This is my very first post to the forums, as a head's up. Also, I'm a writer by trade, so I tend to be pretty chatty... I hope that doesn't annoy anyone, lol. Being new to this community (and hoping I can be a regular contributor here), I figured a brief introduction was in order. Some communities (well, people in those communities) flame newcomers for making suggestions, which is silly and counterproductive, but to insulate against that just to be safe, my credentials for offering ideas are more rock-solid than most: I was a small-time indie game developer (primarily a game designer/ story writer). I'm currently a professional writer (political satire, one of the few remaining noble professions, lol). I've been a Fallout fan since I was 18, when I played the first Fallout game back in 1998. And I co-ran, with my brother, one of the biggest, oldest, coolest casual guilds in World of Warcraft, and definitely the most popular on our server, from 2007 until I quit that game in 2011 due to the svckiness of Cataclysm. So hopefully it's okay for me to share my opinions/ desires here, lol. Without further ado, the meat and potatoes

Not every guild is hardcoe. One of the main reasons I quit playing WoW is because Cataclysm was designed almost exclusively for hardcoe, nerd-raging, basemant-dwelling, sociopathic gear junkies who will never know the loving touch of another human being. Mega-nerds can't comprehend this, but the world doesn't revolve around them, and if you'll allow me to pull this figure out of my rear end, 90% or more of MMO players don't care to go on raids, or spend 7 hours of their lives trudging through dungeons so they can score a some new plate boots (provided a hunter doesn't roll on them).

Our WoW guild was (and still is) massively successful, and to this day, even after I've left WoW, is outlasting almost every hardcoe raiding guild across the board, because it caters to that aforementioned 90%. The guild has a casual atmosphere, games, a helpful and sharing officer corps... it offers new gameplay dynamics and gives players of all stripes something to do. And while our guild wasn't competing in the meaningless "who can prove their virginity the fastest by spending (x) hours in a dungeon" contests, most of those hardcoe players were humbled when our guild celebrated its birthday every year with a fireworks display over Stormwind that was more awe-inspiring than their most epic boss fights.

If Fallout Online has guilds, you can count on my brother and I forming one of the earliest social, casual guilds around, and that guild will end up outlasting most of the hardcoe guilds, too. Please don't forget about us! Don't make it difficult (if not entirely impossible) for casual guilds to exist and thrive. I'm not saying you need to give us colored deathclaw eggs so we can hide them and offer prizes (as awesome as that would be). I'm just asking that the ingenuity of creative casual players not be limited by restrictive guild dynamics or a hardcoe-centric design/ implementation of guild functionality.

Guild Hall ideas aplenty! I've read that guild halls and player-run towns are on the agenda for Fallout Online. If that's true, it would be amazing if guild-owned buildings could be operated as business establishments. For instance, my brother and I have for years talked about how cool Fallout online would be, and one idea we toss around regularly is having traveling salesmen. Scavengers would dig through ruins to find items, and armed with a couple of pack brahmin and shotgun-weilding, combat armor-clad guildies, we could sell goods to fellow players all throughout the wastes, with our guild hall serving as our primary storage facility. If it could have a bar where we could serve food and drinks, and a casino with slots, roulette, and other games (our guild being the house/ taking the house's earnings), that would be stellar. Or maybe it's just a simple general store environment where we have tables of merchandise to sell wasteland wanderers. If guilds could design their own guild halls, or could have their pick of a variety of pre-fab buildings, I'll literally wash the game designer's car by hand, personally!

Some other rooms that would be useful, particularly for casual guilds: offices with desks/ chairs/ maybe some storage, an armory/ storage area, a kitchen, a courtroom for guild meetings/ trials/ etc., a classroom or library setting for instruction/ guild orientation seminars, and maybe a professions area for item crafting.

A guild rank system as complex as we want it to be. One thing that always irked us about WoW is the lack of ranking options for our guild members. The game offers ten ranks, and that's about it. We'd love to see a tree system for ranks, where you create a rank and drag/ drop it onto a leadership tree, with guild masters (please allow for more than one!) at the top, then various shared officer ranks beneath that, and so on.

Many guilds only use three or four ranks, but others, like ours, could never have enough ranks, and numerous occasions present themselves when running a big guild where it would be handy to have a non-linear ranking system. Our guild's lowest rank was/ is called "purgatory." Purgatory allows for zero access to guild stuff; no guild chat, no guild bank, no help or communication with guildies. It's a prison rank for players that break the guild's rules. With a tree system, new guild members could start out in one tree, and then we could move problem players to another tree, without having to promote or demote them through the ranks. It would help large guilds (ours had more than 500 members at one point) keep the guild organized, it would let us break guilds into divisions/ internal organizations, etc. The tree system would be a huge improvement over WoW's cheesy 10-rank system. Three trees (the other two being optional) and 25 ranks per tree would be astounding. And of course, the guilds that only want three or four ranks can do that, too.

The things WoW got right, they did get right. World of Warcraft did nail quite a few guild features pretty well, and in ways that helped casual guilds, too. The guild bank, multi-tiered guild chat (regular and officer chat), tabards (some method of quickly spotting guild members), the guild vault (guild bank), public and private chat channels with voice chat functionality for improved communication, and the guild calendar/ event scheduling system come immediately to mind as cool features from WoW that Fallout Online would be silly not to have iterations of.

Sorry for how tremendously long this post is (and here I am making it longer). I hope this community is nicer, more inviting, and more mature than some of the others I've been in. It sure seems that way, reading through comments and posts. If you folks approve of my ideas, I'll offer some non-guild ones too. I hope my contributions are entertaining, and I promise to keep them shorter in the future!