We may not have a launch date for Star Wars: The old Republic yet, but many fans are alrady their guild relations. Guild sites have been popping up all over the place, and many big guilds from other MMORPG’s have launched SWTOR sections.
To help out non established guilds, BioWare have now unveiled the Pre-Launch Guild Program, that allows players to reserve guild names and establish or join a group with similar interests.
As long as your guild meets certain criteria, it will be imported directly into the game at launch. In addition, every guild will get its own mini-site on the official SW:TOR site, complete with guild information, recruitment status and forums.
This is a system I have I have missed in many other games and great development in this type of games if you ask me.
Its all a simple process, all you have to do is head over HERE in the guilds section and start creating or searching for your guild. If your unsure about any thing, you can check out the to Guild FAQ HERE.
The FAQ talks about placing guilds automatically on servers (and during phase 2 you can align your guild with allies and adversaries). This is actually quite clever as it should help BioWare spread out the initial population by ensuring that large guilds don’t all end up on the same server.
And considering that there are RP guilds it seems logical to assume that there will be RP servers as well (which is good news that I don’t recall having been confirmed yet).
The only question I have is whether players will also be automatically allocated to servers, but I doubt it. This seems purely a measure to ensure spreading out population by putting large guilds on different servers.
Another interesting thing to note is that for a guild to be automatically transferred to the game like this at least four members in the guild need to have pre-ordered the game. Though I can understand it as a measure to ensure that there are going to be enough people in the guild, it’s also a clever trick to increase the number of pre-orders. I can see that guilds that want to ensure that they’re in the game might ask more of their members to pre-order just in case something goes wrong with a few of them.
It’s an interesting thing. But I’m not in a guild, so maybe I’m misjudging how guilds will react to this. I think that they’ll generally like it, but I can see how there might be concern about the auto-placement.