Guilds Redux

[Zarkral]

nah thats why i said bind. so they cant just hand it over.

But they could hand the loot from the OAD over, or should we make all OAD loot bind on pickup too?

[Terron]

u can do whatever you want with the loot. the whole system is about keeping the keys fights balanced, not what they do with the loot. just needs to be made so 4 can fight 5 instead of 4 fight 10+ where they choose to ignore it instead.

people dont want to log on and fight 10 people. sad part of it is, those 10 people are always on at the same times throughout the week. so if you are a player that logs on and see 10 enemies online, you will inevitably see it that way 99% of your logins. same can be said with the oad structure. you log in everyday from A to B and every single day you get to do, or watch some other group do, the same oad(s) and there is ZERO randomness day to day.

on one hand you have europeans complaining they get no events, on the other you get eastern americans saying they get no oads because euros can complete the majority of oads 5-12 pm GMT before americans even get out of work.

[Zarkral]

I don't think we disagree on the issue or the goal. But just limiting accounts from a guild in a room can be abused by splitting. And binding the key to one guild is not an effective penalty as long as the loot can be traded.

[anthriel]

I don't think this is easily solved by just cutting the guild size limit. All the incentives that made those guilds would still be around. Pretty much all current group content is an incentive to shape the player base into two big blocks. I think the core issue is that If you got 60% of the active players on your side you get 99% of the kills, loots, rewards or whatever you are aiming at, while the other 40% gets stomped. Even though some effort has been put into solo content at max level (dailies, long solo quests for endgame gear) to counter balanced that, we are probably not quite there yet.

Ideally if you had 60% of the players, you should get about 60% of the reward. So lets just remove all those incentives? Be gone everything that is mainly decided by numbers, that means all OAD key fight, dragons etc. There wouldn't be much game left.

I suppose you could gain OAD keys from daily/weekly quests, limit OADs to one guild at a time (bosses could spawn when key is used), dragons could act like the Devourer event and no more world events with full pvp at bosses.

I don't particularly like the idea of removing so much pvp content, but I struggle to see another way to get rid of the incentives for people to form into two big groups.

i am definitely against just making guilds boot people. thats not even right. and i play solo and still feel that way.

@zarkral @terron

I am totally in agreement that we dont want to just make guilds boot people or make weird changes that result in removing the PVP of the game (eg make everything like the devourer)

I do think there is a way to effectively cut guild sizes without forcing booting or without getting rid of good PVP competitiveness between guilds.

This has been mentioned in the system here viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1512
.... basically its an incentive system that gives guilds points for being active (rather than idling) and rewards guilds weekly in PP/herocoins (or some other valuable commodity like champ marks etc) .... however the scale of the rewards are such that it incentives forming more guilds.

For example
1st place guild get 10 copper herocoins that week
2nd place gets 9 copper herocoins that week
3rd place gets 8 copper herocoins that week
4th gets 7 herocoins etc....

Under this system you'd currently have something like 100accts in silh sharing 10 herocoins p/w and 50accts in empire sharing 9 herocoins per week with Utopia getting 8herocoins p/w, Jeff & Angie (Torm) getting 7 herocoins per week, piddy (thieves guild) getting 6 herocoins p/w all to himself, and mort (shady acres) & myself (ronin) probably getting 5 & 4 herocoins p/w all to ourselves.... sooner or later some of those 100 silh and 50 empire accts are going to think "damn if we just split off and form our own 5-10man guild we can collect those herocoins that are currently going to piddy/mort/anthriel (or even utopia) pretty easily".... and voila! --> non-forced guild diversity that doesnt destroy PVP (but actually promotes more competition!) ... this results in more balanced guild numbers as guilds are forced to weigh up the decision of adding additional numbers with the fact that there is then more ppl to split the rewards with (how it should be rather than just trying to get 60% of active players to take 100% of game's loot as Zarkral put it).

[for more fleshed out description of the idea, see the post link]

So far, no1 has been able to point out why this proposal is not going to cause favorable outcomes. Ppl did originally argue that PP would be given away too easily but thats just hypocritical in light of current 'giveaway' events (loser's moshes, everyone gets PP events etc) and the fact that currently PP is so unevenly skewed to some timezones. The only real reason i can fathom why some ppl dont want this (and have argued against it previously) is because it breaks down existing power structures which many have vested interests in (to the detriment of the game's/playerbase's growth imho).

[Terron]

incentives are nice but the incentives should be doing the oads. you gve people too many options to gather purples and noone has to log on to play other than set times. it reminds me of a phone game log in at 6 and open your mystery box. im not entirely against an incentive system but i kind of think pp and champs marks hit that category.

you shouldnt get huge bonuses or penalties for guild size. they should just restrict the amount of influence huge guilds get in the key fights. then the incentive is already there. a guild of 15 people gets to use 5 characters to outfit 15 players. a guild of 4 or 5 gets to split gear with only 4 or 5 people.

