Loli Squad, Rainbow Bears, VRPD, etc etc etc. You've seen all the different groups. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could have WoW-style tags under our names with the group we associate with?
Ideally, I see this system working more like Wildstar's "circles", or Guild Wars 2's guids. You can join as many as you want, but you "represent" only one at a time. A nameplate mockup might look like the attached image.
You would manage the guild in-game via a simple interface much like the Social menu. If you have permission, you can invite people to your guild or remove them with the context menu. You can change which guild you're representing in your in-game UI.
Additionally, on a website (say, an extension of the vrchat.net/home page), you could manage your group from a browser. You could also upload your icon (in the form of a 1:1 ratio PNG), change your guild name, leave a group, or change your representation via this site.
The "group" would have 3 permission groups:
Administrator - Can represent the group, manage the group on the website, add members, remove members, change group icon, change group name
Officer - Can represent the group, can add members, remove members
Member - Can represent the group
Furthermore, allowing Playmaker access to "guild ids" (such as "current guild represented") would allow people to create rooms with permission-based colliders-- maybe to set up private areas for setting up Improv for those in the improv group, allowing people behind the bar in the Pug, etc.
Apologies if this is too long! This is an exciting idea to me, and I think it would be very heavily used.
You can make an icon and parent it above your avatar in the meanwhile.
I think this is a good idea but I'd like to have the ability to be in multiple groups. Maybe a separate system though? Guild System and Groups System. Oh nvm apologies, I just read the part about 'being in many, representing one'.
Maybe have playmaker have the ability to add people to a group via trigger as well if the map maker owns the goup? Could be used for puzzle maps to mark someone's progress or other things like that.
@Josh Smalls: Maybe-- if the function exists, it should prompt the user if they want to accept membership.
@Bryan Bortz: I will point out that I found (and upvoted) these, but I wanted to go over the idea in more detail.
@tupper: 👍 I wanted to make sure it all gets collated together under this one. And to show it's ongoing support.
Nice. Something like a character progression would be awesome too, but I like this idea alone just as well.
Would be neat too that together with the 'group' system we could have 'group chats' where we have a default VRChat animation that starts when we open up the menu to contact other group members, so it doesn't just look like we're looking at the normal menu/nothing. Le group chat would be nice so we can get meetups going and all that :P
Good Idea +1
Needs some more design but I think we all like the concept of groups. Marking as planned.
I love the idea of guild groups in VRchat, I've thought of it as something that is inevitable for the game for some time and I think the planning for this idea above is good.
I want to add some of my thoughts to this idea.
What I want to see is a way for allowing guilds to set a world of their own, which they would either create as a chill-out area for guild members and make adjustments to room settings as they see fit. A "template" guild world should be provided to start off for groups that don't want to make a world or don't have the skills to do it.
The reason I think this would be so good is because it's a good starting point for advancing VRchat and adding more features to the game.
The template world would include things such as a notice board, for announcements or messages, a way for the guild to leave messages for events, or for players within the guild to leave messages for each other.
(Also imagine if players could take photos from within VRchat which can be shared physically within the guild world, they could be taken/spawned from the notice board for example as props. This would enable players to share and talk about VR experiences they have had WITHIN VR and share the evidence that it happened of course, this would also act as a memory bank for the guild, the photos wouldn't be removed unless deleted. Also players should be given a method to move the photos to their steam but there shouldn't be a way to upload under any circumstance. Typing this idea right at the very end I can say I think this might be the thing I want to see in VRchat personally, most of all).
Anything that makes the world more interactive and of course gives players more ways to interact with each other.
I dislike the idea of making VRchat competitive in anyway, I don't think numbers of players in a guild should be displayed to players outside the guild and there shouldn't be any form of ranking. Finding a guild should be a completely natural process of getting to know people and asking to join someones guild or getting invited. It should be done in a way similar to adding or blocking a player, completely personal, the way you other games force you to decide on "an ideal" option for a guild to join isn't in line with what VRchat is about.
(I also wouldn't want to see any form of custom ranking and names and for the most part other players ranks in your guild should be hidden, maybe a letter by their name when you open their player panel to show their rank, but it should be strictly management, I like the idea of keeping all players equal within a guild).
But within guild groups, going back onto the topic of guild worlds it would be amazing to see some form of progression within the guild, something tied to the guild world that everyone in the guild contributes to and works towards. The best example I have for this although not a good one is if players had to collect food from which they can then feed to a dragon in their home world to make it grow bigger. It's a terrible example for VRchat but it gives the best idea of what I'm trying to say. It shouldn't be some huge deal or stand out to players as the focus point of guild worlds, it should just be something that happens over time. (A slightly better example, maybe growing a tree, that players in the guild can water once a day.
(With these ideas for adding more interactive elements to a world some of which are physically changing, or things like the notice-board example I gave would mean there would need to be some method for allowing players making new guild worlds to add these features back in on their new world).
I'm sure I could think a lot more into this but this gives the basic idea quite well, the idea of giving players the ability to make a group where they know everyone is friends is amazing, but then giving this group of players a world that they group can label as a "home-base" or a place where all they can find all their friends is even better, a place unique that belongs to them.
I won't go into world design but of course with something like this the issue of performance and such comes to mind, these worlds would need to be fairly big and if there's 500 players in a guild there could be a lot of people on at any given time and it would be a problem to put 50-100 players in the same world together unless some range/zoning technique was used within the world which wouldn't be very reliable, the first solution for this that comes to mind is just having multiple copies of the world with a player limit, but then it's defeating the whole idea of having it in the first place. It may be that this is just something for a year in the future.
Overall I think the future for VRchat will always be focused on giving players the ability to create new worlds, games and modes to the point where VRchat itself could feel like a hub in the end.
I don't want to give off the image that I want to see VRchat turn into a game, VR should always be focused on people talking and interacting and having fun with other people, even 20 or 30 years for now, it should always be focused on people, not the game. I don't want VRchat to be a game, I want it to be a lifestyle.
So in my opinion something such as guild worlds is something I see as a really good starting point. Other ideas is eventually giving players their own "rooms" or personal space, somewhere that they can consider as a place to go to talk to just a few people for example, giving players ways to make these rooms feel unique should be done from within the game though, e.g. letting players change props or colors, or the landscape outside the window in an edit mode.
Another small slightly relateable idea I've had is for some form of collectible system within VRchat, just a few details on this. The basic idea is world makers could add some kinda of badge or token that can be taken from their world by players that have completed the game or even just visited their world, I don't think this would make much sense to have in the game now, but in the future it'd be a good idea. This would be a good reward for long term players too, a small way of looking back and remembering the time they've spent playing the game.
Sorry for the essay, I didn't expect to type so much when I started probably an hour ago. But I'm glad to get these thoughts out!
I believe most of these things tie in together with the guilds idea quite well but I know it's a little bit of a mess, I'm happy to move it somewhere else or take any of the sub-ideas into greater detail.
A feature to allow us to add a subtitle underneath our playername to advertise the group we follow perhaps with a icon too!
Groups and nameplate updates are both something on our roadmap.