WARNING: HUGE BLOCKS OF TEXT AHEAD. Skip down to my comment for a TL;DR summary of this part. This idea is in a few parts:

HOMECOMING PART I: Social Changes
HOMECOMING PART II: Shuttle
HOMECOMING PART III: Ready Room Renovation
HOMECOMING PART IV: Guild Lab
HOMECOMING PART V: Guild Stash

So, I have a bunch of ideas for Guild Halls lately, and I remember an event a while back that was called the "Homecoming Celebration" and it celebrated the major Guild Hall change. See release notes 2012-11-14 for details. We've not had one of these in a while and I'd like to see it again - and I'd like for it to always be Guild or at least social related, so players can expect playerbase-focused updates around the time of a Homecoming Celebration.

It's sorta close to that time of year, so I feel like posting these now. Ignoring the fact that this sort of thing can take ages to code. Hey, at least I'm posting earlier than the time it used to happen! >,..,> Anyway....

I'll be submitting these ideas in Parts over the next several days/weeks as I have time. Some of them will not be liked, I'm pretty sure. Many of them incorporate suggestions made by others before, some of them many times, with my own twist on the idea(s).

Obviously I don't want ALL of them in one Homecoming event, that would be too overwhelming. Just something, you know?

Focus of this part is on:

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Guild Stash: the sharing of items.

This is the one I think people won't like at all. But this is the suggestions tread, and darn it, I'm gonna suggest it >:O

Guild Stash:

I think in the long, long run it will be very good for the game, and everyone.

I've been thinking about OOO's just...absolute avalanche of promo boxes. Items in these boxes are "limited," yes, that's part of the market strategy. But they're so brief, and so abundant, that each individual thing gets lost in it all, and long-term? This strategy is not as profitable as other strategies. Reason being, things are just forgotten. I try my best to maintain the wiki regarding all these aesthetics, but this is essentially just data storage. New and returning players are not very likely to figure out that, say, the celestial shield even exists unless they're bored and looking through the shield/news list or happen to see it in Haven. So there's no chance they might spend money on it, if they don't know it exists. Right?

With this guild stash, things will change big time. It is kinda...advertising with longevity. Perhaps with this, we could get fewer promos and more events because OOO will get a higher money trickle from released promos than before. That is a hope of mine, anyway. I dream of slooms and more content.

So here I go with this idea pitch:

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First, some major changes:

Empty Halls:
If the last member of a guild leaves the guild, the guild's hall automatically goes up for Hall Auction, with a starting bid at its upkeep. The time is infinite until someone bids, after which the auction lasts a week. The winner is the Master of the guild and hall. You can only bid if you're not in a guild. Guild name change passes make this better. Reasoning: we invest a lot in a hall. I don't like the idea of that effort and money vanishing into nothing because some guild master decided to start a new guild or whatever. With the guild stash, a lot more, a whole lot more, will be invested. The previous hall owner(s) do not get any money from this auction (unlike the standard auction house). You've consigned your hall to HQ if everyone in the guild is gone, and Spiral HQ uses that money on...HQ stuff. Game Logic.

PvP:
Part of social changes really. Players can now "represent" another guild for GvG. The PvP stats for this will be separated from the rest, to "represented" category (vs. pure guild vs guild with no representation, so hardcore PvP guilds can have their numbers) purpose of this is to allow desired matches to occur with specific groups and planned teams, without having to try and set this up with a random team or guild subbing. Subbing, with the guild stash, will be a really really bad idea, and "representation" will be absolutely vital because of the stash. Representation lasts 12 hours or until you represent another guild. You can only represent one guild at a time. If you are not representing, you essentially represent your own guild, or if guildless, yourself.
You can represent a guild if you recieve a representation invite from a veteran+ of a guild. Quing will ensue as usual, as if you were in the guild you're representing. You have the option to ignore any and all representation invites in the options menu, because this sort of thing will be VERY annoying junk mail for sure in a lot of inboxes.

Leaving a Guild:
Leaving a guild is done one way only: social options menu, big red button that says "leave guild" and then says "are you sure."
Reason: I've had plenty of guildies say they've almost accidentally left the guild when trying to leave or enter the hall through the social guild menus.
With the guild stash mechanics? yikes. Leaving a guild is no mistake now. Because the consequences in relation to the stash are quite serious.

