Or at least that is what Craig Morrison and fellow Funcom peeps are hoping, because that is the next main feature being rolled out in Age of Conan. Basically, the idea is that everything you do as a player will be counted against your guild, hence you’re leveling the guild when playing the game. The system is called Guild Renown and it focuses on getting Renown points in three different areas:

• Valor, which is PvE stuff.
• Glory, which is PvP mini-games and similar.
• Artisan, which is garnered from crafting.

I wonder if this means we’ll have artisan focused guilds? That would be cool, make armor not war…

Anyway, the Renown level is calculated from these three, and there will be rankings so that guilds can compare and boast amongst each other. Naturally, there will be rankings in all these three niches, so that you can be that artisan super guild if you want to.

Rankings will be reset regularly, weekly is the idea right now, and there are status items to be won for the guild and participating members.

My initial reaction to this was “cool, but that’s more pressure from serious guild players”. Not so, at least not if you want to believe Morrison:

One area we have considered here is that we don’t want to have players feel ‘forced’ into merging guilds to compete for ranking placement. Thus, we will be making the ranking calculations only count the top X contributions from members in the ranking period (the value of X to be determined during testing). So let’s say we decide the contributing cap will be 50, then the top 50 contributors within the guild will be the ones whose efforts are counted for ranking purposes, even if you have 100 members. Please note that we plan for all members to be able to contribute to the Renown level, so larger guilds may level up quicker, but they won’t necessarily do better in the rankings – they might – but it is important that success in the rankings is down to effort, not just due to overwhelming numbers. With this, we hope that even small and medium-sized guilds will be able to make appearances in the rankings.

Sounds good.

Read the full Letter from the Game Director July 2009 here.