NEW Guild Hideouts and Raids Idea

Just wanted to fully put into a post what my concept of Guild Hideouts is.

This concept includes:

• A fully customisable Guild Hideout
• Cross-Server functionality to allow for Guildmates to meet in-game
• Interactive activities within a Hideout to partake in with Guildmates
• TDM/CTF Style Guild Raiding system similar to Hourglass mechanics
• The much requested ''friendly fire toggle'' allowing for crews to FFA

TL;DR

A Customisable and upgradable area that is instanced to a separate server all of your guildmates can access. You can add a bunch of functional items here to play with your guild mates and with such high levels of customisation you can really make it unique and represent your guild. Progression allows you to expand your area and make it bigger and better, unlocking new features such as the ability to Dock your ship. You can show off your trinkets, Race against your friends, bet in card games, have some good ole FFAs, take shortcuts to the Reapers Lair and Athena Hideout, and share clothing styles with your Guild. You can queue up to either Raid another Guild's Hideout of equal size, or to defend yours. Each Expansion to your Hideout unlocks the ability to raid with more and more people to really make it feel like a War, whether its TDM or CTF. This System allows for much more in-depth of a goal for a Guild to collectively work towards other than literally just a new roman numeral on their mast per 100 levels.

Okay TL;DR over, no complaining about the text wall if you read past this.

Before I begin I want to address a major concern with something like this. There's a glaring issue that a lot of expansions to existing concepts have. How do you introduce a new mechanic to an existing system when people have already 100%d Commendations and therefore would immediately have access to all the new stuff, without completely invalidating all the existing effort they've put in by just making a ''do the same thing but post-release of the new system''. The answer to that for me is pretty simple, to first Unlock a Guild Hideout you would need to be at a certain guild level. Beyond that everything to do with Hideouts is its entirely own set of commendations that have you do entirely different things than what you've already done. That way nobody feels like previous work was meaningless, and nobody feels like they've not got anything to do as they've already done it.

What is a Guild Hideout? A Guild Hideout is a location you create and play that allows any and all Guildmates to access. The Owner of a guild can choose any Large Island in game and choose one of several present spots on the Island to create the entrance to their hideout, You would go into a Hideout-creating mode which highlights the areas that can be used as the Entrance so people can find one that best suits them. Once they enter the hideout they will enter a loading area like the Underwater Tunnels of Hourglass, and then load into a new server containing your Guild Hideout. Visually your entrance would appear for other players on the server as soon as you load in, but they would not be able to interact with it. If two crews happened to have the same location as their Entrance, they would each just load into their own Hideout. Inside the Hideout, the area starts off as a small Cave. If you think of it modularly, it starts out as lets say a 3x3 Square of Tiles. Through progression of the Guild and Hideouts system you can modularly expand how big it is and how much space you have. When Choosing to expand the area this would cost a Significant amount of gold, we're talking Millions per individual added Tile. This money would be a collective of all Guildmates who deposit money Into the Guild Bank, more on that later. Once you expand your space you can then start to look at adding Features to your base, each requiring a certain amount of space, some being free standing, some needing to be against or on walls, etc. Alongside the things you can buy that have interactable function, you would also be able to purchase a vast amount of new things to decorate your Hideout with. Be it fancy lights, braziers, wall decor, furniture, a fish pond, A great big painting of Flameheart or Ramsey, etc. The total amount of space you could choose to expand is huge, lets say 250 tiles, but the total amount of tiles you could break is lets say 150. This means you can't just completely open all available space, but instead can use your 150 tiles to create unique shapes and designs to your Hideout. You might just still make a big open room. Maybe you have Medium sized rooms connected by thinner Corridors and each room has its own theming. Maybe you fully commit to the Raids and make the most fun action packed space possible for the most enjoyable fights. Maybe you want to fully shape the Hideout to incorporate a challenging Parkour Racetrack. Maybe you make a fully vertical Base with multiple floors connected by Staircases. If you can think it, you can probably do it, no two Hideouts would ever be the same. And there's so much customisation that there wouldn't realistically be a 'meta' shape or anything. Sure there might be a standard ''this is how to make a fun TDM area'' kind of thing, but its entirely up to you to add your own personal take on it. Many of the Cosmetics you can put into the Hideout will be earned through the gameplay revolving around the Hideout, but you may also lots through other means. Such as you might get some Gold Hoarder Banners to put in your Hideout from being level 75 gold hoarder, or you might get a Replica of the Skeleton Curse Cup at level 100 Servants, etc.

Notable Modular things you could purchase to add to your guild include:

• A Card Table, this would allow you to play a variety of card games as well as Liars Dice. You could gamble in it with tokens which cannot be converted into any in game currency, but just for the feel of betting on the games.

