Guild Renown Changes

[Gremmlynn]

You keep saying that because you want to see guild bonus eliminated as is obvious when reviewing all your threads.

To me, it has seemed that everyone who has brought up the subject has been more worried about size bonuses leading to successful guilds all consisting of small numbers of highly active players. While less active players are stuck with unsuccessful guilds being lead by equally less active leaders. I share this concern.

I've also pointed out that under the old system the ideal # for optimizing the old guild system was closer to 20 than it was to 6 due to the flawed formula that was previously used.

Actually iirc, the optimum number was 11, which is actually closer to 6 than it is to 20. Above this adding a person subtracted more than a person from the combined bonus of the rest when increased decay was factored in.

[/QUOTE]

[smatt]

The perception that 6 was the ideal number for a small guild persisted after it actually was. Why was it.... Because there was a time when the bonus was bugged and a guild with exactly 6 active accounts recieved double the appropriate bonus.

No matter how they work the formulaes, there will always be a most and least advantagious size.

[Chaos000]

You keep saying that because you want to see guild bonus eliminated as is obvious when reviewing all your threads.

This is completely untrue. I've shown the math that proves adding a person even when you are below 10 people is always beneficial unless the person is highly inactive. The opposite is typically true - new members of the guild were recruited because they were playing/active and almost always give a boost to our net renown total. The problem has more to do with people that have been in the guild a long time that were once active, but are no longer active. Because small guilds are a more tight knit community, these folks often log on to say or chat and then log off.

I've highlighted the item that needs to be pointed out.

I've since amended my position in regard to guild bonuses. I don't want to see guild bonus eliminated. I also don't want the removal a "highly inactive" persons to be the practice in which any guild benefits. Increasing the bonuses only further devalues the contribution of the player (averaging 5 renown a month) because while they no longer play, they log on to say hi or chat then log off.

Changing the guild renown system (from /account to /guild rank) in the first place WAS to discourage booting. Any changes to this system, ridiculous or not, should continue to discourage booting or we're right back in the old system.

Turbine likely won't get rid of small guild bonus or decay. I'm trying to work with that.

[Chaos000]

Excellent idea! Do you think this idea, in conjunction with a small increase to Guild Size bonus would pretty much eliminate nearly all issues? Real or perceived.

Increase the guild size bonus enough to allow for even a guild of the lowest common denominator (1) to halve their effort to reach and maintain the maximum rank? I'm sure it'll help.

Realistically, so long as the "decay divided equally among all guild members" argument is used in a decay/guild level environment, it will never be fully satisfied unless being smaller is in some cases more beneficial over their larger counterparts.

[Tshober]

The devs at least could finally admit that the whole system of renown / decay is for the sole purpose to make more money. But I am perfectly sure the current system is sub optimum for that purpose. And I am very positive about that the devs know this fact.

Even if Tshober calls me a revisionist now as well, I am sure the devs would like to return to the old system because of pressure from marketing and sales. But the devs can´t because of the sh*t-storm brewing then within the player base.

So they muddle through and hope for getting some time and much needed manpower to rework the system. Hopefully they read in here because in here are a lot of very good suggestions of what to do or implement to increase sales in the process without angering the player base.

Actually, I think this is a very plausable assessment of the situation.

[Gremmlynn]

Realistically, so long as the "decay divided equally among all guild members" argument is used in a decay/guild level environment, it will never be fully satisfied unless being smaller is in some cases more beneficial over their larger counterparts.

Any type of size bonus would lead to this sort of situation in extreme cases. But as long as it's kept to just extreme cases (highly active 12 hour/day players not wanting to add 1/month players due to a smaller bonus, for example) it should be good enough.

[Tshober]

sorry for my ignorance, but i thought the renown decay was based solely on level of the guild and not the members. if this is true why is anything else about size and decay being said?

