Friday, April 17, 2009

Guns for Hire


The idea of Mercenaries in WoW has intrigued me for a long time. You really dont see a lot of Mercenary activity in WoW. The closest thing I have seen is Hijacking a Raid I.D. when the original group did not feel like going on that night. This is not about Ninja looting etc. This is about getting paid gold to use your skills.


I have had this idea to start a Mercenary guild for several years. It would basically be a group of skilled players who would hire out their services to PuGs. Obviously, you could not have a bunch of scrubs because you would quickly get a bad reputation, and who would pay for crap. You could charge X amount per instance plus repair bills. The players would be contracted out and give a small percentage back to the guild bank. You could charge different amounts for different things. For a run thru of a low level Dungeon, you could charge X amount plus all of the cloth drops or the non-useable green drops. For higher level instances, a flat fee plus a number of blue or green drops.


With content the way it is, it would be fairly difficult to get something like this running. I would imagine that much of the usiness would come from running lower level people through old istances. A small guild may need a little help with Naxx. Charge them a flat rate, or a BoE epic drop.


In this guild, there would be no guild runs. There would only be free-lancing. You could do whatever instance you wanted, assuming you got a share of the loot.


Like I have already said, I am not sure how this would work. The idea just intrigued me. Would people be willing to pay for these kinds of services? In the real world, there are places that will pay for heavily aremed mercenaries to get what they want. We could probably have something like that in WoW as well.


The second idea I had for a Mercenary Guild would mostly have to do with a PvP server. It would be sort of a Bounty Hunter type thing. Someone from your faction puts a bounty on someone and pays you the appropriate amount. You then go kill that person and screenshot it as truth. Extra money involved for multiple gankings. Say you are leveling out in STV and some player several levels higher keeps on ganking you. Call in the A-Team. You get in touch with one of the mercenaries, set up a price and conditions, and enjoy the carnage as several people come to your aid and smash the ganker to bits over and over again.


Again, this is just an idea I had. There may already be something out there like this in WoW. Let me know what you think. Would this be a feasible business or would it be a complete failiure. Would you pay for low level boosting or high level help in places you may be stuck?

7 comments:

Nim said...

I think that's a fantastic idea and it's something I think I'd really enjoy.

Consider a tank/healer team that ran DPS through 5-mans for money. Quick, efficient and possibly profitable.

There was a guild on ER that used to sell slots on it's ZA bear run every once in a while.

If a mercenary guild could get a good enough repuatation, I think it could work.

Anonymous said...

I like this idea! In addition, lowbies might be willing to pay X per hour to have a higher-level toon guard them while leveling. So in addition to gank-for-hire services, you could also charge 5 gold per hour (or whatever) to have an 80 help you level someplace tough like STV or Tanaris while keeping you safe. Of course, you'd have to have some contingency clauses (if three 80s roll up and flatten you, there's not much you can do about it), but it's a great idea.

Billy Wallace said...

I love the pvp part of it. I never could get into Eve online, but their bounty system seemed pretty cool.

Another obstacle is charging enough to make it worthwhile. The 5 gold per hour to help levling is a joke when I can do a 5 minute daily and get 12g.

There have been times, however, where I was getting completely locked down by campers, and I would have paid a few hundred gold to reverse the tide. (Read: Level 40 warrior with crap gear vs full epic 70 shadow priest. That a-hole ganked me 14 times. I couldn't get away no matter what I tried.)

Anonymous said...

While not truly a mercenary guild, the best PvE horde guild on my server in Vanilla WoW would regularly sell MC and Later BWL runs for gold.

They would carry anyone who paid the fee through the instance with them and let them have any drops they could use. The fee was quite high but I'm sure it was nice to have guild funded repairs and consumables back in the day while trying to progress through AQ40 and Naxx.

I believe they even held a contest durring the opening of AQ rewarding whoever sent them the most stranglekelp with a full MC run.

Arioch said...

I've seen ads for this!

My gmail account tries to be helpful and links related ads in the header and one was for WoW Mercs. If I see it again I'll snag the address.

Heywood Djiblomi said...

Guild: WoW Mercs
Realm: Black Dragonflight

Maybe?

Arioch said...

Found it!

Doesn't look like there is much information you can get on the website without making an account, but the google ad reads:

Mercs for Hire - www.finklesnork.com - Need a Tank, Healer or DPS? Book with FinkleSWAT - We Can Help