Pre-Launch Guild Program

Ooh, a mid-week update.

Today BiOWare launches the new Guild Headquarters for Star Wars: The Old Republic where people can register their guilds and look for guilds to join. Here is the official news:

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the new Guild Headquarters (HQ) as well as the Pre-Launch Guild Program. Many members of the community have already been organizing guilds on the forums, and we’re now happy to provide the tools to officially register and reserve your guild’s name. In this new section of the website, you can search for an existing guild to join or you can create a new guild and begin recruiting members. When Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ launches, you may be able to import your guild directly into the game, subject to availability and meeting certain criteria*.

Every guild gets its own guild mini-site on www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com, complete with information about the guild, its recruitment status, and its own public and private forums. Create or join a guild now and you’ll have the opportunity to have your own space to socialize and organize before the game launches. Every guild is automatically entered into the searchable guild database, which makes it easy for players to find their ideal guild. Get your guild together early and get ready for The Old Republic!

To learn more about guilds in The Old Republic, check out the Guilds Game System page for details, and to search for or join a guild, visit the Guild HQ now! Also be sure to visit the Guilds FAQ for answers to commonly asked questions.

*Conditions and restrictions apply. See Guilds FAQ for full details.

Interesting stuff. I'm sure that the various guilds will love it.

[EDIT] Just been reading the FAQ and had a few additional thoughts.

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.