What you say is almost true. The guild size multiplier in the decay formula has been fixed at 20 so every guild, regardless of size, is treated as if they had size = 20. That means the only thing in the formula that changes over time now is guild level. All guilds of the same level get the same daily decay amount, regardless of size.

The only size-based factor that remains is the small guild bonuses to renown earned. For very small guilds, there is now a trade-off between the small guild bonuses and the extra renown earning capability that would come from adding more members. Adding more members reduces or eliminates the small guild bonuseses for those guilds so they have less incentive to add more guild members than larger guilds have.

[Hendrik]

Increase the guild size bonus enough to allow for even a guild of the lowest common denominator (1) to halve their effort to reach and maintain the maximum rank? I'm sure it'll help.

Realistically, so long as the "decay divided equally among all guild members" argument is used in a decay/guild level environment, it will never be fully satisfied unless being smaller is in some cases more beneficial over their larger counterparts.

Thank you again Chaos.

Nice to be able to debate with someone that does not sound like a broken record for a change.

[Nestroy]

What you say is almost true. The guild size multiplier in the decay formula has been fixed at 20 so every guild, regardless of size, is treated as if they had size = 20. That means the only thing in the formula that changes over time now is guild level. All guilds of the same level get the same daily decay amount, regardless of size.

The only size-based factor that remains is the small guild bonuses to renown earned. For very small guilds, there is now a trade-off between the small guild bonuses and the extra renown earning capability that would come from adding more members. Adding more members reduces or eliminates the small guild bonuseses for those guilds so they have less incentive to add more guild members than larger guilds have.

The only thing that remains is to say that the arbitrary number of size = 20 for calculating decay is too high for small guilds:

+ Before change the decay formula was 10 + active accounts. So the decay for small guilds basically started at 11 and grew linearly from there on. Now it is 20 flat and many guilds now get more renown decay than under the old system.
+ Ransack at 1 level up: While this is no problem to a fairly large guild, the smaller guilds get much less renown and have a high decay hit so they are prone to loose the hard-earned level immediately again. Then level up again, get ransack, loose the level, level up, get ransack, loose the level... Classical loop. And, yes, this happens!
+ Furthermore, there is much more content since U14, that simply does not give renown or only a small token number for bosses killed. challenges, epic quest end rewards after first run (Eveningstar) or never (all else) or epic chests just to name the most annoying renown-less features.
+ Renown bonus remained the same. So not even here did the small guilds get any boost or boon in exchange.

So the quick and dirty thing would be to re-set the arbitrary decay number to whatever pleases the devs as long as it is well below 20. Or to clearly communicate that they do not want small guilds to populate the servers any more.

[Tshober]

The only thing that remains is to say that the arbitrary number of size = 20 for calculating decay is too high for small guilds:

+ Before change the decay formula was 10 + active accounts. So the decay for small guilds basically started at 11 and grew linearly from there on. Now it is 20 flat and many guilds now get more renown decay than under the old system.
+ Ransack at 1 level up: While this is no problem to a fairly large guild, the smaller guilds get much less renown and have a high decay hit so they are prone to loose the hard-earned level immediately again. Then level up again, get ransack, loose the level, level up, get ransack, loose the level... Classical loop. And, yes, this happens!
+ Furthermore, there is much more content since U14, that simply does not give renown or only a small token number for bosses killed. challenges, epic quest end rewards after first run (Eveningstar) or never (all else) or epic chests just to name the most annoying renown-less features.
+ Renown bonus remained the same. So not even here did the small guilds get any boost or boon in exchange.

So the quick and dirty thing would be to re-set the arbitrary decay number to whatever pleases the devs as long as it is well below 20. Or to clearly communicate that they do not want small guilds to populate the servers any more.

We are basically in agreement. Reducing the fixed guild size moves us closer to my prefered solution of eliminating decay entirely. The ransack decay loop should be eliminated (not the ransack itself, only the loop aspect of it). And the lack of renown in much of DDO's content should be addressed. All of these things would be helpful and would not harm any segment of the playerbase.