Accessories:
This is crazy. Bear with me. This is inspired by, again, Warframe, which I feel does a TON of things right. Just so much. I know this is SK, and not WF, but we usually learn and improve via comparison. *takes a deep breath* here it goes:

Accessories will no longer be attached with superglue by Bechamel. Bechamel talked with Biotech Hahn and figured out that magnets are a thing, so accessories are now attached with magnets. Meaning that they can pop on and off, of any armor/helm, for free, without destroying them, by the player. Bechamel now sells silver keys and lockboxes for tokens, perhaps, so the NPC still has a function. Just throwing that out there. Anyway, this will be facilitated by a new UI panel in the inspect window, called "Appearance." Again, there are SO many accessories that are just forgotten about or already bought, so money is in the past and limited in the future. With this, future won't be so limited - players might desire published aesthetics, and OOO can spend more time on content/events instead of promos (I dream). And honestly? I think in the long run OOO will profit more from this setup in the long run: players won't desire more than one copy of an item, sure, but they'd probably be more willing to go after more accessories because of this. We'd just have to see. A lot of merchants will weep. Putting this update in would make all attached accessories pop off into players' inventories in the "accessory" arsenal tab. Major market derps. Oh the not-really-physically-painful-pain of market derps. Yeah, like I said, crazy.

Warframe does it this way. You buy an accessory, you can stick it on or take it off of any frame at any time. And they don't even have a ton of aesthetics! SK has like, BILLIONS. I say we try this out.

Please take a gander at this potential UI I spruced up. Pretty neat that it feels like it could totally fuse into our current UI, heh? Yeah, I like this idea a lot. Each accessory could use its own icon, like they did with gear/costumes. Oh, work, right, people don't like doing that do they?

*hides behind dread skelly shield from the "omg no dracora they will absolutely never do this" barrage of comments.* Oh you're not gonna like the stash one bit if you don't like this "one accessory, many outfits" idea.

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The Guild Stash

The Guild's Hall has a Command Console. The Command Console grants access to Storage, Design Mode, and Guild history. It allows treasury deposits.
It will now have a Guild Stash in addition to these other things. The Guild Stash is how Guild members can share items with each other, without unbinding fees.

Yes, this includes accessories, costumes, gear, and most battle sprites.

I know, I'm crazy. Someone's already trying to put a straightjacket on me. Here's the mental picture:

The celestial shield. Not a reskin. Infuriatingly locked behind a paywall. But your guild has many members. One of them unboxed this shield.
That member can choose to deposit the celestial shield into the Guild Stash. Any guild member that is able to equip 5* items (even guild masters who are too low star level cannot equip items beyond star restriction - situation entirely possible) can use the shield whenever they want, so long as nobody else is using it. They can only use it, not sell it etc. Obviously. Your guild has all the luck you need! (probably).

The shield shows up in every guild member's individual arsenal, marked with a green guild shield symbol where the "blue bound diamond" normally is.
It can be incorporated into loadouts. Similar to trinkets, if someone is using the shield and you equip a loadout with that shield in the loadout data, the loadout equips everything it can. Like if you made a loadout with trinkets, then your trinket slots expire, your loadout equips everything but the trinkets. Same thing with guild stuff.

Items equipped from the guild stash will automatically pop back into the stash when the person who's equipped them logs off (or equips something else). Because of this, guild members logging in will always be wearing their proto armor.

Some safeguards:

-once an item is deposited in the stash, it's pretty much stuck there. But not entirely!

-The game remembers who put what into the stash:

-If a member is kicked out of a guild, anything they put into the stash is automatically returned to them.

-If a member leaves a guild, their link to their stuff is severed, so even if they come back in and are kicked, their stuff is stuck in the Stash.

-This way, a kindly officer can kick their friend out of a guild in case the Guild Master goes crazy and there's less suffering.

-This way, someone joins a guild, and deposits, they'll probably stick around longer.

-This way, a bad GM or group can't just steal items by kicking the people who shared them out.

-If a guild master kicks everyone out of the guild and then leaves, any items retaining links to owners will be returned to owners via mail and the hall goes up for Mega Auction.

