I thought I would do something a little bit different for this update. Rather than keeping the update under wraps until it is ready to be released, I have decided to blog the major changes that will be arrive with the next SimpleMMO update.

V9.0 heavily focuses on guilds. Guilds are a huge part of SimpleMMO. It is essentially the backbone of the games community and is important for us to recognise the importance of this. A well built guild mechanic can increase the interaction between the community, give the game more meaningful depth, and increase the competitiveness between players and groups. Because of this, I have worked tirelessly over the last few months overhauling the entire guild feature. The entire feature was essentially scrapped and re-written from the ground up. It was honestly a massive pain in the arse. My eyes are sore. My fingers are red and I swear last night I had a dream about being in a guild battle. It’s the most complicated area of SimpleMMO because the guilds module has its fingers dipped within almost every corner of the game. By doing this rewrite, I am able to expand upon the guild module and add more exciting features to it.

Let’s cover some of them that will appear in v9.0.

Guild Power

Introducing “Guild Power Level”. Guild power is a seperate type of guild level that was heavily inspired by Discords “boost” mechanism. This feature might be a bit complicated to wrap your head around at first but it is quite simple. I’ll try to break it down as simple as I can.

• A guild has a power level of 1 to 5.
• This power level is determined by how many Power Points the guild has. For example, a power level of 5 requires 60 power points.
• A guild can have an infinite amount of power points but level 5 is the highest power level.
• Each power level brings new bonuses to the guild such as increasing the member cap, additional armoury slots, and more.
• Power points can be achieved from three ways: guild wars, completing guild tasks, and buying them outright with diamonds.
• Every day, a guild loses a single power point. This is to ensure that the guild works hard to maintain or exceed their current power level.

Power Level*	Bonuses*
1	XXX amount of guild members +2% bonus exp and gold per travelling member 500 armoury items
2	XXX amount of guild members + 2.3% exp and gold bonus per travelling member 1,000 armoury items
3	XXX amount of guild members +2.5% exp and gold bonus per travelling member 5,000 armoury items Change guild icon
4	XXX amount of guild members +2.7% exp and gold bonus per travelling member 20,000 armoury items Change guild background
5	XXX amount of guild members +3% exp and gold bonus per travelling member 1,000,000 armoury items. Gradient guild tag Gradient guild name

Guild Levels and Experience

Guilds now have a level that is dependent on the amount of experience that it has. Levels are capped at 100.

All existing EXP will be reset on the new update. However, do not worry! The guilds current EXP will be archived and it will be listed within a “legacy hall of fame”. This hall of fame will be a leader board of the top 50 guilds with the highest EXP (before the reset). It will remain there forever without change so now there is an incentive to get as much EXP as possible.

Legacy guild EXP can be converted to “power points”. All guilds created before v9.0 will be eligible for free power points.

Gradient guild name and tag

As you may have noticed from the table above, you can now apply a gradient to both the guild name and the guild tag. This change requires a power level of 5. If the guild drops a level, then the guild will lose the gradient.

Change guild icon

A guild leader can now change the guilds icon to a sprite that they have within their collection. The guild needs to have at least a power level of 3 to do this. It will cost 1 power point to make a change.

Change backgrounds

A guild leader can now change the guilds background to a background that they have within their collection. The guild needs to have at least a power level of 3 to do this. It will cost 1 power point to make a change.

Guild Activity

Woohoo! Finally! A much needed (and requested) feature. You can now view the activity feed to see how the members are contributing to the guild. You can also see how much EXP has been gained from a particular activity (such as PvP)

Location Raiding

A guild can choose to raid a particular location. When a raid has been activated, every NPC kill and step that a member takes will contribute to the guilds experience points. Raiding a location costs 1 power point and lasts for 60 minutes*.

Guild Only Leaderboards

This is basically the public leader boards but it has been filtered to only include the guild members. It’s quite handy if you want to see how other guilds members are performing.

Guild Armoury

Players are now able to submit items to the guild armoury. Any member within the guild can the request any amount of items from the armoury and the guild leader can accept or reject the request. This feature is still a bit bare-bones at the moment, however I have plans to enable the ability for leaders to send items directly from the armoury.

New guild design

Oh yes! Looks cool doesn’t it? I totally didn’t steal this design from the player profile page.

Guild wars

Guild wars finally have a meaning! Now, a guild can actually win a war rather than having it go on forever. The winner will get EXP and power points for their effort. The loser will lose EXP and power points just to make things interesting. The winner is the guild that reaches 1,000 kills first (or if a guild surrenders).

You are now able to inspect each guild war to get a break down on who is winning. This page is still fairly basic at the moment but I have plans to expand it in the future.

Guild tasks

Guild tasks work in a very similar way to your daily tasks. However, there are a few differences:

• They need to be manually activated by the guild leader.
• Activating a task costs XXX amount of gold.
• If the guild fails at completing a task, then the guild will lose power points.

The guild leader can select from a list of many different types of tasks. From stepping, to PvP. Each task has a different requirement and also a different time limit. Some tasks may give you a long time to complete it but your reward will be low. Other tasks may require the guild to complete it within a short amount of time but the reward will be higher. It is up to the guild leader to determine what is the most suitable.

Mass messaging

The guild leader can send a mass message to all of the members. It’s quite handy if the leader is holding an event.

That’s all cool… but what else?

While I haven’t listed all of the new features within this update, the above definitely covers the grand majority. Guilds are something that I wish to expand upon even further but due to time constraints (and burn-out), I have decided to put the remaining features on hold.

Frequently asked questions (probably)

Still no guild roles? Why?

Read “That’s all cool… but what else?”.

Can you upload a custom icon to the guild?

No – not at the moment. However this may change in the future.

When will this be released?

v9.0 should be released towards the end of March once everything has been finalised.

* Disclaimer: All values listed both asterisked or otherwise are subject to change upon release.