I pur­chased Everquest II on Steam a cou­ple of weeks ago. I never really gave it a real shot (beyond the neutered trial), but for $5 I fig­ured what the heck. While I can’t really afford to play more than one subscription-based MMORPG at a time, Everquest II does have some cool things going for it. Every so often I would see some­thing that I thought LOTRO could ben­e­fit from copy­ing to some degree.

One of these things pops up the sec­ond you enter the game world:

Everquest II’s Wel­come Screen

As you can see, it con­tains server news, friends list­ings, a link to guild recruit­ment and more. I like the con­cept of this idea, although in the case of LOTRO cer­tain things could be changed (for exam­ple, I’m hop­ing we never get a marketplace…).I think it helps tie things together and allows mem­bers (both new and old) to be fully aware of what’s going on around them.

I espe­cially like the in-game guild recruit­ment tool:

Everquest II’s Guild Recruit­ment Screen

I really love this idea, par­tic­u­larly because it does what I think MMORPGs should do: it makes every­thing you need to do for a MMORPG acces­si­ble in-game. I find it frus­trat­ing that many MMORPGs rely on out­side sources (offi­cial or not) to set up guilds/kinships and so forth. I think out­side sources should be sup­ple­men­tal,  not com­pletely inte­gral to the expe­ri­ence. I’d love to see some­thing more robust in LOTRO that allowed Kin­ships to adver­tise them­selves and gain new recruits in-game.

I don’t think it even nec­es­sar­ily has to go as far as Everquest II does. As an exam­ple, what if major areas had a bul­letin board play­ers could check out and see who’s recruit­ing. This could be by a helper NPC or even in its own lit­tle hall. I’ve seen this con­cept han­dled in var­i­ous microtransaction-based MMORPGs like Shin Megami Ten­sei: Online to pretty good effect.

Does any­one have any input on this idea or have their own sys­tem they think would be better?