I was just thinking as I stood aboard my guild's airship that something could to be done to make the whole experience a little more dynamic. I found myself thinking back to some of the airship battles in old Final Fantasy games and how much more technology we have now. So I got to thinking that an interesting idea for a new adventure pack could be involving our awesome guild airships. Something like quests where a guild would have to defend our airship from, say, attacking mercenaries or a portal from Xoriat. I recall a TBC mission where we have to attack and board another ship while defending our own. The quest-lines could even involve some of the NPC's on board the ships. A good example would be the beholder navigator, or even House Lyrandar. It could be tied to the favor system so if you do quests from a House P NPC it could give House P favor. It would be a good way to get guilds together more often and get more people to join guilds.

A large issue I see is level difference between guild members. Many players are mid-TR or leveling alts or are new. Not everyone has a 20 to bring. There would have to be a level scaling system that would bring lower players up to high, but not give them the feats/powers/spells etc. A lvl 2 would have the HP/SP/saves/BAB etc of a lvl 20 of their main class but not have new feats and such. It would certainly take more balancing than just that to make lowbies useful but it's the base of how to get it.

Now I feel and I'm sure many would agree that there are lots of people on DDO who don't join guilds or don't have large airships. While I feel it's good to encourage players to join a guild it's not so good to exclude those that don't want a guild, from an entire adventure pack. Guilds should have the option to pug players if they so choose so anyone can join. It would also need to be either cheap or F2P due to many guilds having a large mix of free, premium and vip players. The profit for Turbine would lie in the time sink players would invest into it while not accomplishing the rest of the game.

The other issue is incentive. Why do we want to do this other than just for jollies? Turbine has gone through great lengths to prevent power leveling in the usual MMO sense and so we can't just set up an unlimited xp zerg line that lvl 20's run all the scrubs through for mass xp. The quest xp should be mediocre or scale based on how many 20's are there. So a group with a max lvl of 8 would get way more xp than a group w/ a max lvl of 20 but the group w/ the 20's would have an easier time. Another thing would be possibly removing XP but having high favor rewards and new items. Another would be keeping the items, making scaling for lvl's 1-19, and just adding an Epic mode for all the overgeared uberpowerful guilds who have the 20's to pull it off.

I think the amount of quest options to be quite high and the idea of bringing guilds together more often and encouraging team play are good for profit as far as a business perspective goes. The amount of time sink Turbine could get would be much higher than the current airship system. We just do what we always did and play the game to lvl our guilds up. No time sink whatsoever. If the quests are engaging enough and the loot good enough people will keep running these quests, and sink lots of time into it. Then as people do the quests they would keep getting more guild renown thus unlocking more ship NPC's and getting more quests. The options would be almost too many. If Turbine really wanted to cash in they could make the first couple batches free and then the high end stuff for high lvl guilds to cost TP.

Anyways sorry thats so longwinded, feedback would be appreciated.