The Daily Grind: Which MMO supports guilds the best?

i think any game with enough customization for the guilds.

wow lotro any of those with A respect to the members.

apart from a few other games where they are just cannon fodder in clan wars.

cant remember the names. been dizzy these days :O

The guild level advancement in World of Warcraft is fasinating without having a need for a guild hall. If people are prepared to pay a sub for the privilige.

I do like LOTRO kinships and kinship houses as well.

Kind of sad but alot of the games with the best guild systems/perks are not the most popular games out there. EQ2 comes to mind. Makes you wonder why the hot MMO's dont "borrow" more of this from the little guys.

IMO WoW does a great job supporting guilds. Yea, there isn't guild or personal housing, but you do have guild tabards and battle standards which let you represent your guild. Those are kind of "fun" things.

I like the huge guild bank with multiple tabs that allow you to set different permissions and the ability to see a log of deposits/withdraws. The guild perk that gives the guild extra 10% of looted gold by members is really cool, and allows guilds to do some neat things such as hold events with prizes and stuff.

I love how the game recognizes when 80% of a group is from your guild, and that ties into the guild achievement system. You also have the weekly "guild challenges" which rewards your guild for actually grouping up to do things like instances, raids, and battlegrounds.

But what's really great is the in-game event calendar. This makes setting up guild events so much easier, it's ridiculous. This is by far the best "guild perk" in the game. This should become a standard MMO feature. Also, the guild finder is a pretty great feature making advertising or searching for a guild easier. I'll take these kinds of things over more "fluffy" features like housing.

SWG and GW

EQ2 & aion

EQ2 has a little talked about feature that is really amazing. It's the guild page that people see before they've joined a guild. Other games simply provide a message that "you don't belong to a guild". EQ2 provides a listing of all the guilds that are currently recruiting along with information about each one's play style, what the guild has said they're looking for in recruits, and a direct way to contact each guild's currently-online recruiters.

The reason this is so amazing is that it allows prospective members to screen themselves, reducing the number of recruits who are poor fits. It also eliminates the need for guilds to randomly spam chat channels with recruitment messages.

I'm constantly amazed that other games haven't adopted this feature ages ago. As far as I know, it's been in game since launch, yet EQ2 is the only one I've seen with it.

Eve has best "guild" support.

Well that was just one feature of what EQ2 has for guilds. I brought it up because people don't often hear about it. Other features include guild advancement which unlocks rewards for both the guild and players. For example, some houses and mounts can only be purchased if you belong to a guild of appropriate level. There are also a wide variety of guild halls, up to and including a private island. Guilds can put crafting stations in their hall complete with supplier vendors and the like. There's also a very deep permissions system that I think is a step above WoW's.

I can't remember if there are guild achievements. I don't think so. But the game does notify guildmates when someone accomplishes something significant including earning guild status which contributes toward advancement.

At the end of the day, I feel that post-Cataclysm WoW and EQ2 are about tied in terms of their guild systems. Each has stand out items that the other lacks. Up until Cataclysm, there was no comparison. EQ2 won hands down.

@aurickle
That was supposed to be a response to "unverified"'s reply to my post. Sometimes Massively bugs out.

I was going to say EVE, but then I realised that you can't play EVE without guilds, so it's actually part of the gameplay, as opposed to most MMORPGs where you can be a lonesome wanderer and join guilds when you feel the need to settle down.

A Tale in the Desert. If only for the fact you can join more than one guild on a single character.

You can have a private guild with only yourself and a few best friends, another for neighbors, bigger ones for the general public or region, ones based on function or interest or a specific project. Ultimately, it provides an in-game social network fairly similar to Google Plus' Circles functionality.

I'm still waiting for more MMOs to cotton on to this, the closest approximations of this are various player-created global channels, but there's nothing like the word 'guild' and the perk of being able to use specific guild resources to make one treasure that sense of belonging to a group, versus a global channel where you just broadcast chat to whoever cares to listen.

Each guild and description can be looked up with an /info command by any player, and all the members seen. Vice versa, /info a character and you can see all the guilds they currently belong to. It's a more oldschool kind of accountability.

Since the game is also much about goods accumulation and use thereof, their guild rank functionality and privilege rights to use, pickup, destroy individual items/storages are also very customisable.

Chat channels in ATITD also save a certain amount of messages (within a buffer limit) regardless of whether the listener or speaker is currently offline. Thus they can and are used as in-game message boards for short memos to various people. It's a small thing, but it provides a bit of, how do I phrase this, persistent continuity - you and other people still exist in-game in some form even after logging out and are still part of that guild, even if your schedules don't meet - and an increased sense of belonging to a group.

A little bit of research has pleased me immensely. It looks like quite a number of newer MMOs have begun to develop or support the feature of remote guild chat - WoW in April of this year. It's probably existed in third party form in other MMOs before this, but I have no personal experience with EQ, DAoC or AC. My Age of Conan guild had this via a third party mod or bot of some kind, it was highly addictive to continue to keep in touch with a guild even out of game.

There's still a lot of things MMO developers can innovate with for guild and/or social network support, I'm quite keen to see what the next-gen MMOs come up with next.

How can anyone put Lotro in this list with the lack of Kinship updates in the last 3 years? Even housing in general is not well supported there.

I like all the features of SWG, EQ II, Eve Online, Guild Wars, and Age of Conan. As much as I hate how SOE will change live games one had to admit their development for guilds have been great. I haven't taken a look at the S. Korean designs for guilds. I really should since I love their world design.