[Hendrik]

The only thing that remains is to say that the arbitrary number of size = 20 for calculating decay is too high for small guilds:

+ Before change the decay formula was 10 + active accounts. So the decay for small guilds basically started at 11 and grew linearly from there on. Now it is 20 flat and many guilds now get more renown decay than under the old system.
+ Ransack at 1 level up: While this is no problem to a fairly large guild, the smaller guilds get much less renown and have a high decay hit so they are prone to loose the hard-earned level immediately again. Then level up again, get ransack, loose the level, level up, get ransack, loose the level... Classical loop. And, yes, this happens!
+ Furthermore, there is much more content since U14, that simply does not give renown or only a small token number for bosses killed. challenges, epic quest end rewards after first run (Eveningstar) or never (all else) or epic chests just to name the most annoying renown-less features.
+ Renown bonus remained the same. So not even here did the small guilds get any boost or boon in exchange.

So the quick and dirty thing would be to re-set the arbitrary decay number to whatever pleases the devs as long as it is well below 20. Or to clearly communicate that they do not want small guilds to populate the servers any more.

+ It is VERY SMALL guilds, not Small. Very Small are 1-10, Small is 11-25. We must be accurate.

+ There is FACTUAL evidence in this thread, just pages back, a VERY SMALL guild of 7 active accounts is earning 50k+/- a weekday, more on weekends. Will cap with current activity and membership between 94 and 95 GL. Zero wrong with that. Furthermore, SMALL Guilds that are inactive cannot overcome Decay for the simple fact that they are full of inactive players.

Also, how can you explain a Guild of ONE, in the current system, still able to beat this 'much higher decay'. He counts as 20. Still able to advance to the mid 60s with casual play?

+ I have not yet seen factual evidence a small/very small guild is getting the 3 lvl/day limit. I welcome them to show themselves with numbers to back up claims. Please. This information is needed.

+ Considering Quests below char level give lesser renown, these people would need to chime in with what quests they are running at what CR and with what Char level to get the BUG addressed.

+ It has been suggested that VERY SMALL/SMALL guilds get a slight bump in Size Bonus, repeatedly, to overcome this oversight.

Set it far below 20 will not solve the core issue, just shift it to no longer effect those complaing, but someone else. Then they can complain and we start this whole thing over again just with different participants.

[Hendrik]

We are basically in agreement. Reducing the fixed guild size moves us closer to my prefered solution of eliminating decay entirely. The ransack decay loop should be eliminated (not the ransack itself, only the loop aspect of it). And the lack of renown in much of DDO's content should be addressed. All of these things would be helpful and would not harm any segment of the playerbase.

Adressing any/all bugs with renown drops would a boon for us all. But for that to happen the players must take iniative to get it addressed. Will you be the first?

The only harm would come later, when this whole cycle starts again claiming that it benefits large Guilds again and they are climbing faster then their small and very small counterparts.

It will be a conjuntion of solutions posed by the players that will address the renown system and none of them will be the elimination of decay. The power and CHOICE to advance will be put into the Guilds hands - as it is now, it will just be easier to make that choice.

[Tshober]

Adressing any/all bugs with renown drops would a boon for us all. But for that to happen the players must take iniative to get it addressed. Will you be the first?.

Huh? Be the first to do what? Many examples of DDO content that is virutally renown-free have been cited in this thread. All that is needed is for the devs to fix them.

The only harm would come later, when this whole cycle starts again claiming that it benefits large Guilds again and they are climbing faster then their small and very small counterparts.

So what? Only legitimate complaints matter. That is not a legitimate complaint. Of course a group of 100 players all working together can move forward faster than a single player going it alone. The only way that would not be the case is if the game were designed for single players. This is an MMO. There are advantages to working together. That is appropriate and not a reason for complaint. Small guilds get renown bonuses to help them remain viable in DDO. That is more than most MMO's do for small guilds.

