Guild quests

Bliss wrote me with an interesting idea on a possible social engineering feature for World of Warcraft guilds: Guild quests

A recent post you made regarding WoW's future made me wonder if you had any thoughts or suggestions as to what could be done, within the current construct of the game, to increase social engineering. Guild housing, I'm sure, has its own series of difficulties and obstacles for being realized, and although it would be fun to see and have a common "room" to hearth back to with my fellow guildmates after a raid, it doesn't strike me as something that would truly foster a sense of connectedness with them. It would just be a common place that I might run into them from time-to-time rather than outside of Karazhan for instance.

I thought recently that a Guild Master might be able to specify a daily quest for items that the guild bank was needing - similar to the gathering of materials for the opening of the AQ gates. He/She might have an interface that allows choosing of various materials and a guild "butler" NPC might have the quest for the day. The Guild Master says, "Hey - we could really use some Felweed for potions/elixirs/flasks," so they can set a daily quest for collecting these materials...perhaps no more than 2-3 per day so as to not exploit easy questing. Gold payout would be less than a standard daily quest, but would still count towards the limit that a character could do in a particular day. I know that lower level characters don't have access to standard daily quests until max level, but this could be allowed giving lower levels the ability to contribute if they have the gold even; I don't know, just thinking out loud here. :P

Interesting idea in principle, but the devil as always is in the details: World of Warcraft doesn't have a mechanism to count the actual *gathering* of Felweed as a quest item, it can only see that you received it. Thus if there is a quest that gives lets say 5 gold for delivering 10 Felweed to the guild bank, there isn't anything that would prevent all guild members to take the quest, take the 10 Felweed out of the guild bank, hand in the quest, thereby putting the same 10 Felweed back into the guild bank and getting their 5 gold reward. So a quest like that would just hand out free gold to all guild members. To work at all, the quest would need to actually destroy the Felweed, which not only is against the idea of gathering something for the guild, but also then results in people just looking whether 10 Felweed are better sold at the AH or better handed in as quest item.

So let's try to design a better form of guild quest for better guild social engineering. First of all we need a common project in which the guild as a whole would be interested. That could be enlarging or decorating the guild hall, or it could be something more useful. As we started with a proposal to collect herbs, lets stick to that general theme: Lets design a guild quest that adds a temporary potion dispenser to the guild hall. The potion dispenser would hand out a limited number of flasks of various levels, from low- to mid-level flasks useful for soloing, to high-level flasks useful for raiding. Once it is operational, every guild member could use it to get 1 flask of his choice, which would be soulbound. After 3 days the dispenser would disappear, and the quest could be restarted to build the next one. To build the potion dispenser would require a large number of special herbs. These herbs would be quest items, that is soulbound, and could only be found by herbalists as an added "loot" item when "opening" a herb resource node. And, now comes the tricky part, the quest herbs can only be found in herbs in zones that correspond roughly to the level of the character gathering them. That is a level 5 guild member herbalist would be able to find such quest herbs while gathering Peacebloom in Elwynn Forest, but a level 70 guild member wouldn't find any quest herbs in the same Peaceblooms, he would need to gather Felweed in Outland to find them. Thus every herbalist in the guild could participate equally by doing something appropriate for his character level, and have a positive contribution to something that helps the whole guild. Of course that is just one example, you'd need to have other guild quests for the other gathering professions, and something involving killing mobs for the non-gatherers. But the principle should be similar: you only get quest items by killing mobs that are at least green to you, but a low-level guild member can get the same quest item from a low-level mob that the high-level guild member can get from the high-level mob. The reward is some added feature to the common guild hall which also helps all guild members equally regardless of level.

The general idea behind features like this is that guilds should have a common purpose. Right now that isn't the case in World of Warcraft, where the only common purpose appears to be guild chat and raiding, with everybody below the level cap and a certain gear level unable to participate. I would so love to take all the World of Warcraft developers, lock them in a room, and force them to play A Tale in the Desert for a month. They could learn a lot about social engineering from that game, even if it probable has less players than a single WoW server.