Hi everyone! Below are some questions we received during the in-person Community Roundtable session at the ESO 10-Year Celebration Event in April that we promised to follow up with answers. We hope you find these answers helpful!
Q: Has there been any consideration for guild mounts that show off the guild tabard in some way? (Maybe a raised banner?) What would that take?
A: We love this idea and hear it often from our many players in guilds. We’ve talked about this internally over the years as well. It’s one of those things that is quite a bit trickier on the technical side than it sounds due to how guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded, players being able to be in five guilds, etc. Know that we are aware of the desire for this as a guild feature.
Q: Have there been any discussions about integrated voice chat for PC/Mac, even if just to coordinate for instanced group content? Sometimes people don’t want to install new apps to talk with each other and instead opt to communicate via in-game chat. This is especially painful for pick-up groups.
A: While many players do opt to use Discord or other external voice chat solutions, we understand the pick-up group communication pain point. We’ve discussed integrated voice chat for PC/Mac servers and while it’s not a hard “No, never”, this is another one that requires a significant technical investment and isn’t something we currently have on the roadmap.
Q: What happens to guilds if the guild leader passes away? What is the official process for passing on the role of guild leader?
A: If a guild leader becomes inactive for at least 60 days, for any reason, someone from the guild can contact Customer Support to request transfer of the guild leader role. From there, we look to transfer the role of guild leader to the person who meets the following criteria:
- Active within the last 60 days
- A member of the next highest rank in the guild (one of the guild’s existing “officers”)
- The person who has been in the guild the longest, if everyone else is the same guild rank
- Not already the leader of another guild
We use this specific ranking system because it is fair, neutral, and allows us to be consistent. It also helps us minimize situations where guild leadership is stolen, passed to a newer member of the guild, etc. Once guild leadership is transferred, that person is welcome to pass it to someone else in the guild if they wish.
While it is a bit more involved, there is also a process in place if someone wants or needs to claim a deceased family member’s account. This process is in accordance with similar laws related to what happens to online accounts when someone passes away.
Q: Will we ever get proper guild halls in ESO?
A: We love the idea of guild halls in ESO and recognize that our community has asked for them since the game launched. We have had many internal conversations about them over the years. The current challenge is the necessary caps. Much like the item limit caps in player housing, there is also a limit to how many characters can simultaneously be in a player home (it’s 25). As with items, these caps are in place to ensure that players on lower spec machines don’t encounter significant performance issues while in player homes.
When we’ve asked ourselves in the past if a 25-person cap would feel good for a guild hall, especially if it’s a guild of 500 active players, the answer has always been no. It’s not the kind of guild hall experience we’d want to give you. So, while the idea of guild halls isn’t completely off the table, it’s important to us that we find a solution that allows us to do it right, and support the ability to have more than 25 simultaneous players in the guild hall.
Q: Do you have any plans for improved guild tools in ESO?
A: While we don’t have any specific plans to share currently, there are many things on our backlog that we’d love to do with ESO’s guild system and the related tools. Over the years, we’ve collated pages of ideas from you, our community, as well as from internal suggestions.
We do want to improve guilds, in general, and the tools that players use to run them. As with anything we add to ESO, it all comes down to time and resources, determining what will have the greatest positive impact for our players, and prioritizing against all the other items on our game features and improvements backlog.
Please keep the suggestions and ideas coming, though. We do want to hear them!
Q: Will we ever get the ability to hide our guild tabard, like we can hide helms?
A: This is another request that has come up often over the years. We understand how important this is to some of our players, especially our roleplay and ESO fashion enthusiasts! Like the suggestion for guild heraldry on mounts, this is something we do have on our backlog and want to improve the overall experience. It’s also not as simple as turning off the visibility of armor pieces such helms and shoulders, for example, due to how our guild tabards and overhead guild nameplates are coded on the back-end.
Q: You all should send out surveys to guilds to get feedback about guild tools and what quality-of-life guild features players want. Would you consider that?
A: Great idea! Yes, we will talk with our amazing Research team about creating a guild-focused survey. Thank you for the suggestion!
One thing you all can do to help us is ask your guild members to consider opting into getting emails from us here. While we can share links to surveys on our social media channels, forums, and in Discord, being able to email it to more players who are in guilds would greatly help us hit a much broader and more diverse population.
Q: Could we get a solution for the guild MOTD text getting bumped/interrupted by automated game messages when typing it up? It’s so frustrating when that happens!
A: Thank you for sharing this with us! We agree that isn’t a great experience. We’ve passed this along to our UX and QA teams for investigation.
Q: Will we ever get Steam achievements for ESO?
A: Steam achievements require a separate (and additional) process from achievements on any other platform. Due to this, we have no current plans to add Steam achievements for ESO.
Q: We’d like to be able to get empty plots of existing player houses, or the ability to “remove” the house from the plot. Is that something you might consider?
A: Interesting suggestion! Historically, the empty plots aren’t nearly as popular as the houses; that said, we will pass this suggestion along to the Housing team for consideration. Due to how we build out the housing spaces, it is unfortunately not as simple as just “removing” the house from an existing space. Even existing player housing spaces would require additional world building where the house is/was.