[Chaos000]

Any type of size bonus would lead to this sort of situation in extreme cases. But as long as it's kept to just extreme cases (highly active 12 hour/day players not wanting to add 1/month players due to a smaller bonus, for example) it should be good enough.

It is common for any sized guild to have a small contingent of highly active 12 hour/day players providing the advancement of the guild. I am not against bonuses being boosted even if it may cause some highly active players to not want to add 1/month players due to a smaller bonus.

I am against this causing some highly active players to now want to boot 1/month existing members due to a larger bonus the guild would receive as a tradeoff. If the bonus is higher, even the moderately active players would also benefit from booting 1/month existing players.

[Nestroy]

+ It is VERY SMALL guilds, not Small. Very Small are 1-10, Small is 11-25. We must be accurate..

Nitpicking. I never clearly indicated on the ingame whatever-it´s-called guild size. Small means anything from 1-20.

+ There is FACTUAL evidence in this thread, just pages back, a VERY SMALL guild of 7 active accounts is earning 50k+/- a weekday, more on weekends. Will cap with current activity and membership between 94 and 95 GL. Zero wrong with that. Furthermore, SMALL Guilds that are inactive cannot overcome Decay for the simple fact that they are full of inactive players..

If I have a hyper active guild I can pull in even about 1.5 million renown / day, look at zonixx. Argument is moot. If I run my farm toons on lv. 1-4 content only in the right quests, I currently pull in 60k in 4 hours of play alone, in my guild? What does that show? I use pots (100% bonus)? I am crazy running always the same quests again to get max renown? I am devoid of brain and social life? Well, as usual, 50k might be much and might be less, depending on play style. Many guys from my guild farm for good items they want. You do not pull in much renown while farming. Many would like to run challenges for the items they provide. Not much renown either. If any VERY small guild is determined enough to go to level 100 and all players are giving everything to reach that goal, they will reach it. Not exactly something very new here. Any players that prefer fun to farm will eventually get their VERY small guild out o the guild level picture. Simple as that. But all that already has been said 100.000s of times.

Also, how can you explain a Guild of ONE, in the current system, still able to beat this 'much higher decay'. He counts as 20. Still able to advance to the mid 60s with casual play?.

If I go multiboxing, i can do this as well. Ask Zonixx.

+ I have not yet seen factual evidence a small/very small guild is getting the 3 lvl/day limit. I welcome them to show themselves with numbers to back up claims. Please. This information is needed..

The ransack starts definitively with ONE level. If this is WAI or a bug I cannot tell. It definitively is that way - my guild last time got hit by that loop. We ran for lv. 58 and eventually reached the level. And then the renown by a sudden stopped to flow in. I used my farm toon to farm renown. The renown vanished from ANY end reward list for about 24 hours. Chests all the sudden gave a mere heroic deeds instead of anything else.
It took me about 2 hours more than planned to prepare for decay the next day. I got shafted by a server restart that gave us double decay. we fell down to 57, I got back normal renown loot, we got again to 58, the renown again vanished from chests and end reward lists. And this is not anecdotal, ask those guilds that leveld within the last days, what they tell you about this.
We finally after about 48 hours of battle did get our lv. 58 and renown loot returned to normal after about 24 hours, but what the heck... That function of "ransack after 3 levels" definitively does not function that way. It kicks in after you leveled up ONE level!

+ Considering Quests below char level give lesser renown, these people would need to chime in with what quests they are running at what CR and with what Char level to get the BUG addressed..