Once an item is in the stash, it can't be modified in any way while it's in the stash. Be sure an item has the final UVs you want on it before putting it in.
You can ask an officer or GM to kick you from the guild so you can get your stuff back, punch roll it as desired, then put it back.
I like to put in safeguards :3

The battle sprite you chose for the "Eternal Bond" mission cannot be shared in the stash. Any other sprite can. Your proto armor cannot be stored in the stash.

An item cannot have accessories on it and be in the stash. Because they all popped off remember? *digs into the ground and covers hole with shield.*

The Stash has a row-slot for every depositable item in the game, including accessories.

And now here's the part that forum people REALLY won't like (probably). You can just equip those accessories like costumes, easily. See the image I linked to above. Shared around the guild via the stash. With all members.

Inspired by how warframe cosmetics work - you have a shoulder thing? It can go on ANY frame, you only need to buy it once, no recovery or destroying involved at all. Now, I know that's warframe, and this is SK. But SK could work this way, and IMO, it sort of needs to: because there's a darn lot of accessories and a darn lot of costumes and a darn lot of gear, and as each new costume or accessory comes out, things might fit better on the new stuff. It would advertise to new and returning players things that exist, and really be a sort of teaser - stick around and get your own!

Now, you might say, OOO makes money with people recovering acc and putting them on something else. I think that yes, this is true, but! A lot of players also don't bother with this sort of thing, giving up on the new stuff because recovery is not an economic choice for them. More players might unbox more boxes if they know that they can share it with the guild and put it on any armor/helm they want, when they otherwise might not have bothered. We'd have to see how the economics play out.

The guild stash is sort of a long-term advertising mechanism. People with access to a stash can easily peruse and wear the lovely treasures of the past, and will very likely want to get one of their own "just in case" and buy into the game/play more of the game to earn cr for their own copy. When otherwise they wouldn't have even known the item existed. This is on many levels - 0 knowledge. Or... Seeing something on someone who's got private inspect. Without taking a while looking through pictures on the wiki...or asking someone what something is... How would you search on the AH for something you didn't know the name of? At 0 knowledge, you wouldn't even search of course. I think you get the picture here.

Stash Limits
The stash has a slot for everything in the game that can be deposited into the stash. Infuriatingly, you can see these slots (in the command console's stash UI) even if they're empty. This might set some guilds into a collection frenzy mode. I know I would be tempted.

The first Stash upgrade has 1 slot per item (this is general - like two vog cub coats with different UVs are considered the same type of item by the stash). The second has two slots per item.
third, 3,
and up to 5.

So you could share like, five vog cub coats with different UVs at this point, along with 5 of anything else. Each stash upgrade is unlocked with wing upgrades - both 1F wings, first stash unlocked, etc. If the guild removes wings, the stash locks. Items are retained, merely inaccessible. Stash is locked when guild fails to pay upkeep. Stash upgrades obviously would cost a ton of crowns. like a ton. so much. I mean think about the power here.

Stash could also be called "armory," "hoard," etc.

Storage is essentially a trust test at this point, what with a guild alchemy machine drawing from the treasury in the other parts of this idea.

OOO could easily just do accessory slot upgrades that expire, like trinket slot upgrades, or make it so items can't be shared in the stash until 3 months after their release into the game, etc.

Costumes (and accessories, with this idea) should be able to be unbound at Vise. What price would be fair for a costume, vs. a functional 0 (or 5 etc.) star armor?

------Pros/Cons------
Cons:
complete player market crash for accessories. like rekt.
huge pressure to join a guild now, a lot of people don't like that.
property risks - don't donate to the stash of a guild you don't trust.

Pros:
players are happier because items are shared.
More items are known about by more players because they're accessible in the guild stash, when otherwise the players might not have known the items even existed, nor would have had any prodding to know.
OOO might benefit in the long run due to these factors, we'd have to see.
Less complaining about rare odds - sadly, OOO would probably make things MORE rare in the boxes because of the guild population spread, but maybe not, to keep it fair for the guildless.
Players who wish to become dormant but keep their stuff for future playing can "leave a legacy" while they're gone. A useful legacy.

------To readers------

Please avoid saying things like "OOO will never do this" etc. I want user opinions about the game/feedback for this. +/- 1 based on how you think it will be for the players. Please post ideas about cost/time parameters and so on!

This is probably the most ridiculous idea I've ever come up with in terms of "OOO will never bloody do this ever."

But as I said, this is a suggestions forum, and I'm gonna suggest in it, darn it! D:<