Characters part of the same guild

OlMurraniKasale

OlMurraniKasale

Krytan Explorer

Join Date: Jul 2006

Seattle

Zaishen Order

Rt/

Hi folks,

The moderator for the questions forum told me to post my question here - I guess they think it will cause a discussion and speculation, which I hope isn't true - I'm hoping just for the correct answer.

Do you know why all of my characters must be in the same guild? I created a guild under one character, but want another character doing something else. Of course, he's part of that created guild too.

So, hopefully there is a short answer that ANet has answered already somewhere/somewhen. Anyone know?

Lonesamurai

Lonesamurai

Furnace Stoker

Join Date: Apr 2006

Cheltenham, Glos, UK

Wolf Pack Samurai [WPS]

R/A

Honestly? thank god they are all in the same guild, not only that, but thank hell itself that each person only takes up one guild slot and no matter what character they are on takes only one slot compared to some games *Cough*WoW*Cough*

My WoW guild has 28 members, and i already know that 17 of those are the same people with all their multiple characters, one even has 7 characters already...

Brett Kuntz

Brett Kuntz

Core Guru

Join Date: Feb 2005

Your account joins a Guild, not your individual characters. It's to prevent you from messing with Guild related things.

Bankai

Bankai

Desert Nomad

Join Date: Sep 2006

Bubblegum Dragons

Mo/E

It's because of PvP characters. It's useless to be in a guild and have to be invited for every new PvP character you make to play gvg.

Zahr Dalsk

Grotto Attendant

Join Date: Aug 2007

Canada

It's because having your characters spread out in multiple guilds would be stupid. They're all you. You don't belong to multiple guilds.

The only place where I can see separate guilds per character being useful is on shared accounts. Which are a minority.

free_fall

free_fall

Wilds Pathfinder

Join Date: Oct 2005

That's just the way it works.

I'm no programmer but I'd venture to guess that it's to keep the portion of the game database involved in tracking guild membership as streamlined as possible.

Look at it his way:

Let's say there are 2 million unique accts. Assuming every acct belongs to a guild, that's 2 million entries in the guild membership database.

Now, assuming each of those accounts consists of a single campaign - i.e. 4 character slots - allowing different characters to belong to different guilds would potentially increase that database to 8 million entries.

Tying a 2nd campaign to your acct and/or buying additional char slots (I have 12 char slots on each of my accts, for example) would increase the size of the database exponentially. Instead of 2 million entries in the table, you could be seeing scores of millions.

By tying 1 acct to 1 guild, when you use the "Select Character" option to change chars, the game doesn't (even) need to send a call to the guild database table.

CyberNigma

Jungle Guide

Join Date: Jan 2006

San Antonio, TX

W/R

Look at the bright side. Your account is what ties you to the guild and to the friends list. I play with several people in WoW. They have to have each character added to the guild AND I have to add each of their characters to my friends list (filling it up) if we want to keep talking to each other in-game (and nobody else uses xFire but me it seems). It's very good. If you don't want to show up in your guild list then you can set yourself to offline, though they may still know you're online by looking at the last time on (sometimes bugs).

Neither way is perfect as some people will like one way or another. I prefer one account per friends list and guild list. It was very convenient. On WoW there are some people that like to hide other characters and that's ok. Here it's more difficult to do. I guess the solution would be to allow a Show as Offline box when you log on so you are always shown as offline instead of having to switch your status.

arcady

arcady

Wilds Pathfinder

Join Date: May 2006

San Francisco native

Mo/P

I suppose there's a good and bad side to it.

On the good - easy tracking of friends and instant add of all alts into your guild.

On the bad side you can't have an 'escape' character - you can't hide out when you just want to be alone for a while. You can't be a part of several guilds that might interest you - such as some characters in a PvE guild and others in PvP.

WoW does guilds by character, so you have to track down an officer with each alt you make and get it added. On the other hand, if you want to have a guild for a couple of friends to hang out on, and another guild to play PvE, with a third that is a ranked PvP that you take part in - in WoW you can do this.

City of Heroes does guilds by character, but you have a global chat handle. You can be in all those separate guilds, but it you're hanging out on a different guild on an alt or a different server in order to relax for a bit from busy guild politics or just to not have to deal with chat for a while, that global chat handle gives you away... You could say this results in the detriments of both of the other two games.