Hi HN! I'm Eli, the founder of Guilded (<a href="http://www.guilded.gg" rel="nofollow">http://www.guilded.gg</a>), part of YC's Summer '17 batch. Guilded helps online gaming teams recruit, improve, and compete.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions!
This looks a fair amount like Guildwork (<a href="http://guildwork.com/" rel="nofollow">http://guildwork.com/</a>), 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>... "So tired of laning with bads"...<p>... "Map talk mittengard is terrible"...<p>... "Why do you want to join Rage Force?"...<p>... "You decide who makes the cut"... "Talent on the market"...<p>Look at Discord for an example of capturing the fun, whimsical spirit of gaming and exploration.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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)).<p>Hope you don't mind the feedback! Good luck! These types of ideas are certainly interesting.
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.
I knew I recognized your name from somewhere! Presumably you are the iEchoic of <a href="http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_(vs._Terran)" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/IEchoic_Build_(vs._Ter...</a> fame? :)<p>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!
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.
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.<p>We failed for a whole bunch of reasons but love the idea. I think you have the timing right on this. Good luck.
This looks really cool (and I'm not a hardcore gamer) but avid Discord user for things like Zwift.<p>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.
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.<p>this type of thing would make us absolutely use the platform<p>edit:
also drop the colon after "Dota"
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).<p>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?
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?<p>[1] <a href="https://tracker.network" rel="nofollow">https://tracker.network</a>