Well, which epic quests do you want? All except Kings Forrest, Drow City and Demonweb? I run lv. 21 epic quests on epic elite (makes them lv. 23) with lv. 22 toon and get what? Phiarlan Carneval yesterday, Under the Big Top, epic elite: I got heroic deeds from one chest. The epic chest gave tokens and the end reward list stated several random lootgen I cannot use for my toon. House D, Harbor (lords of dust series), Druids chain in Eveningstar?! End reward lists are devoid of any renown at all. Independent of if you run the quest epic normal or elite, independently from you being 2 levels below or above quest level. And do not tell me anything of "anecdotal" or bug report. The formums are full and my last bug report I issued (shortly after Druids Deep was released and i ran this the first time) got canceled after 5 minutes without further notice. So this seems to be WAI.

+ It has been suggested that VERY SMALL/SMALL guilds get a slight bump in Size Bonus, repeatedly, to overcome this oversight..

Could live with that, though.

Set it far below 20 will not solve the core issue, just shift it to no longer effect those complaing, but someone else. Then they can complain and we start this whole thing over again just with different participants.

Well, it is quick & dirty, but that´s what the last change has been as well. At least it would lift the burden from most small guilds that got directly hit be the higher decay from the system change.

Then again, of course a general overhaul of the renown / guild level system would be most welcome. But since this does not seem to be too high on the priority list of the devs, a quick fix would do the trick imho quite nicely. And reducing the minimum account hit for decay should be easy to implement without using too much resources fromt he devs.

[DocBenway]

+ Before change the decay formula was 10 + active accounts. So the decay for small guilds basically started at 11 and grew linearly from there on. Now it is 20 flat and many guilds now get more renown decay than under the old system.

This is one of the things that should be clear 2300 posts into this thread. The formula was (10+(MAX(MGS,10) x levelmultiplier. This means that there was ALWAYS a hidden, never acknowledged, questioning ignored minimum size in calculations of 10. Before the changes a guild of 1 decayed at 20xmultiplier, a guild of 5 decayed at 20 x multiplier and guild or 7, 8, 9, 10 all decayed at 20 x multiplier. They have never said why. This is why any guild of 10 or under did not benefit from the changes.

Just out of my own curiosity I was looking at some old dev posts and saw:

A quick response:

- We do owe you guys a dev diary explaining some of the mechanics. We intended to do this by launch of Update 5 and we're seriously behind. My apologies.

- Guild decay is based on number of accounts. Players, not characters.

- It was our original intention to only use the # of active accounts, but it wasn't implemented that way unfortunately. It proved to be a lot more difficult than we thought. I hope we can change this (for all the obvious reasons), but the truth is we simply don't know at this point and cannot promise anything.

- A large drop in decay occurred because of a bug. We've tweaked the rates to mitigate this until we issue a patch.

- We have a LOT of tweaking to do. Getting the balance on this isn't easy. As such we won't be releasing actual numbers (because they're going to keep changing for the forseeable future), but that doesn't mean we can't make the mechanics more transparent.

- The mechanics for small guilds aren't working correctly at the moment. Small guilds should be progressing much faster than we're seeing now. This will be addressed in a patch.


Good thread.

I just bolded some glaring failures.

[Hendrik]

Huh? Be the first to do what? Many examples of DDO content that is virutally renown-free have been cited in this thread. All that is needed is for the devs to fix them.






So what? Only legitimate complaints matter. That is not a legitimate complaint. Of course a group of 100 players all working together can move forward faster than a single player going it alone. The only way that would not be the case is if the game were designed for single players. This is an MMO. There are advantages to working together. That is appropriate and not a reason for complaint. Small guilds get renown bonuses to help them remain viable in DDO. That is more than most MMO's do for small guilds.

So? Reporting in the forums DOES NOTHING. Have you bug reported them? You know, the way things can get fixed?

[Hendrik]

If I have a hyper active guild I can pull in even about 1.5 million renown / day, look at zonixx.


I am crazy running always the same quests again to get max renown? I am devoid of brain and social life? .


If I go multiboxing, i can do this as well. Ask Zonixx.

Yes, crazy and no social life, IMO.

:P

Doing something just to see if it can be done is not really all that good of an example. A FAR EXTREME example of pushing the limits of the system. Wasn't the Guild also going to be sold too??

