
Launch HN: Guilded (YC S17) – Power-Ups for Gaming Teams - iEchoic
https://www.guilded.gg
======
iEchoic
Hi HN! I'm Eli, the founder of Guilded
([http://www.guilded.gg](http://www.guilded.gg)), part of YC's Summer '17
batch. Guilded helps online gaming teams recruit, improve, and compete.

I've been a gamer my whole life, and I made Guilded because I was tired of
using clunky website builders, random recruiting forums, and Google
Calendar/Docs to manage my teams. I thought it was kind of crazy that in a
world where hundreds of millions of people play team-based online games, it's
still hard to find the right people to play with, still difficult to
collaborate on strategies and organize your team's schedule, and still hard to
find the right competition for your team. Players are stuck with whatever
tools the developer was able to fit into the game (often none) or whatever
forums and game-specific and platform-specific tools have come along.

Guilded launched recently and is still in beta, but over the last two months,
it's become the most popular recruiting platform on the web for Overwatch
teams, and has picked up a lot of traction in some MMO communities as well.

I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions!

~~~
JoshTriplett
Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference
to gaming guilds)?

I'm always amused by names rich in puns and wordplay, but at the same time
curious whether they impede adoption at all through ambiguity. Then again, if
it's primarily shared and mentioned through writing online, then that's
probably less of a concern.

A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider
picking it up as a redirect, just in case.

Apart from that, this looks impressively integrated. Do you integrate with
Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag guild members with roles in
Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People could connect their Guilded
account to their Twitch account, and check a box like "automatically grant
[mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders / people designated as global
mods by the guild]".

Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration
with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for instance,
tabletop gaming)? The team coordination, communication, and storage features
seem useful for that, for instance.

~~~
iEchoic
> Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference
> to gaming guilds)?

Yup. It's a play on the terms "Guild" (gaming guilds) and "Gilded" (to cover
with gold). This inspired the gold brand colors/identity.

> A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider
> picking it up as a redirect, just in case.

Thank you for the tip! Just grabbed it.

> Do you integrate with Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag
> guild members with roles in Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People
> could connect their Guilded account to their Twitch account, and check a box
> like "automatically grant [mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders /
> people designated as global mods by the guild]".

Yeah, we have some basic Twitch integration right now. You can connect your
Twitch account and it'll show when you're live and import your past streams.
That's a great idea, though, and is something that I think is definitely
consistent with the product goals.

> Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration
> with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for
> instance, tabletop gaming)?

One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's
atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have
generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working on
expanding the game catalog over time.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's
> atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have
> generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working
> on expanding the game catalog over time.

Fair enough. This is probably too far from your primary mission, then, but I
will say that I wish there was a service that did what you do, for tabletop
RPGs. Something that makes it easy to organize games, track character sheets
and setting documents, provide maps, keep logs of events (including markers on
maps), facilitate between-session communication and compartmentalized
communication (GM/player), and so on.

I haven't seen a service that offers all of those things with good
integration.

~~~
shostack
It might not be quite what you're looking for, but our group started using
Roll20 recently. It has some quirks and is missing some spell data, but it is
very customizable and includes online video chat. Think "Google Hangouts meets
D&D."

~~~
JoshTriplett
I've used roll20, but I don't find it very useful for non-virtual roleplaying.
I'm looking for something that integrates calendaring, drive, etc; meanwhile,
video chat is not particularly valuable.

------
Deimorz
This looks a fair amount like Guildwork
([http://guildwork.com/](http://guildwork.com/)), which I remember trying to
do a fairly similar thing a few years back (but aimed more specifically at
MMORPGs, I think). The founder of Guildwork is actually the CTO of Discord
now. It's good to see someone else working on a similar idea, I think it's a
space with a lot of potential.

Guilded looks really nice from what I can see while clicking around the site
randomly a bit. Congratulations on getting it to the beta stage, it looks
extremely impressive for something to have built mostly solo.

One fairly minor suggestion: I think it would probably be good to replace some
of the screenshots in the carousel at the top of the landing page with more
carefully selected ones. They're the very first "glimpse of the site" for
someone new visiting guilded.gg, so they're the first impression of what the
site will be like. And the very first thing they see right now is the Dota 2
screenshot with a large "So tired of laning with bads". Then it cycles to the
WoT one that's also showing someone complaining. I think that just gives a bit
of a negative initial feeling. Also, if Overwatch is one of your main focuses,
having a screenshot in there with something more in-depth than "Overwatch
RELEASE!" would probably help to show that off as well.

~~~
Vishnevskiy
What's funny is I got rejected from YC with Guildwork years ago. After
flailing around trying to make it work I reflected on why it didn't work,
Discord was the result. :)

~~~
Deimorz
Ha, interesting. Glad to see you doing so well with Discord, I used to spend a
ton of time on the BG forums back in around 2009 or so, and vaguely remember
giving some feedback on the very first versions of Guildwork.

