Doing the math: Guild Size vs. Renown

[geoffhanna]

This started as a personal quest to figure out how to unstuck my guild. We’re mired in the mid-40s and have been for months. There was a belief that we were too big; if we only pruned our size we’d be able to start advancing again.

Time to do the math. Fortunately, Turbine provides us with a flawed yet very helpful data source: the myDDO guild rankings. I captured the data Friday 3/25. It is quite fluid, in fact Over Raided gained another level while I was cutting and pasting!

Conclusions:

1. Almost all of the largest guilds are also high level
2. The vast majority of guilds in DDO are low level and are also very small

Conclusion one is not surprising to me at all. Regarding #2, I suspect that the vast majority of guilds are also inactive orphans, but cannot prove that; there are no activity metrics in the guild leaderboards.

Observation:

• Most of the very highest level guilds are very small

I am marking this as an observation rather than a conclusion because there are only 12 guilds at the very highest levels.

It may be easier to manipulate renown when you have a core of players in careful coordination. Or it may be that the small/tiny guild bonuses are overcompensating and are not working exactly as intended. I cannot present evidence proving this one way or the other.

And now, the gory details.

Total Guilds:

This chart shows the total number of guild ranking pages per server. Multiplying by 25 gives the total number of guilds.

Guild Pages per Server

Khyber wins again

90th Percentile:

This chart indicates where the 90th percentile falls for each server in terms of guild members and guild levels. In other words, 90% of the guilds on each server have this number of members (or less) and are this level (or less).

90th Percentiles by Server

Again, these numbers do not account for inactive guilds; the leaderboard does not include activity metrics and it is not feasible to research them in myDDO individually.

By Level and Members

This chart includes all guilds at level 50 or higher. In other words, these are the success stories.

Guild Levels by Size

Note that the vast majority of these guilds are small. Is this because the small guild bonus is over-compensating? I don’t believe we can state that, especially as the vast majority of ALL guilds in DDO are small. It seems logical to expect to see that trend in this chart too. But it remains a possibility.

Detailed Examination of the Top Ten

Note how many of the most successful guilds are small, or even tiny. This could be explained if there is an issue with the small and tiny guild bonus; in fact, I believe that is the case. But ten is a small sample, and some very large guilds have attained top-level success as well.

Top Ten Guilds by Level

If in fact the bonus is an unfair advantage, this would have the effect of pressuring competitive players into divvying up their larger, more inclusive guilds into into very small, very exclusive fragments. I doubt that Turbine is intending cliques by design. But again, I don’t believe this data proves that the bonus is unfair. It does indicate that it MAY BE but that is a different point.

On the other hand, examine the list of the largest guilds:

Top Ten Guilds by Size

Every single one is also high level. This trend holds for larger samples, by the way, nearly all of the largest guilds are at least 50th level.

A Case Study: The Halfling Commandos

We have about a dozen active players who are on most nights. Some of them play outside of prime time too. Another dozen or so participate regularly but not nightly. Another 40 play rarely*.

* This latter number used to be much higher but we have been pruning inactives to try and increase renown retention.

We zoomed through levels, regularly appearing on page 1 of the leaderboard, until we hit about 40. This was many months ago, quite soon after guild leveling was introduced.

We have been painfully fighting against decay ever since and have only managed to struggle our way upwards six more levels in the intervening months.

There has been some sentiment amongst some members to jettison the rare players so that we can qualify for the small guild bonus. Except, we like the rare players, and we like being a casual guild with few rules. This is actually causing us some stress.

I suspect that our real problem is not our size at all, but rather the fact that we allow our players to have characters in other guilds.

Summary:

If you want to have a high-level guild, your best bet is to start a very large guild. But if you want to have the very highest-level guild you may be better served with a very small guild of very dedicated players.

This analysis does not disprove the “small guild is better” theory. It does prove that larger guilds are good too, and in fact are the only “sure” way to attain high level.