I could also multibox accounts and sit in a Guild and do nothing and complain that I am not gaining renown to show that the system is broken and must change. Extreme examples don't help fix any problem.

But we are digressing from the topic at hand.

We should continue to find ways to modifing the system and debate them.

I still think Chaos' idea is very vailid with activity/inactivity. And maybe in conjunction with a Size Bonus increase would pretty much eliminate all issues. All remaining would reside in the players hands - where it must be - to advance or not.

[Artos_Fabril]

As for your other comment about small guilds wanted things handed to them without any work, that is ridiculous. We don't want to have our guild members renown taken away from them at a rate 10x higher than would occur if they are in a large guild.

Sorry for the confusion, I was specifically addressing the poster I quoted. As before when you took offense at my taking issue with a poster claiming non-factual information to be true and part of the problem, I quoted his post, because I was addressing his post.

Most posters in this thread, yourself included, are fairly rational even when their arguments are repetitive. I apologize for again confusing you by addressing a specific poster below quoted text from that poster.

As I've said before I think we need a 100% penalty for booting players if we want to discourage booting players without a good reason. Changing guild bonus to discourage booting seems like a ridiculous approach since "booting" is largely a problem in large guilds and not small guilds.

Two amendments I would like to propose to the 100% penalty:
1) It should be an option when a player leaves a guild to leave on good terms, taking none of their earned renown with them, or leave on bad terms, taking 100%.
2) The 100% kick penalty should decrease after inactivity by 20% per month inactive. If a player hasn't logged in for 6 months, there should be no penalty to the guild for cleaning up the rolls under a new system, just as there is none under the current system.

The only harm would come later, when this whole cycle starts again claiming that it benefits large Guilds again and they are climbing faster then their small and very small counterparts.

Not buying the slippery slope argument. But if the bottom of the slippery slope were the elimination of decay, then bring on the grease!

+ I have not yet seen factual evidence a small/very small guild is getting the 3 lvl/day limit. I welcome them to show themselves with numbers to back up claims. Please. This information is needed.

We don't have any factual evidence, but we do have a developer comment (from Vargouille) stating that after gaining 1 level in a day, a guild should see a 50% decrease in renown drops "from the new higher rates"

Renown drops are reduced by less than half if you've gained one level in the past day, at the original or increased test rates.

If you gained ten times as many renown drops before leveling, that would definitely be beyond what we expect (or ridiculously bad luck). If it feels like it was twice as much before gaining a level, that's roughly in the ballpark, if still somewhat unlucky.

If I go multiboxing, i can do this as well. Ask Zonixx.

Zonixx took advantage of the "buil your guild" even that gave extra bonuses to players for leveling up to 8 (25,000 per character, if I recall correctly) he wasn't doing it all on renown pulls alone.

The ransack starts definitively with ONE level. If this is WAI or a bug I cannot tell. It definitively is that way - my guild last time got hit by that loop. We ran for lv. 58 and eventually reached the level. And then the renown by a sudden stopped to flow in. I used my farm toon to farm renown. The renown vanished from ANY end reward list for about 24 hours. Chests all the sudden gave a mere heroic deeds instead of anything else.
It took me about 2 hours more than planned to prepare for decay the next day. I got shafted by a server restart that gave us double decay. we fell down to 57, I got back normal renown loot, we got again to 58, the renown again vanished from chests and end reward lists. And this is not anecdotal, ask those guilds that leveld within the last days, what they tell you about this.

A 50% reduction in renown drops after gaining a single would be WAI, according to Vargouille (above). A 100% reduction after gaining one level would not. Either way, I agree that renown ransack should not set in until the second level in a day, and can't imagine why anyone would argue against that. Also, this is the very definition of anecdotal evidence.

