Airship as Guild Housing and Docking at Floating Cities!

[Wolfandre]

Neat concept, and it'd be neat to implement. Here's my take on it, however...

-Airships and their hangers should be their own separate zones with no one actually able to fly the ship, FFX style. Why? Because then your airships would be kind of like this....*ahem*
Free Company Leader: Alright guys, what do we want to do today? Leves? Dungeon raids? AF quests?
Random Member: ....Let's go to Camp Bearded Rock and crash into the noobs!
Leader: ...........LOLOK!!
*vroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom*

-Upkeep on the ship is vital. Repairs need to be made, fuel needs to be stockpiled...give the DoL's and DoH's something to do other than just build the thing. A fuel cost to get to certain areas would be good for this, as well as sustainable damage over time (general use, battles, dungeons, etc.). Airship can never truly be destroyed, but can be rendered neigh upon useless without proper upkeep.

-Unless it was implemented sort of like WoW's (ugh, I know) flying mount system, rendering zones would be disastrous. Ever wonder why there were no flying mounts in FFXI? Because the zones weren't built for it, and it would have looked TERRIBLE. Do it right, and the zones can stay beautiful while aloft....and again, so long as we aren't allowed to pilot anything.

-I can see a sort of 'Idle Over <X Camp>' feature to facilitate ease of transport to certain areas. Entire Free Companies could take an entire day and have 'Domain' over certain regions for periods of time. Leves become easier to accomplish, dungeons are faster, camps have free teleportation to them, gatherers can gather in teams and crafters can dominate the facilities in camps, etc. Did you like Conquest in FFXI? I'm sort of thinking like that. Want control over an area? Take to the skies to fight for them, or out-gather/craft....I dunno. Tangent. You see where I'm going. Could be neat.

-Dungeons need to be completely instanced, just like they are now. It would be awful waiting in line on your airship for those floating dungeons for the next Company to get out.

-Certain parts of the ship being only usable by certain jobs/classes during battles/PvP/whatever. PUGs take to the masts and swing over on ropes, GLAs and PLDs swarm the gangplank for boarding parties, BLMs and THMs in the crow's nest firing off spells, Musketeers being the only ones able to operate the canons. Give classes a niche and a job to do on the ship, in battle or not, and I guarantee you there will be a diversified class picking.

-No NPC crews aside from the navigator. Make us the crew. Without crew members on the ship, it can't fly. No ships out there flown around by one guy. It takes a team to run a good ship, and without one, you're in deader air than a college radio station.

All in all, a pretty good idea from the OP, and can really be built around. I'd like to see something like this implemented, so let's see if we can garner enough support for it.

EDIT: Oh, and please, for the love of the Twelve, none of the current airships, as was mentioned. It's like...a blimp. With air...oar...things. Thing doesn't even look like it has engines (or any sort of capabilities to keep it aloft) and it can still turn on a dime. Magitek says wut?