Content geared towards FCs

[Avoidy]

I wish. Even something like guild missions would go a long way towards making FCs feel like more than linkshells with slightly more functionality. As it stands, it's really difficult to make an objective case for even joining a community FC over making your own solo FC and simply communicating with friends via LS/CWLS, especially with solo fc home ownership being a major incentive.

In Tera, we had guild missions that officers could select from the guild menu. These were really really basic but it was still more than we have in XIV. To put it in XIV terms, the guild leader would pick a mission titled, say, "Run Dun Scaith 8 times." and the quest would begin, and everyone in the FC would see it visible. From that moment on, anyone in the FC who ran Dun Scaith would count towards that 0/8 goal, and if a full 8man squad of FC members went in together, they could finish the quest in a single run, since 8 of them completed it. Doing these quests boosted your guild's rank, and you'd be able to see your guild's ranking in game set against other guilds, so it got kind of competitive. At one point, guild housing was even sort of teased as an incentive to support your guild but the devs dropped it.

In BDO as well, guild quests were implemented in a way that was like "kill 500 of X monster" and anytime anyone in the guild killed that monster, it counted towards the quest. You got like, guild contribution for this or something and then at the end of a certain time period the guild leader would issue payouts that were distributed to every member with people who had higher ranks and higher contributions getting more money back than people who didn't contribute anything.

In this game, there's just nothing. Someone earlier said "if you want to do things with your FC, just do it" in like a "be the change you want to see" kind of way, but the thing about that is it's a two way street. I might want to run random content with people in my FC, but if my FCmates don't see a reason to, say, run puppets bunker in 2023 or something, then they're not gonna agree to do it. Square could incentivize and facilitate group efforts by implementing any of the examples I just mentioned, but they've chosen not to for many years and now here we are. Imagine trying to recruit someone to your community FC in the current year. What can you offer them that they can't just get from a linkshell and a solo FC? I say this as someone in a community FC where our main competition isn't even other FCs sniping our members; it's people just leaving to be in FCs by themselves so they can have specific buffs on demand, their own house, and their own army of submarines that they alone can control, while losing no real socialization aspect since they continue chilling with us in linkshells anyway. The last time I asked someone what they could get out of a community fc that they couldn't get from just having a solo fc and inviting their friends to a linkshell, the answer I got was literally "uhhh FCs have a MotD function," like come on bro.