• A Race Track. This would allow you create a Start and End Bell as well as several numbered checkpoints, and finally a Race Board that shows the highscores. This would allow for some very fun competition between your guild and creativity in how you choose to design your Hideout. You could either just make a Racetrack that goes around your Hideout, make a specific section dedicated to the race, or make the entire hideouts design incorporated around a big race.

• Mounted Cannons you can place and have aimed any way you want in order to provide a fun shortcut to get from one side of the base to the other.

• Traps, maybe you want a big pit of spikes to fall into, or a lever you hook up to a big spike covered log that clears a corridor. Maybe you want some pressure plates that cause the walls to crush you. I'm sure you'll find some evil way to send your guildmate or rival guildmate to the Ferry.

• Smoothened Sections of Wall that create spots to place your existing Trinkets, Paintings, etc. You could also create larger sections of wall that can facilitate you to hang a Ship Figurehead, ship's Name Plaque, etc. You could also select parts of wall to cover in wood and choose a ships hull to choose as the colour scheme and patterning. You could also hang Sails and Flags around the Hideout, either on the wall or as Banners attached to the ceiling. That way if your Guild has an overall theme you could accommodate this with how you choose to decorate the wall space to really encapsulate your Guilds Identity.

• Clothing Mannequins. Afaik the ability to save a Clothing Preset so you don't need to manually put in each piece one by one when you want to change clothing is a feature that has been confirmed to eventually be added, whether it would prior to this idea or alongside this. You could place Mannequins around your Hideout and select clothing to put on them from your custom outfits. Another Guildmate could then interact with the Mannequin in order to Wear the clothing that is on it. This would allow someone to wear clothing they don't own, as long as they remain within the Hideout of course, as soon as they leave it gets taken off. It would also allow someone to save the outfit the Mannequin has as their own Outfit, that way they can effectively give your outfit to someone else instead of manually saying each individual piece. If you don't happen to own part of it, then it would just become blank. This could be a great way to create a custom Guild Uniform, and could pair very well with another idea you'll see later on.

• Shortcuts to the Athena's Fortune Hideout, and Reaper's Lair. This would allow you to have a quick way to get to an instanced version of the Reaper Lair (while still within your Guild Hideouts server) for quick access as well as if you want to explore it with more guildmates than a single crew. Obviously to actually get into the area you would need to individually have the respective Level 100s.

• Pirate Portraits. These are pictures you can hang on the wall that you select one of many poses and backgrounds and it puts your pirate model on it. That way you could have pictures of all your Guildmates. These are relatively limited in terms of customisation, hence why its specific poses, because otherwise I think that'd be much too hard a feature to make for what is ultimately quite a small item.

• Trading Company Representatives. These would allow you to purchase voyages, cosmetics and level ups from the companies as well as to make your Hideout feel full of life.

• A Ships Dock. This would only unlock once you get a Large Tier Hideout and allow you to create a large open space of water with a Dock. This has actual Function where a Guild Ship approaching the Island their Hideout is at can select to Dive into their Hideout bringing their ship with them, rather than just going in on foot. Gameplay wise it would have the same limitations as Hourglass, where you lose all your loot and therefore would not be a free escape or anything. But I'd say it should also get rid of your Emissary. The Dock starts out with a Single Bay which can house Two Sloops, or One Brig, or One Galleon. You can expand this further for up to 4 bays allowing for at most 8 Sloops, 4 Brigs or 4 Galleons (or Combinations of all 3). This could also be a way to introduce the idea of saving Resources, though obviously a very limited selection through a couple of Crates stored within your Docking space. You could use this feature to trade resources between ships, Maybe one crew is about to log off for the night so they communicate to another guild ship to quickly hop into the Hideout to get their supplies.

• The Guild Bank. This Feature works to create a pool of money for the Guild to use on upgrading their Hideout. This works similarly to how money is generated for Alliance players. If you are sailing on a Guild Ship (doesn't need to be emissary) and make 100k Gold, you will also add 50k to the Guild Bank. This is not taken out of your earnings, but is simply an extra 50k created to go into the Guild Bank. This is how all Cosmetics revolving around the Hideout are bought. With 24 people in a maxed Guild this Guild Bank could be filling up very fast, and is why the Hideout Expansions, Features and cosmetics are gonna cost a boat load of gold. Another Guild Permission ''Allow Player to purchase Hideout Items'' will be required to make sure only those trusted with buying things can do so. That way a Guild can collectively decide what to buy or save up for instead of just one guy blowing everyone's hard earned money on stuff only they care about.

