every single MMO they where involved in. I also have the feeling that a number of SWG vets are posting here seeking even minor reasons to bash Bioware. People, the dinosaurs have long ago become extinct. It was nice while it lasted but please go die your digital deaths somewhere else. SWG forums are a good place for this purpose.
they have no versions avaible for preview at this time. bioware doesnt recoginize pre-orders being taken now by places like gamestop because they havent announced a release date.
this was posted by the community manager in charge of guilds:
DavidBass Guild Hall -> Phase 3 - Deployment (pre-order issue)
We have not announced our pre-order details yet, however here's the basic idea - all pre-orders will have a code that you will enter on the site to confirm your pre-order, and that's how we'll know who has and has not pre-ordered.
We'll give you all the information you need regarding pre-orders once the time comes, so don't worry too much about it for now.
and this is from the head community manager:
StephenReid
Joined: Oct 2010
03.10.2011 , 12:30 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dejoule
Will I be able to use my preorder from Gamestop to count as one of the four pre-orders needed for guild deployment, or do the preorders have to be done through Bioware/EA?
Any pre-orders taken from retailers right now are not 'official' pre-orders from our perspective, because you haven't received a pre-order code.
We'll be working with retailers to deal with early pre-orders like yours. Please understand however, we cannot guarantee anything, as we're not the retailer.
Regardless, 'official' pre-orders (ie, those with codes) will be available from a variety of sources (which we'll announce along with the pre-order program).
Hence the reason for "prerequisites" for your guild to be imported at launch. Also makes sense that guilds are filled with people that will actually play the game at launch, so thats why we see that 4 guildies will be required to pre order the game.
Why does everything have to be the result of corporate greed? The reason for the pre order's requirement may just be so BWdoesn;t have to import 100,000 guilds into the game when 50,000 of them won;t even play the game. Having 4 people pre order the game almost insures that guild will be created after the port.
I'm glad the article came out becuase I never thought of the population balancing that could take place even before teh launch.
Bioware benefits with pre-orders, advertisement, and able to balance some of the population at launch. Players benefit by being able to create guilds, have a place jsut for them to recruit and talk about waht they personally want to do in the game, and have one more tool to use while waiting for launch.
This program is win for everyone involved. And any complaints against this is just proof no matter what game makers do, some people will never be happy.
Can we make this clear... nobody is rpe ordering the game. ( at least not officially yet).
This guild hall page has 3 phases. We are only at phase one, which is guild creation. Phase 1 means anybody can create a guild and secure a guild name. This phase does NOT require a preorder. You basically create a guild, add members, and essentialy create your own guild page on SWTOR's site.
Next is Phase 2 - alignment. This is where you pick a side and can pick other guilds as allies and advasaries. Say if you ahve a republic guild you can pick some other republic guilds as allies and some other imperial guilds as advasaries. This means when Bioware picks which guilds go on which servers the preference will be that your allies and advasaries will all be on the same server. Again, this phases does NOT require pre orders.
Next is Phase three - importing of the guilds. This is launch time. Just beofre launch Bioware will have to sort guilds 1st by their server preference (pvp server or pve server so on and so on), then sort guilds onto the same server as their allies and advasaries.
Yes phase 3 is a little tricky because there will be tons of guilds linked by the advasaries and allies link and there is a chance an ally might not make it on the same servers.
And this is why the prerequisites ar present. So that Bioware can cut out the guilds that were created "just for fun" and only have to worry about the guilds that are guaranteeed to at least play the first month.
How so?
amazing how many people can comment on this without actually READING the original post. Thanks to the guy who speculated on actual guild numbers, I'm guessing about 3-5k ACTUAL guilds are signed up & will be playing which is still a very large number.
As for the application process of guilds that was mentioned- I don't understand....
If you can't be bothered to spend 5 minutes filling out an application explaining what type of gamer you are & your past experience why would a guild want to waste their time on you? If you want to just randomly join a group of people that you nothing about & vice versa isn't it basically just a pug & not truly a guild? I get it, filling out a form of your personal history is a pain in the butt but no decent guild wants to take a chance on a random who might ninja loot, never log on for events, have a bad attitude, be a 10 year old kid, etc....
Lol...
Guild Headquarters= NOT WORKING
Danish SWTOR community!
www.SWTOR.dk
until i get to play the game or beta test it or whatever pretty sure i wont commit me and my guild to as game that so far is nothign but vaporware.
Well sony did this. Well sony did that. Quit comparing. Thats really annoying
First off they have tons of content and second the costed at least 100 million to 500 million dollars to make I don't think that 5 million would be much to ask.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I remember a time when we didn't have guilds in the games until well into the games' runs.
I remember when you used to hang around, team up, and get to know interesting characters that would really fit into what your guild was about.
And I remember when the guilds were about something, usually tied up into the lore, and not about the pragmatic concerns like "PvP" or "PvE" or "RP."
I recall a time when we didn't even have anything like "commitment levels" or "voicechat required." Fact was, nobody really knew much of anything about the people who were in our guilds back then. Nobody really felt the need to ask.
Some may think we didn't take things seriously back then, but you'd be wrong. We took the game seriously and our places within it seriously. We took the roleplay environment seriously. So seriously, in fact, that we didn't want the guild to get in the way of all that.
We don't take things like that seriously anymore. We take different things seriously, like guild membership, PvE prowress, PvP prowress, Ventrillo prowress, and ladders and ranking prowress. So seriously, in fact, that the guilds are up even before the game...probably because, in today's gaming environment, the guilds are more important to the players today than the games are.
I don't blame SW:TOR for doing this. They want uberguilds because they can provide a lot of ready customers with a minimum of effort. And for those cross-game guilds that can marshal hundreds of members to whatever game supports their needs, this is good for them too.
But that's because today's game, today's guild, and today's player is just so much different.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Today's games are much more fast-paced than before. I'm not saying it's better, but there it is. But part of that is also that a player tends to have objectives and quests that pull them through the content and game world. There seems to be scarce time for the random socialization of previous game. But then, maybe that's where guilds come in.
What functions like this one offer is a chance for groups of friends to create their guilds and groups before hand, allowing them to resume their previous social circles, while also giving them a chance to expand that based on their chosen game-play style.
Have things changed? Drastically. Is it bad? Being an older gamer, I'll admit it has made certain aspects more difficult, but when all is said and done, I think the majority of gamers have gotten as much benefit from it as loss. Trade-offs. That's all.
May the Chaos forever bind you to it's glory.
I would say don't preorder if your so angry about them asking for money up front?
5.2 Million dollars doesnt even begin to put a dent in the amount of money they have invested in this game. They have spent hundred of millions just on voice actors.
Needless to say I fully support them asking for preorders as I don't want a bunch of rubbish names and guilds being imported, as well as some guy who made 100 forum accounts to reserve 100 different names, yet he doesn't even play. That would totally ruin guild and communities in the game.
Think about it.