[blametroi]

Thanks for the detailed analysis. Do we know yet if "members" means accounts or toons? My guild sounds similar to yours in terms of regularly active players, but with fewer of those less frequent players. We finally made level 60 in spite of the renown hit from Crystal Cove farming.

[Khimberlhyte]

The number of members you see is the number of characters in the guild, including alts. Guild renown decay is based on the number of players, which is much smaller. Given that many of the high end raiding guilds have multiple characters per player, the "members" number you see gives you no information on renown decay or small guild bonus. Some of those guilds you call "large" with >100 "members" actually have 25 or fewer players. This means much less decay.

The large blind-recruiting harbour guilds have fewer alts, but also suffer from massive renown decay due to the number of players. I don't see them ever getting much past level 50 or 60.

You should look up some of Vanshilar's work on guild renown.

[geoffhanna]

Definitions:

Very Large Guilds > 700 members
Large Guilds >500 members
Small Guilds: < 200 members
Tiny Guilds: < 100 members

Very High Level: 70+ levels
High Level: 50+ levels

Members: not defined on the leaderboard but reliably believed to be "characters"

Large blind-recruiting guilds can achieve well over 50th level. Several have. One is in the top ten.

[NUDS]

Thanks for the detailed analysis. Do we know yet if "members" means accounts or toons? My guild sounds similar to yours in terms of regularly active players, but with fewer of those less frequent players. We finally made level 60 in spite of the renown hit from Crystal Cove farming.

"Members" is the number of characters/toons in the guild.
It's simply as an indication of roughly how many characters there are in a guild.

"Accounts" is the number of unique accounts in the guild.
This is used to calculate renown gain and decay i.e. small guild bonus.



Note that I have 6 unique accounts in my guild, which gives the sweet spot for 300% renown bonus. I have 13 members, with many from my main account.
http://ddowiki.com/page/Guild_Renown

[Beethoven]

The current system benefits small active guilds, there is no doubting that. You basically end up with the best of both worlds: low decay + large bonus. Personally I do not see a problem with the bonus for small guilds. What I do find somewhat problematic is the exponentially increasing decay at the high levels and firmly believe it to be the reason we will not see large guilds be able to reach (or maintain) a level anywhere close to 85. Most (if not all) will get stuck at ~80 - 81.

Large and medium sized guilds often do well in the low and mid guild renown levels because there the game is mostly about gaining renown. There is no extreme decay and things are mostly just about maintaining a number of people active enough to gain ranks (the speed largely depending on the ratio of active to less active accounts). Come the high guild levels things change dramatically and gaining renown takes on a secondary role to managing your decay.

Now, I know hypothetically if you get 500 very active people together you can overcome the decay and also reach the highest level. Practically it is not going to happen, I don't think. We are basically talking about finding 500 people who (for the most part) get along, are dedicated, don't get interested in another game eventually and won't have anything come up real life in the near future that will significantly reduce their in game activity/production. Needless to say managing a roster of 500 people is far more complicated (even more so if you assume an average of only 3 toons per person, that's 1,500 toons).

Also: fix the level 80 Guild Ship. It has less hookpoints than the level 55 (it's supposed to have more, but they are bugged and thus cannot be used)

Here as simple example: assume only 1 in 5 person will eventually cease guild-renown productivity (for a lack of a better term).

* Small Guild (10 members): that'd mean loss of 2 people. It's not only significantly easier to get 10 hardcore players together, it is also not quite that difficult to find two new members. You set those 2 people on vacation (and consequently remove them from the roster temporarily) the renown penalty associated with it is manageable. Finally, 2 members will not cause a huge difference in renown decay.

* Large Guild (500 members): it'd mean 100 inactive/less active accounts. The renown decay for 100 accounts becomes enormous at the high levels. You cannot set them on "vacation" because removing 100 accounts is going to anihilate your guild renown.