------
goodroot
Cool! There's definitely a need for something like this. I played competitive
Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one has successfully
replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc communities of the time.

Griping: Massively unimpressed with the presentation and branding. Gaming has
a ton of work to do to be considered a generally accessible and comfortable
place for people of all form. In your hero image, two of your images show
toxic commenting by people in the team channels and much of the wordage comes
across brusque-y.

... "So tired of laning with bads"...

... "Map talk mittengard is terrible"...

... "Why do you want to join Rage Force?"...

... "You decide who makes the cut"... "Talent on the market"...

Look at Discord for an example of capturing the fun, whimsical spirit of
gaming and exploration.

Guilded appears dark and intimidating. I am not at all encouraged to explore
and my desire for play is far from stoked. In fact, this is the kind of energy
that has sent me packing to the quiet confines of single-player gaming.

~~~
iEchoic
> I played competitive Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one
> has successfully replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc
> communities of the time.

Yeah, a site called Gamebattles was the closest for me back in the day. I
haven't found anything else that's captured that feeling yet, as they've
largely died off. About the screenshots, we threw together those as parodies a
long time ago and haven't gotten any feedback about them so I thought nobody
read them, heh. I agree that the landing page copy could use another pass,
thanks for the feedback.

~~~
goodroot
Cool. :)

Apologies for leaning into the negative aspects; the site struck a cord. I'm
deeply, deeply passionate about gaming. I think they need a loving, gentle-
touch and less of the hyper-masculine spirals of darkness.

May you use your powers of community forming to nurture comprehensive and
accepting goodness and less in stoking the truly boring, raging fires of
gaming negativity and elitism.

~~~
iEchoic
I totally agree. If you get a chance to try it out, let me know if you see
anything else that gives that vibe. If anything, I've been wondering if the
cute knight avatars everywhere and the bubbly GuildedBot dialogue make it a
little bit too "cute" in contrast with the games' atmosphere, so I think the
quoted sentences are just out-of-sync with the rest of the branding.

------
hkmurakami
Steam/Valve should really take note, since the monetization end game for any
kind of gaming user service (this, discord, etc) will be a game distribution
platform.

------
BinaryIdiot
Pretty interesting project and looks great! I see a platform filter; is this
targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment? Any plans to setup a way to
jump directly into a game with a group of people? I'm not sure how many games
support this but being able to click a button to jump into an existing game
would be pretty compelling.

Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong
mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like
squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).

Hope you don't mind the feedback! Good luck! These types of ideas are
certainly interesting.

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you! This is great feedback.

> is this targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment?

All platforms.

> Any plans to setup a way to jump directly into a game with a group of
> people?

Not yet, but I definitely think that's worth exploring. I think the first step
in that process is to build the capability to know when your team is playing.
Then, if everyone is playing except you, we can let you know that you can get
online now and group up with everyone. That alone would be valuable for a lot
of people, and if we could auto-join you that'd be even better.

> Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong
> mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like
> squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).

The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't scale
to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On the
other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority of
the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't know
what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons, allow
search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't
> scale to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On
> the other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority
> of the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't
> know what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons,
> allow search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.

Fair points. One strategy we've done is show the more important games _to the
user_ first and sort appropriately (pre-orders, installed, played, etc) but
that data is likely difficult to get, at least for a new user. But you could
show the games they own / primarily use first and go from there and / or
popular ones like you were suggesting.

You're a web app so drop downs are not as awkward as, say, on a console but I
still try to see if there are creative but intuitive ways to avoid them :)

------
danr4
Looks pretty good (also considering it's mostly a solo effort). I'd try to
stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and features
should vary greatly between them.

~~~
iEchoic
> I'd try to stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and
> features should vary greatly between them.

Agreed. Right now, I'm focusing on a few communities to make sure it works
really well for them before expanding the feature set to all games.

What's interesting though is that all of the site's features - even the ones
that look game-specific - cut horizontally across many games. For instance, we
recently added an Overwatch team comp builder. It turns out that every game
that has the notion of "balanced teams" can adapt that in the future, even if
they're not even the same genre. The same engine used to generate Overwatch
teams can be used to generate League of Legends, DotA, and Heroes of the Storm
teams. This is something I'm really excited about in the future.

------
lmitchell
I knew I recognized your name from somewhere! Presumably you are the iEchoic
of
[http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_(vs._Ter...](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_\(vs._Terran\))
fame? :)

Never knew you personally but I spent a lot of time lurking on TL after SC2
release, and further on into the Dota days, congrats on the launch!

