Balancing guilds with solo play

I dislike any system where the game has any role in mandating how much someone is hired for and in what way they are 'contracted'.

But I come from a 'main' game where there are no 'Guilds' and the only benefit you get from grouping together in the equivalent way is an ingame chat channel.

Guilds are a convenient way for games to offer ease of communication and management to people. Therefore I think any system that is built to help 'players who don't want to join guilds' must be convenient for both sides.

I don't view a full mercenary system as MORE convenient for both sides.

And as an addition to what Penguin said, there'll definitely be solo-friendly guilds that will be completely fine with you running on your own or with your friends and just support you in whatever ways the guild can. I know this for sure because that'll be my guild in my node and I'm sure as hell I'm not the only one who'd want to support solos.

MMOs are meant to be played in a company and not alone. There's way better games for solo or limited multiplayer gameplay, so why turn the only genre that supports huge groups of people working together towards one goal with adding mechanics and features that splinter that group into singular characters.

We have not received permission from derp to share the quoted post.

We have not received permission from CROW3 to share the quoted post.

And I've known a ton of guild that never made their members do anything they didn't want. What they did do is help out each other way faster than you would've gotten help from some rando in chat.

Some's PKing you while you're out and about alone? Ask someone in the guild to help out. You're having problems crafting smth? Ask someone in the guild to help. You wanna fight some small boss? Same shit. All it takes is just finding a guild that'll be good for your playstyle.

We have not received permission from derp to share the quoted post.

The whole game will be group-balanced. Most likely you won't enjoy 1v1 pvp because there'll be classes that will annihilate you even w/o guild skills.

We have not received permission from derp to share the quoted post.

Yeah, and you already have a choice. You play alone and have limited solo content or you play in a guild as the game was designed and meant to be played and you enjoy all of the content.

We have not received permission from derp to share the quoted post.

There'll be some solo mobs. Probably 50+% of the artisan profession could be done solo. But you won't be killing bosses, you won't win against stronger players in pvp. You most likely won't be able to defend your caravan alone. And even the artisan stuff will still require you to cooperate with other people because you'll need other professions to support you or other people to defend you if you decide to gather some rare resources alone.

Oh, and those solo mobs won't give you BiS and I highly doubt they'd give you pre-top either. This is an oldschool mmo that requires you to participate in social structures in the game. If everyone could just farm their shit solo - why would they be social?