I said it on another thread, going to repeat it here: the most elegant solution would be if they somehow manage to re-code the guild renown/decay in a way where guilds only suffer a daily decay based on accounts that were active during the last 24 hours. Leave everything else alone. Small guild bonus isn't the problem. The problem is large guilds are bound to have members that won't be active every day, but they cause decay every day.

[Ungood]

If you want to have a high-level guild, your best bet is to start a very large guild. But if you want to have the very highest-level guild you may be better served with a very small guild of very dedicated players.

I would like to interject something.

You want the highest level guild. a collection of dedicated players who want a high level guild is what will get you there. The pinnacle issue is dedication of the players you have. Do they play, do they take the renown rewards, to they clear room in their inventory to loot that heroic deeds, do they have in their mind that they want a higher level guild, and it is up to them to get it there?

In this regard, smaller guilds will have the edge, not because they are small, but because they dedicated, they selective, and the members know what they want, and are willing to work to get there.

OR, is not a large guild, but each and everyone of them plays, and wants to be the highest guild. They want that badge of glory and they are willing to do what it takes to get there.

Larger guilds will invariably have a mix, and to a point the more active/dedicated can carry the less dedicated, but that pans out to slower gain or a stopping point over all.

As the guild levels up, each member costs that guild a set amount of renown per day (There is a chart in the DDOWiki that will tell you what you cost on a daily bases to the guild).

Now, using that chart, and using a level 50 guild, each member costs 93.75 renown daily, (+937 extra loss because turbine thinks that is fun!), we will call this guild "Test50"

If a player only gets on once a week, they have now have a 6 day cost to stay in "Test50", or roughly 667 renown for the week, that they need to recapture during their one day play, -OR- the other members of their guild end up carrying them.

Which here is an irony. As the guild gains levels, an Inactive (has not played in a month) is worth more to the guild then someone who plays once or twice a week, or semi-casually. As a semi-casual player never stops costing the guild renown, but, may or may not contribute what they cost to the guild.

Another way, simply put, 600 renown is not hard to earn daily by any active player, thus "test50" can have all it;s members only play once a week and they can still keep going up the ranks. because the one day they play, they recapture their cost for the week and then some.

What happens however, if your daily-active to semi-active ratio shifts (not to be confused with inactive which costs the guild nothing) this can make a climb up harder, much harder for a guild and even cause them to not only stop gaining, or hit a plateau, but even regress.

So, basically, larger guilds, have a larger feeding pool, which means they can carry a larger mass of semi-active, until such time as the guild hits the higher levels where the actives can no longer carry the semi-active and culling this "casual" either becomes a party of the game, or, the guild accepts where they have capped.

This might be why the highest level guilds are the ones with a dedicated base, no one is being carried, and as long as every member ensures that at the end of the day they have put their guild in a positive number of renown, there is no way the guild will not grown, is it at that point, simply a question of how fast will they get there, not how high they will get.

Or such is just my observation.

[Draccus]

The problem isn't with guild size, it's with what activities contribute to renown.

Guild A runs Shroud on Normal in 30 minutes, has 4 deaths and gets more renown than Guild B who ran Epic VoN5 in 60 minutes with no deaths.

[Chette]

You also have to remember that it's not total members, but total accounts (active) that contribute to renown. So guild A might have 200 accounts and 600 members, while guild B has 50 accounts and 500 members. Guild B will suffer far less decay.

[grodon9999]

The numbers of members is a useless figure, it should list the number of accounts.

[maddmatt70]

You missed the part where there are far more small guilds in DDO then large guilds which kind of trivializes your data because yes there should be more small guilds at the top just like there are more small guilds at the bottom.

[Lithic]

Your guild size vs guild level shows a pretty even distribution of guild size over the 65-80 range, which would suggest that the guild renown bonus is working just fine. The "front of the pack" guilds seem to be doing just fine, regardless of guild size.

