This is why, after some research, our guild decided to kick in for a personal Tatooine stronghold. Our guild is small and we just co-designed the rooms. Members contributed decorations directly to the "owner" and collectively the guild "decorated" the stronghold. Less cost, less hassle and everyone got what they wanted.

Yes, unless you have some kind of major disagreement about decorating, it works really well to have one designated decorator and have everybody else kick in funds / prefabs / decorations. I almost feel like it's a more social thing at that point, like it involves planning and communicating, not just different people logging on at different times and silently doing whatever...

 

I also wanted to say, I hadn't really considered the fact that the 50-person limit in strongholds also applies to the guild ones, and that a very large guild would have trouble meeting up in there. So they're a bad deal for small guilds because of the cost and the difficulty inviting outside people, and a bad deal for big guilds because they can't even fit in there. If you have a guild with exactly 50 active members you might enjoy a guild stronghold!

I think Guild Headquarters and Flagships could use some improvements. That being said I'm grateful for both. If you keep positive about it, you can use both to bring your guild together. Theres never been a goal like this for guilds before ingame. You'll have to RP it up though and keep the positivity going.

 

We've got rooms for GMs on the back of the crew deck and rooms for officers on the tatooine headquarters. We've got a beautiful garden room on tatooine by one of our officers that everyone in the guild donated plants and items for. I keep a wishlist on our facebook page with decos we'd like. I also get people involved in which expansion we're getting next. We have 6-12 people attend any door opening on the ship and there is always fireworks.

 

Headquarters and ships are not perfect, but they are what you make them out to be. Make them a big awesome deal and they will be.

My guild has slowly been rebuilding our base in personal stronghold form, and we've had plenty of cross-faction alts coming and going. I figured it's not a bad time to bump this old thread.

You've raised a lot of important issues about the guild strongholds/ships lacking functions of personal strongholds, however you keep forgetting 1 very important thing. Guild stronghold/ship along with its decorations is owned by the guild subject, not by any individual player account.

 

With guild strongholds/ships, if the GM steps down/gets sick/is unable to play anymore for any serious or non-serious (guild drama/split) reason, the stronghold/ship and the decorations remain with the guild, as does the possibility of decorating at all in the first place. But if the person who is the actual owner of a personal stronghold you're using now for entire guild stops playing for some reason, it's over. You won't add any more decorations nor make any changes, the stronghold will not appear in Public Listing ever again. The owner wouldn't transfer his gold key to someone else even if he wanted to.

 

So while the guild strongholds/ships have sme serious disadvantages compared to personal strongholds, their undeniable advantage is that they belong to the guild itself and are immune player (in)activity and departures from the game.

Edited November 18, 2014 by Pietrastor

That goes both ways, though.

 

If the guild disbands, everybody loses everything. If the guild leader gets pissed off he can kick out a bunch of people who helped build it, and they lose everything. Even if the guild doesn't disband or blow up, it could die down and a lot of people could decide to move to a more active guild (pretty common occurrence in any MMO), and again they're giving up access to the stronghold they helped to build.

 

If the person who possesses the unofficial stronghold quits, anybody with a key can still hang out there indefinitely and possibly invite others. Unless the owner freaks out and un-decorates it, it will still be just how it was, forever.

 

The absolute worst case scenario is that the guild needs to start over with a new stronghold, but building the same personal one twice still ends up being a fraction of the cost of building the guild version once.

 

These are all "what if" scenarios anyway, but my point is that guild strongholds are not at all immune to these problems! The human element will always be a risk.

 

The other great thing about personal strongholds though... is you can totally build your own. They're very attainable. That means you always have a backup plan as long as there's one player left alive. The guild's favorite hangout goes dark? Invite everybody to your place. Easy fix.

Our tiny little guild considered buying a stronghold but ended up just having the gm buy tattoine, all of us contributed decorations and we decorated by committee. Each member set up their "room" and we collaborated on common areas.

Everyone has a key and it's publicly listed. So long as everyone cooperates, this works well, particularly for smaller guilds.

 

Check out Velara's Galactic Stronghold on Shadowlands R side.