------
jessemillar
I'm really, really excited about this, especially once you expand to other
games. I'm big on The Crew and Rocket League but am most active in Kingdom
Hearts Union χ and our party is terrible at being organized when it comes to
raid event scheduling. This could very easily solve that and integration with
Discord (which we already use) makes onboarding a breeze.

~~~
iEchoic
> This could very easily solve that and integration with Discord (which we
> already use) makes onboarding a breeze.

That's great to hear, that's exactly the idea. I haven't actually looked into
Kingdom Hearts Union at all, thanks for the tip.

------
pxlpshr
One of my first startup experiences was working for a company that built
aspects of this concept in 2007; match-making, server provisioning, and
competition/tournament workflows. We licensed it to id for Quake Live and
later Riot Games for what became League of Legends.

We failed for a whole bunch of reasons but love the idea. I think you have the
timing right on this. Good luck.

~~~
iEchoic
That's awesome, I'd love to hear more about your experience with that if you
don't mind me shooting you an email later. Thank you.

------
daveambrose
This looks really cool (and I'm not a hardcore gamer) but avid Discord user
for things like Zwift.

I'm curious: are there other use cases for Guilded outside of online gaming?
For instance, on Zwift, you can join certain races and clubs, but it's really
messy and happens primarily off their app (often in FB Groups). This seems
like a better use case.

~~~
iEchoic
I think the concept applies to many domains, but Guilded is 100% focused on
online gaming. It's definitely interesting to see Discord gain traction in
non-gaming circles, but I'm not planning on venturing there in the forseeable
future.

------
potion
running a dota team with mostly full time job having adults means a lot of
gymnastics around scheduling. Something that would be a game changer (that I
didn't see) is functionality in the calendar for future availability/suggested
times for events.

this type of thing would make us absolutely use the platform

edit: also drop the colon after "Dota"

~~~
iEchoic
Definitely! This is something I'm planning on building in the future. Not only
would it make finding times for scheduled events easier, but we could also
send you a notification automatically when you have a full team on (for
example) to queue.

Good catch on the Dota naming, will fix that now.

------
koolba
I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of
Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).

What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to
run their group or charging game developers for integration with the platform?

~~~
iEchoic
> I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of
> Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).

Yeah, that's pretty close. The main difference is that Guilded is less focused
on solving real-time communication for gamers, and more focused on exploring
collaborative tools like calendars, media albums, recruiting tools, and
analytics tools. We integrate with real-time comms tools (like Discord) to
make it easy to use both.

> What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to
> run their group or charging game developers for integration with the
> platform?

Subscriptions for premium features, paid cosmetic features (think guild
themes/skins, etc.), and sponsored events (using the integrated calendar) are
all things I'm exploring right now.

~~~
Nuzzerino
How is this different from existing services like Enjin?

~~~
iEchoic
Enjin was launched at a time when "website builders" were the only way to
really manage your team, and that's still what it is today. A few problems
with this approach:

1\. I might just want to have a team calendar, and I don't really want to
create a website to use a calendar any more than I want to create a website to
use Google Calendar. You can create a team and access all the tools on Guilded
in 10 seconds.

2\. Enjin has poor mobile support as a result of this philosophy, because
user-created websites on a desktop don't tend to work as well on mobile. They
certainly won't work well as an app.

3\. Because all of the features that Guilded teams use are integrated in a
first-class way, we can do really cool stuff with your network connections,
like share your updates to your Discord server, notify your team when you go
live on Twitch, etc. Many of Enjin's are third-party html/js/css, so they
don't have that level of control.

These problems are ones that I wanted to solve, and they were a large part of
the motivation to build this.

------
lwansbrough
This looks great. We're working on something at Tracker Network[1] that you
may find interesting, but it's still pretty early. Have you got an email I can
reach you at?

[1] [https://tracker.network](https://tracker.network)

~~~
iEchoic
Looks very cool! Email is in profile.

------
grahamperich
Really great idea, and nice product man. I am considering building something
similar for Overwatch specifically.

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you. I'd love to see what you build, Overwatch is really exciting right
now.

------
miiiiiike
Neat! The player search for Overwatch is way more involved than I expected..
How many people are on your team?

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you! I've been focusing a lot on Overwatch recently, I think the game
and the scene is really exciting right now. It's just me, but a close friend
did a lot of the design work, especially very early on.

~~~
miiiiiike
Alone? How long did that take? And.. Let me know if you need a 76.

------
Elect2
Nice site. But it keep a high cpu load for me.(macos+firefox)

------
davidbanham
Great to see another gaming startup on the .gg TLD!

------
gustaf
Congrats on the launch Eli! :)

~~~
iEchoic
Thanks! :)