The reason you have such a big cluster of small guilds in the 50-65 range is because this is the "middle of the pack" group. It isn't surprising that a big cluster of smaller guilds plots in this area, These are average guilds with average renown gains. There just happens to be a much larger proportion of smaller guilds vs large behemoths in game.

If anything, the fact that the leading guilds are so evenly distributed suggests that the guild renown bonus for small guilds is too small, as if it was perfectly balanced there would be the same proportion of small vs large guilds at all renown levels.

[Fetchi]

The reason guild renown is flawed is because whoever created it failed at math.

[Beethoven]

If anything, the fact that the leading guilds are so evenly distributed suggests that the guild renown bonus for small guilds is too small, as if it was perfectly balanced there would be the same proportion of small vs large guilds at all renown levels.

What you are not taking into account is how long it took different guilds to gain the level they have now. Most the large guilds that have acquired a high level have made a (relative) slow but steady progress ever since the system was implemented. There are couple small guilds that managed to reach the highest levels within a couple of months.

[geoffhanna]

I am not trying to sell any particular point. I am just presenting the numbers. Sometimes they provide a clear conclusion, but often they do not.

By the way, I agree that "Accounts" would be a very useful metric in this analysis. So would some form of "Activity" metric. But it is what it is.

------

@Khimberlhyte: Yes Vanshilar's work is very good! BTW, so is the DDOWiki section on guild renown

@maddmatt70: Was your reply intended for a different thread?

@Beethoven & @Ungood: I think you are both arguing that small guilds have an inherent advantage regardless of the small guild bonus? Due to their ease of coordination?

@lithic: I agree with your comments about the spread at the top (I tried to indicate that in my explanatory text but may have failed). But another thing I found interesting was the lack of spread in the middle area. Why are there so few large guilds at the lower range levels? I use "lower" carefully because this chart starts at 50 and in my opinion that is already an advanced level. And there is a desert at the high number area below 50th level.

[Therigar]

I'm not sure that I see a problem.

I'm sure many people have differing views of what a guild should be. To me it is one of three things.

1. A group of people who routinely game together and work to help one another achieve maximum success.
2. A person or maybe even a group of people who doesn't want to be bothered with the whole "join my guild" blind invite drama so they create a guild of their own in order to eliminate the tells and blind invites.
3. A group of people who think that having a guild will bring them something in terms of game benefit but who do not actually coordinate any effort to game together or intentionally work to help one another achieve maximum success.

My suspicion is that guilds that fit the first case are most successful because they contain a small core of players who are online and playing. They have very specific goals and are well coordinated so they are able to game together very often.

I belong to the second group. I have tried my hand at the first but I don't have the skill to lead a group strangers and actually inspire them to commit to regular gaming times. So, my guild is me and my two kids and none others. I'm not envious of any of the larger guilds because my choice was personal and I'm content with it.

I know that there are some guilds that exist just to avoid the blind invites that take place. They are intentional that they are for people who prefer to solo or pug. In some cases they are like my guild in that they are not concerned about guild level. It was not their intent to attain high level so any renown or decay is of little consequence.

OTOH, some of the guilds that exist to avoid the blind invites also hope to reap the benefits of guilds without the work that goes into intentional coordination and cooperation. While their rationale for existance falls into the second grouping their actual behavior belongs with the third.

As for that third group, mediocrity and failure seems appropriate. Guilds should not succeed by doing nothing. There should be no benefit to having a revolving door of memberships when there is no intentionality behind how the guild operates. Not building regular teams with regular play times, not coordinating adventures, not sharing loot to benefit one another, not establishing raid calendars with fixed times and slots -- these things explain why guilds do not retain members (decay) and why they do not succeed (renown).

And my guess is that most of the large guilds actually fit this profile because it is impractical to coordinate the gaming of complete strangers when they have no commitment to the group.

Guilds like Over Raided are successful in escaping this problem because they have a very specific and well established focus. The people they attract are equally committed to the same goals and actively work to help one another in a selfless way. That has the benefit of recipricol conduct by each member so everyone benefits.