Well, which epic quests do you want? All except Kings Forrest, Drow City and Demonweb? I run lv. 21 epic quests on epic elite (makes them lv. 23) with lv. 22 toon and get what? Phiarlan Carneval yesterday, Under the Big Top, epic elite: I got heroic deeds from one chest. The epic chest gave tokens and the end reward list stated several random lootgen I cannot use for my toon. House D, Harbor (lords of dust series), Druids chain in Eveningstar?! End reward lists are devoid of any renown at all. Independent of if you run the quest epic normal or elite, independently from you being 2 levels below or above quest level. And do not tell me anything of "anecdotal" or bug report. The formums are full and my last bug report I issued (shortly after Druids Deep was released and i ran this the first time) got canceled after 5 minutes without further notice. So this seems to be WAI.

You know the difference between a help ticket and a bug report right? A help ticket gets ignored and closed, a bug report gets sent to MajMal, but there's nothing to "close" it gets incorporated with all the other bug reports, and then they determine if it's a priority and if it's reproducible.

Well, it is quick & dirty, but that´s what the last change has been as well. At least it would lift the burden from most small guilds that got directly hit be the higher decay from the system change.

Again, what is with this deathgrip on the notion that guilds below 10 accounts were only getting 10+accounds worth of decay prior to the change? It is patently untrue. Prior to the change which set every guild at an effective decay amount equal to the minimum decay amount under the old system. The expanded decay formula was (max(accounts, 10)+10)*(((50*level^3)*tier multiplier)/1,000,000) now it is 20*(((50*level^3)*tier multiplier)/1,000,000) tier multiplier is based on guild level.
01-25 = 0 (no decay)
26-40 = 2.5
41-60 = 3.0
61-80 = 3.5
81-99 = 4.0
100 = 4.5

Just out of my own curiosity I was looking at some old dev posts and saw:

- The mechanics for small guilds aren't working correctly at the moment. Small guilds should be progressing much faster than we're seeing now. This will be addressed in a patch.

Note that this quote dates from 2010, this is from when guild size bonus was not working. Guild size bonus was fixed in the next patch.

[Nestroy]

This is one of the things that should be clear 2300 posts into this thread. The formula was (10+(MAX(MGS,10) x levelmultiplier. This means that there was ALWAYS a hidden, never acknowledged, questioning ignored minimum size in calculations of 10. Before the changes a guild of 1 decayed at 20xmultiplier, a guild of 5 decayed at 20 x multiplier and guild or 7, 8, 9, 10 all decayed at 20 x multiplier. They have never said why. This is why any guild of 10 or under did not benefit from the changes.

DocBenway, Artos Fabril, this might have been the formula at one point or the other. It definitively has not been the formula when I closely monitored the flow of guild renown into our guild during December 2011 and January 2012 where our guild was 7 active accounts strong. We were discussing strategies for our guild, if we should go for growth by actively recruiting or stay at the 7 active accounts. We decided the optimum number would be at about 10 - 14 accounts. 14 Accounts we hit in April 2012 finally.

The guild was much less leveled then, at about lv. 35, so number chrunching had been an ardous task due to much smaller numbers and renown pouring in during decay hit times, but we were consistently hit by decay for 17 active accounts (later 18, when another player joined us), so the formula base at that time would have been 10 + active accounts.

I am not sure when the devs tweaked with that again, but before U14 there definitively was a formula with a base of 10 + active accounts in place. It definitively was changed with or before the last decay overhaul that liberated the big guilds. After this our guild got hit for 20 active accounts decay consistently.

So I will not discuss with you if the 20 accounts is or was the WAI decay minimum any time before. It has not been at all times. Perhaps the formula had a bug that got stealth fixed, I do not know. Frankly I do not care that much either. All I can say is that the current system now is much more beneficial to bigger guilds and as far as I can say from monitoring renown growth more unfair to the smallest guilds compared to the old system.

Well, I am happy for all the big guilds out there. But I want a system that at least holds some fairness for the small guilds as well.