It's kind of ridiculous to suggest deepening the already deep side quest lines revolving around the guilds in the Elder Scrolls games which are already packed with so much content. But it would be really interesting if the game let you focus entirely on, say the Mages guild, and gave you the ability to focus hundreds of hours on that alone if you chose to. Obviously the developers can only invest so much time across the board so how could they extend the guilds beyond the line of quests put into them?

When I finished the Fighters Guild in Oblivion and realized that I could come back after so many in game days to take money and or weapons/armor based on the objectives I set lower ranking guild members on, it made me wish there was a way to keep advancing, upgrading, developing the guild in ways similar to my own character. I think if they could come up with a dozen or half dozen randomly generated objectives that mix up enemy types, locations, rewards, that could really let you perpetuate the guild experience. I also think if there were rankings viewable online that you could level up depending on number of quests completed, additional members taken into the guild, upgrades to the guild halls, etc, that could be a lot of fun. So here's a small list of ideas relating to the Fighters Guild to give examples on how this could work.

- Guild Hall upgrades including new weapons, armor in the armory/training hall. structural differences including new wings, more rooms for new members.

- Ability to recruit new members and assign specific missions that could involve an assortment of half a dozen randomly generated objectives, each type of objective could result in different types of rewards.

- Depending on types of missions you send recruits on, their own stats will level up, giving you the ability to tailor your own small army of Fighters guild members to your design. Could involve sending guild members on combat missions with swords instead of axes and their skills in sword will go up after so many in game missions. To give purpose to this, there could be perks, incentives to advance guild members, unlock new armor types, weapons, etc.

- A rank title or simple level number that goes up after so many points earned from recruiting new members, participating in randomly generated missions and other guild related objectives. Could be shared online to create a competitive nature, similar to how Red Dead Redemption lets you see your ranking in certain combat objectives compared to all other players.

Sounds interesting. I dont mind it.

Decent idea, deserves discussion.

This smells ridiculously of "online desperation" of the sort that will do anything, no matter how extreme, to get "online" incorporated at any level even if it's not multiplayer per se.

So, your guild in a solely single-player game would gain ranks and things based on its performance compared to all the other Fighter's Guilds in all the *cough* other Skyrims? Nah, I don't think so. Blows the whole one single-player world idea in multiple ways IMO.

The only online component would be the option to share your ranking level against all other players. For players that would want to invest a vast amount of time into developing a guild, it would function like a high score wall. The online isn't really relevant to the overall ideas I'm suggesting, it would just be one small way to encourage advancing your guild for those who get into the competitive nature of ranks, high scores.

Yeah I really like the whole managing, I hated how it was just "Congratulations, you are now our leader!... (and there's nothing left for you to do)" with guilds, I'm not so sure on the leaderboard thing, would probably mess up/with mods as well