For anyone who hasn’t been paying close attention to the upcoming Warhammer Online MMO, they recently released a considerable amount of information about the guild system for Warhammer Online. This includes a short video located here, and the grab bag questions from their April Newsletter. Here is my favorite question from the grab bag.

Q: What kind of advantages will a guild offer to players beyond chat and finding groups?

A: Beyond the standard features such as guild vaults, cloaks, and guild merchants, we’ve added a layer of game play into our guild system that goes above and beyond standard communication and grouping needs. Guilds gain ranks just like players do, and not just for bragging rights. At each guild rank, guilds gain rewards that benefit the individual guild members and the guild as a whole. Some of the rewards even enhance the role of the member and guild in PvE and RvR.

In addition, the Living Guilds system is designed to offer maximum control and organization to guild leaders without requiring them to make it a fulltime job. A robust set of tools for organizing members and guild leadership, as well as fully integrated messaging and automated news systems, makes it easy to keep tabs on your members. And the guild calendar makes it easy to organize events within your guild OR within your alliances.

It looks like Warhammer Online will contain a number of features that I am surprised we haven’t seen from a major MMO yet. It looks to contain an in game calendar and news system, which is a really good idea. Every guild I have ever been a part of has scheduled events of some nature for the guild as a whole. Everything from Raid nights, to create a new character night, or silly stuff like a new character race from point A to point B. Then with a news system in place, you can let anyone who wasn’t able to attend know what they missed out on, or how the Sunday raid went. Hopefully some other MMO’s will pick up on these features sooner or later. I would love to see an in game calendar for EQ2.