Hey developers/fellow runners,

As the guild leader of what many are deeming the first successful Dungeon Runners guild, I would like to make a humble suggestion to you guys.

A little background:

We have a guild bank that is on our website; the problem is that it is manually updated, meaning every single item has to be manually input into the database. This is very time consuming, and we would love a more automated way.

The Proposal:

Add a feed of bank items to XML - I'm sure this would probably greatly increase the size of the XML, but if it is at all possible, it would most likely be appreciated by many even outside of the Valor guild.

If you guys see it fit for a good idea, like I mentioned, it would be a great relief. If it is simply too much of a task, don't worry about it. I just thought I would give it a shot :P

Thank you for your time.

- Theck

I'll make it short: I think you should wait until they have made a real guild-function in the game and maybe they'll add a guild-bank they can do a XML for. I'm sure that most player don't want other to be able to snoop around to see what they have hidden in the banks.

Patience, you grasshopper, patience. *japanese music fading out, cymbal going doiiiiiiiing*

Well I just searched for a while, and can't seem to find the original thread looking at stuff from the past three months. However I know someone suggested adding bank items to the feed in order to let people know what they had to trade within the last 6 months. It was not very well received, as the responses I remember dealt with "Well now I'm going to get even more people begging items from me." I'm only going to throw my $0.02 in for guild banks, since personal inventory has already been discussed.

I think, if this were implemented, it should be built into posses as a whole. Each posse could have a guild bank that might show up in an XML for the posse (along with a list of members...) so its members can view the items they have at their disposal.

On the other hand, if guilds are competitive like in most games (though I'd love to see them all work together here... be a nice twist) this will be shot down by most, I'm afraid, and should be opt-in only. Also, the guild bank would need to have controlled access, otherwise people can go join the guilds that have the items they want, snag them, and immediately quit.

Good opinions you too.

Yeah, perhaps they can just create a separate feed like you mentioned that has some guild information, for instance:

<members>
<member>
<name>
<level>
</member>
<members>
<bank>
<item>
<name>
etc..
</item>
</bank>

And perhaps the bank can only be accessible by officers, and they could act as the middle man to distributing and taking donations.

It would be cool if something like this rolled out, again like you said, with posse support.

(Writer's note.... guild == posse for the sake of this post and my sanity. Also please forgive the spelling, I'm stuck on IE right now and don't have my beautiful firefox and spell-checking in text-fields.)

Alright post my other ideas before work, have some time now to flush it out.

As far as a guild XML feed there are two things to consider. The first in my mind is security. This can be solved with either an opt-in system (which won't be as popular, I think) or some form of password. The opt-in system would only be used by "care-bear" guilds who are out to help everyone, and I don't think the majority of guilds will be this way (though I hope they will be). The password system could be thought of as an api key for the XML feed. Meaning the guild leader, upon creating the guild, would be issued some password for the guild. This password should be able to be changed at will (or with some sane limit, once a week for instance) in case of disgruntled members publishing the key somewhere. This gives someone access to the feed. The URL would end up something like:

http://dungeonrunners.com/guilds/Pwnston?key=12345

and would return the guild XML. Any invalid key should return nothing. Better yet, and invalid key should make up data so if someone's trying to guess the key (which should be nice and big anyways to prevent guessing) the data has to be parsed to identify if its bad. If you put the guild's name in the XML, and basic info it'll take some smart scripting (i.e. figuring out members of the guild to look for) to identify a bad feed. This'll take time, and time is the enemy of brute force attacks.

How will this impact the current viewers? It means two things. The first is that if you are a care-bear guild, you can publish your key on the boards and let everyone see what you have. And if you're competitive you can keep the key within the guild, preferably only giving it to officers or the guild leader. Then they can set up their viewer on a password protected portion of the guild site so all members can view the items without ever knowing the secret key. For my library, for instance I'll toss in a guild_key into the main configuration file, so only the person administrating the viewer would have to know it.

Tricksy character viewer operators could allow the guild XML to be viewed after prompting for a secret key, but that requires trusting that they don't keep a copy for themselves, which you may or may not want to do.

The second question is what gets reported in the XML. As Theck has pointed out, members and bank items would be good. Here's my suggestion

Code:

---

<xml>
<guild>
     <name></name>
     <leader></leader>
     <members>
          <member>
               <name></name>
               <position></position>
               <permission></permission>
          </member>
     </members>
     <items>
          --usual item XML... nothing new to invent here
     </items>
</guild>
</xml>

---

Most of these are obvious things to include, leader is important to find out who to contact and for honor purposes. For the members I've included position here as I assume there's different ranks that can be given. For instance "Leader", "Scum", etc. In addition, permissions should be noted as (I hope) the rank names will be editable. This will be a list of however many permissions, such as:

Code:

---

<permission>invite</permission>
<permission>guild-bank</permission>
<permission>promote</permission>

---

Just like <mod></mod> is used on items. From this list a guild can automatically build their lists of various positions, and a member ca know exactly whom to talk to for what they need.

Sorry Snarky.. you lost my interest at "care bear"; I tend not to take people who use phrases like that very seriously.

--- My thoughts:

I don't want it to be open - in other words, I don't want random joe schmoe looking at my bank space; Posse only I can see, but unless they implement Posse Bank spaces I don't see it happening.

Very well, I'll clear that up. I'm using a "care-bear guild" as a guild (posse) who is looking for the good of the community in general and has no problems with everything about their guild in the open. Membership, guild spaces, etc.

I mention that this most likely will not be the case due to the hostility towards XML in general, and hence used "care-bear" in a fairly sarcastic sense, just as it is used in normal PvP connotations.

I stated earlier, and thought it was obvious from the XML layout, that these bank spaces will be on a guild basis, not individual.

So to sum up my feelings: Posse XML should be made available on the condition that the feed can be locked down with a key that guilds have the option of publishing or not.

Theck wrote:

Quote:

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Add a feed of bank items to XML - I'm sure this would probably greatly increase the size of the XML, but if it is at all possible, it would most likely be appreciated by many even outside of the Valor guild.

---

Most of the feedback we've gotten about putting either the non-equipped inventory or bankspace of a character in the XML has been negative. We're not planning on doing it at this time.

As we provide guild support, we will be providing additional XML data appropriate for guilds, and providing ways of connecting that data with all the other data we're providing. Similarly, since the upcoming heave will have PvP ratings that are more robust than just PvP wins, we're adding XML feeds for ranking the top 100 PvPers in a number of ways.

Cthulhu wrote:

Quote:

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Ummmm no delicate way to put this so I'm just gonna come right out and say it: Shouldn't you have the word "Unofficial" in between successful and Dungeon?

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In my opinion, it's our job on the Dungeon Runners team to recognize and support guilds that form, rather than something that we bless and verify. Long before games had official support for them, clans were forming and identifying their members in the games they played (using such simple techniques as [CW] before the name).

Currently, Dungeon Runners doesn't have any support for guilds, but that's our failing rather than a decision we made based on whether guilds should exist.

Snarky wrote:

Quote:

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Also, the guild bank would need to have controlled access, otherwise people can go join the guilds that have the items they want, snag them, and immediately quit.

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Yep, and that's a problem we have to consider in our design whether we provide data on such guild banks in XML form or not. I can't say for certain whether or not a guild bank will be available as soon as any guild support is, though.