Guild Halls are coming soon to Player Housing (also, by the way, Guild Halls are going to be a thing)

In a recent round table interview with PC Gamer, Principal designer and World of Warcraft Player Housing lead Jesse Kurlancheek dropped a comment that sent our minds racing: “guild halls may go live relatively quickly.”

Record scratch. Guild Halls?

There is minimal real information about this feature yet, other than this semi-unofficial announcement. Holly Longdale says in the interview that a housing-specific roadmap will come just before Midnight launch. From some of the other features discussed within the longer interview, we can infer some information — and wildly speculate beyond that.

Confirmed in this interview is the timeline of the coming of Neighborhood Endeavors, a previously announced new feature. Endeavors will allow an alternative path to earning individual housing XP, but also unlocking Neighborhood Favor — a system previously discussed, but not yet seen. From what has been previously described, it appears to be some kind of renown-type system for your neighborhood that persists across Endeavors, one of the features it unlocks may be the guild halls.

How we speculate Guild Halls will be decorated

We have become rapidly accustomed to being able to build whatever our crafty little minds can come up with for our Player Housing from the pieces we have collected, but for Guild Halls, even the collection aspect can be tricky. One option is to unlock features over time by completing renown levels, and then decorating it more like the customization of Housing’s exterior appearance — choosing from a list of element specific options.

The Guild Halls feature is likely to leverage the planned co-decorating and co-ownership of houses mentioned by Ion in the interview. Co-decorating is a feature used in Final Fantasy XIV where players can ‘hire’ other players to decorate their houses for them. What isn’t clear is whose decor would be used in a co-decorating scenario. It is most likely that for a co-decorated house, the decor would come from the owner of the house’s decor catalog. For Guild Halls, maybe guild members will be able to donate their personal decor to decorate the space. Maybe the options will rotate with the current endeavor theme — on beta currently, endeavors last for 50 days before rotating to the next.

Maybe you can select from a catalog of bosses your guild has earned the guild raid achievement through clearing the instance, and use those for either specific appearance sets or decor pieces. There are other guild achievements for PVP and PVE content. Linking the decorating options to those achievements gives your guild some control over the types of decorations available to you, but disproportionately rewards older guilds with larger memberships. Many of those old achievements require 16 guild members to be present for the kill to count.

Another highly requested feature mentioned in the interview was linking access to neighborhood membership to guild rank, allowing guild masters to remove someone from a neighborhood without kicking them from the guild, or putting trial members in a rank where until they complete their trial they can’t claim a plot in the guild neighborhood. In the same way that you could allow officers to be a proxy for selecting an endeavor theme — it may be possible to restrict who can decorate the Guild Hall by rank.

Other features that might be fun in Guild Halls

The interview mentioned other communal activities and spaces being considered for Guild Neighborhoods. Some activities aligned more with the Role Playing community, such as entry-restricted events at the communal stage, haunted house style community events where visitors wander through player-run vignettes, or a race track around the neighborhood at ground level using the D.R.I.V.E. system. We definitely already have plenty of assets for a guild beach party and cookout.

As is obvious by the name, Guild Hall buildings will most likely will be restricted to guild neighborhoods only. There has been speculation as to where the Guild Halls might be located within the existing maps. One suggestion is one of the three sites under construction, scattered around the main town hub for both Horde and Alliance. The other popular option is the larger town hall type building in the town center of each map.

What would you want from a Guild Hall? Would you hang out in one?