MMO Guild Tool Review: Guilded
As a FFXIV Free Company leader, and someone who takes web presence and web design seriously, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can help me keep things running smoothly. Knights of Memory <KoM> is fairly free-form in allowing members to set up and run things as they see fit. In fact, it’s highly encouraged.
You want to run a Canals night, go ahead and set that up. You want a Coil clear day, go ahead and set that up. You want to build that submarine, go ahead and organize it.
Given the high level of trust we have in our members, this has worked just fine for us. The difficult part has been providing a tool that everyone can use to organize these things.
Guild Communication
When my FC adopted Discord, it quickly overtook our old guild website, which was hosted at Shivtr. Eventually, about the only thing we needed a site for (other than a calendar) was to provide potential applicants with information about us, and give them a sign-up sheet that I could reference later when needed.
Things like forums and photo galleries went out the window because Discord provided something similar, and was more central to everything my FC did. For a while, I moved the site to my own self-hosted WordPress, but when I started having issues with my web host that caused me to move most of my WordPress installs, I took the FC back to the Shivtr site.
This was fine. This was functional. But I kept my eye out for other options because I felt we could find better.
I stumbled upon Guilded a few weeks back, and I knew I’d found what I was looking for.
Guilded Luvs Discord
This isn’t a promotional post, but I’m not going to hide the fact that I was really impressed by Guilded’s features. The devs there were smart — they recognized that Discord was becoming widely adopted and they embraced that. Rather than trying to do the same thing or trying to compete, they integrated with Discord instead.
This was a huge factor that made me choose Guilded as our new FC website. I knew that our previous guild sites got little interaction, but that’s because Discord took the limelight. If I were to present a system that works with what we’re already using, then the chances of adoption by the FC was much higher.
I was right.
It took a little nudging, but overall, I think my FC views Guilded as a good experience that works alongside our Discord channel. I love that the calendar feature allows members to set up their own events and advertise them — this is a huge thing for encouraging people to organize their own things.
I also love that while Guilded seemed geared originally to Overwatch, it’s obvious that the devs want to find how to make it fit with FFXIV Free Companies. The devs just released a v2 alpha yesterday and invited FCs to join in testing it on the FFXIV Reddit.
I quickly jumped in (and had FC members who alerted me to this too), and we got a shiny new upgrade to our FC site last night!
In making the transition to v2, I caught a very minor bug, and reported it. I was very impressed at how fast the devs responded, fixed and deployed it. I offered to help test the fix, and everything worked like a charm! Then, I was invited to their team lead Discord, where I can directly report bugs and discuss features, which is pretty exciting.
So this is a very responsive team, open to user feedback, with a lot of great ideas — especially on how far they can take the Discord integration. They also have free iOS and Android apps which work well from my experience with them.
If your guild or FC has jumped on the Discord bandwagon, but you still need a calendar and application tool, Guilded is well worth a look. Even if you don’t have a Discord, but you’re looking for a new guild site, Guilded has a lot of nice features and a slick layout. It’s very easy to make a guild site that looks impressive.
Just wanted to pass along my experiences with this tool so far. Looking good!