So, rather than (insert reference to male organ here) envy -- which is how the original post reads to me -- players should re-evaluate the reason they belong to or operate guilds. If you want your guild to be successful you have to commit to your fellow guild members, you have to have equally committed people as guild members, you have to coordinate your gaming time and work together for success and you have to share selflessly with your guild mates to make each of them successful.

I suspect that the successful guilds have done this, the mediocre ones have not. And that is how it should be.

If it is, then the system works just fine and requires no adjustments or changes.

[Therigar]

I am not trying to sell any particular point. I am just presenting the numbers. Sometimes they provide a clear conclusion, but often they do not.

In this case I think they do not.

Data is only as good as its source and information only as good as the reliability of the data. Unfortunately you do not examine the single most important element, which is how often a person plays and the level of content they run.

You cannot examine this because it isn't available in any data form that you can access. Yet, these two factors influence the guild renown more than any other factor.

If you have 100 people running low level quests where the highest guild renown is ~150 points and the typical guild renown is ~50 points you will be hard pressed to keep up with 20 people running high level quests where the highest guild renown is ~500 points and the typical guild renown is ~150 points. If you then have the 100 people running quests only half as often the differences add up rapidly.

Add in loyalty and the 100 people suddenly show a core of much fewer with a rapidly changing group of temporary employees. Difficulties in coordinating the large group along with individual loyalty and satisfaction means the decay adds up more rapidly because the group is changing on a regular basis.

These intangibles are not measured in your data but have more influence on the results than any of the numbers you present.

This means your data does not translate into information. And that makes it worthless for any purpose.

[Lithic]

@lithic: I agree with your comments about the spread at the top (I tried to indicate that in my explanatory text but may have failed). But another thing I found interesting was the lack of spread in the middle area. Why are there so few large guilds at the lower range levels? I use "lower" carefully because this chart starts at 50 and in my opinion that is already an advanced level. And there is a desert at the high number area below 50th level.

The lower area of your graph more realistically represents the population of guilds, which is why it is much more populated with smaller guilds. In DDO, if there are 10 small guilds for every 1 large guild, and you assume all guilds have similar renown/day, then at any level I would expect there to be 10 small guilds for every large guild. You graph of level 50-65 or so shows this pretty well.

Higher than 65 shows much more even distribution, which suggest that large guilds have a significant advantage vs small guilds. Possibly due to decay of small guilds, which is 10+# accounts. This means that guilds of 10 accounts have double the decay per member of large guilds.

The very highest levels have too few data points to make any conclusions.

[jkm]

I suspect that our real problem is not our size at all, but rather the fact that we allow our players to have characters in other guilds.

I really think you need to pursue this more than your other theories.

I'll give you an example from my own guild. We have anywhere from 11 to 18 active accounts depending on our occasionals (log in for 2 days then disappear for a month).

of these minimum 11, 7 represent the main 4 players (3 extra accounts). the other 4 represent some form of casual guild player. basically all of our renown is generated from those 4 players.

if all 4 of us are on, we generate around 50k net renown per day.
if there are 3 on, we generate around 10k net per day.
lately, we've had 5 running through level 18 stuff and we've been generating 80k net renown per day.
the last 2 days we had 6 of us running and we were at 130k renown per day.

so as you can see, moving the groups from 4 to 5 gave a much higher renown jump than the expected 12.5k. the difference? time. being in pugs or having puggees along wastes a ton of time.

[madmaxhunter]

One possible fix would be add more level locks. We only have one at level 25 now. I think what would really help players' stress level would be to have a lock at, say, level 50 and maybe 80. Just like 25, your GR would never dip after you achieve those levels.

Heck, I'd be fine if they even locked 100, maybe then there could be a balloons and confetti drop from the crow's nest on your ship and Regis Philbin (in a sailor hat of course) would step out with a big level 100 check

Then we can go on to a new adventure, like character housing, would be a great plat dump.