• FFA, TDM and CTF Flags. This is part of another feature later down in the post, but to quickly sum it up. You could have a Crossbones flag where every Guildmate Present could opt into turning friendly fire on so you can mess around fighting eachother. A Red and Blue Flag allowing you join a Team and then play some Team Death Match. And alongside that A Red/Blue Guild Medallion which functions for a Capture the Flag gamemode. This is where the idea of the Mannequin returns, as you could have the area you decide Red and Blues base to be also have a Mannequin that has a Red and Blue team costume on it to allow for quick access.

I want to emphasise this works on a modular set up. Being able to free place things in the exact pixel perfect spot you want them in would far too much work, almost creating an entirely different game within the Hideouts. Literally look at this like making a base in minecraft without as many sharp edges. Like how when placing Trinkets on our ship we dont just put it anywhere there are designated spots for them to go.

A cool thing you cand o with the Guild Hideout is a new Guild Permission you can set. This allows anyone with the Permission (so Owner, Leader, or everyone) to invite non-guildmates into the hideout. This allows for you to show your Hideout to other people including friends that aren't in your guild and participate with any of your guild features with them such as playing Cards against them, Racing against them, etc.

There is also a Second Key feature in Guild Hideouts, that being Raids. The Raiding feature works similarly to hourglass, and allows you to queue up to either defend your own Hideout or Attack someone else's Hideout. This would scale with the amount of people you have in your guild participating to make sure fights are even. Likewise you would not be able to take a raid on a Small sized Hideout with a group of like 15 people. Small, Medium, Large and Huge sized hideouts each allowing for Raids of 4v4, 8v8, 12v12, and 16v16 respectively. Though that doesn't mean a Huge Hideout raid HAS to do 16 people raids, you could still have a 4v4. A Raid could work in multiple ways, by simply being a TDM where players spawn in spread out locations within the Hideout, Capture the Flag style, where the Attackers need to push into the Hideout further and further and break the defences in order to collect lets say a Guild Medallion and bring it back to the entrance within a time limit. Likewise I'm sure there are other variations people could come up with for alternate ways for Guilds to raid each other. This would be an opt in system, so you don't need to worry about getting raided while you are offline or anything, likewise A Guild that fails to defend their Hideout does not actually lose anything, they just don't gain as much (like how in hourglass you don't lose anything when sinking you just don't get the win rewards). In order to make sure queues aren't completely dead due to how few people would be able to queue for a 16v16 Huge Hideout raid, there would also be the ability to run it as a custom server, where you can directly request to raid a specific Guild, that way people can set up their own Raids (like idk a #Guild-Raids-LFC in the Discord kinda thing) rather than purely relying on a matchmaking system. Though obviously rewards for this would not be the focus as you could just farm, you'd either get no rewards or 10% in order to make sure the emphasis is on the fun of the Raid.

There would be a major issue with a system like this and that is Matchmaking is already pretty bad in HG, so why would Raids be any different. For one I think the idea of being able to invite another guild to Raid at least clears up the issue of if you want to experience a 16v16, you still can via inviting even if you don't get the full rewards as if it was a matchmade raid. But generally to make sure that Raids are always occurring I think it would be worthwhile to introduce a Special Event called Raid Nights. We used to have something called Fort Nights which had 1.5x boost to Stronghold Loot on Fridays, incentivising people to participate in World Events that gave them out in order to make sure there was always combat. I think if there was a Raid Night where one day a week (probably Saturday) you could enjoy increased rewards from Raids this would make sure there are always a healthy amount of people Raiding even if eventually its mainly on Saturday. Considering a single crew of 4 people could matchmake I think the 4v4 queue would remain healthy consistently. Even 8v8 doesn't seem to difficult to maintain as that's just 2 galleons in a guild of 24 people. Individual Guilds may even have their own 'raid day' where they all try and be available on a given day and time to do larger raids together, which may coincide with the Raid Nights event. Likewise as I mentioned I think it would be great for the Official Discord to have a Raiding LFC to make full use of the Invitational Raids feature I mentioned.

I think this idea of Guild Hideouts and Raids would really flesh out what feels like quite the lacklustre Guilds system we currently have. It would allow for much more interconnectivity between you and your guild outside of you just making a discord server. It'd Give you a much cooler common goal than just wow my Ship's Mast has an I II III IV X on it, and really make you feel like you're making your own impact on the world. It adds both a new Raiding system for those PvP Oriented players as well as a high customisable gold sink for everyone to work towards no matter how they choose to progress via PvE, PvP, or a mix of it all. Let me know if you have any other Ideas that could be cool to add to this, or things you would change.

Thanks for Reading!

• Frogger