[anthriel]

incentives are nice but the incentives should be doing the oads. you gve people too many options to gather purples and noone has to log on to play other than set times. it reminds me of a phone game log in at 6 and open your mystery box. im not entirely against an incentive system but i kind of think pp and champs marks hit that category.

you shouldnt get huge bonuses or penalties for guild size. they should just restrict the amount of influence huge guilds get in the key fights. then the incentive is already there. a guild of 15 people gets to use 5 characters to outfit 15 players. a guild of 4 or 5 gets to split gear with only 4 or 5 people.

true that we dont want ppl getting free PP for nothing.... but if you read my proposal (in the full proposal linked) i was proposing that in order to gain the guild rank points (to access the weekly PP rewards) the guilds need to be active... i.e. it is coded so that every exp-related activity is given an activity point value that is accumulated by the guild (eg a member killing a frog may be 5 activity points, robbing a mob might be 1 activity point, killing a raider may be 20 activity points, doing the entire mana caverns OAD may result in a total of 5000 activity points for guild, completing quest #256 may give 400 points etc... all these activities adding up over the week to form the guild rank leaderboard... or alternatively to assigning different points just have the server tally up total exp achieved by the guild tho it may need to count that accumulated by 25ers) .... so your guild still needs to be active in order to gain the ranks required to access the PP rewards (ie you will likely still need to be doing some OADing, questing or lvling and you cant just sit idle in a tavern all day and expect to gain the rewards).... in fact i think that this would promote more activity really.

It just then changes the "bigger numbers = better" dynamic to a more interesting/balanced dynamic of finding the optimal guild size enough players to get on the leaderboard but not too many that you have to share rewards too thinly. Eg the 5 most active players who play 20hrs a day may form a guild and rank #3 (splitting 8 herocoins between 5 them each week) wheras it may take a guild of 20 casuals playing 5hrs a day to attain the amount of activity to get rank #2 (splitting 9 herocoins between 20 each week). And the guild diversity also opens things up to more "grey" factions, more diplomacy, more competition etc etc

[Terron]

@zark loot is a separate issue entirely for me. its relatively easy to acquire. whats out there is already out there at this point. however, if future oads are balanced so that any group having 5 numbers has a shot, there will be no hoarded loot. if groups acquire enough loot to just feed other players blues and purples, than it is, an obvious fact, the drop rates are too high.

@antharial definite merit to an incentive system. just at the current time it just sounds like we should all merge into 1 solid guild and benefit, because small guilds dont stand a chance atm. if guild issues are fixed then incentive systems would be grand.

[daedroth]

I used to be against the merit system, can't remember why now... (i think I saw it as a "gold star participation award" system).
I have revised my opinion though

My thoughts, aka brainstorming

OADS:
I think Terron, or maybe someone else, mentioned before about "instances".
My thoughts... Might be ok (with the new one account thing coming out and accounts being limited to one clan), each clan has an instance, a clan can only do/attempt a oad... well once a day (keys could be worked so that they were one use, if you fail tough luck, come back again tomorrow). But this means EACH clan can attempt on their own instance.
Smaller clan would off course still struggle if they do no have the numbers.
Possible problem: Certain people will try to work around the limitations with alternate accounts and clans (so it will largely depend on how successful the one account thing will be). Also lack of competition (there isn't much pvp now as it is).

Incentive Scheme (Anthriel idea):
How will it work, will there be a limit on the amount of clans who will be awarded points? I am guessing so.
The points would mean that bigger clans would get less (more people to divide the points around). Difficulty would be points vs reward balancing.
This may lead to the same problem as instances "Certain people will try to work around the limitations with alternate accounts and clans (so it will largely depend on how successful the one account thing will be)."

More solo/small group things to do:
Quest chains (Piddy again was it? apologies if it wasn't) for items. Decent enough idea, it would kinda be like crafting too (I forsee it would involve: "go there, get this, kill that").
Crafting: Gather enough ingredients to make your own gear. Level 1 - 25 gear available. The higher the level the more crafting materials (or possibly rarer materials needed). It should be possible for anyone to do this. Grinding though eh, but can't have everything for free.

PvP:
Some kind of event that involves the choice of sides (some alliance, at most 2 factions or it could get lopsided). Something like a raid system, it could/should be linked to crystal control. Something to encourage more PvP action. Might even have just a person count limit for both sides, a special map, capture the flag... i dont know.
Points tallied at the end of the week (though kills, control crystal capture, specific quests made for the raid completed etc), reward points divided between participants/clans based on how successful their side was).
Once a month, lasts for a week?

There is also the dailies (CM) and events (PP) already in existence. Dailies could have expanded rewards and more quests, maybe SLIGHT increase in reward cost to reflect more quests. Events is more tricky, because this involves staff members and their own personal time.

PS. I still want to see quests/dailies made more universal in their level requirements (based on item level requirements: 1+, 8+ 15+ 20+ 25). You know it makes sense!
...
Right?

[Terron]

im pretty sure over time, we will get a little bit of most of these. all are good ideas and have benefits.