Guild Renown Changes

[DocBenway]

No where is the small/medium guild being penalized or held back any different than before, they still earn renoun, still get a bonus and still can level to the highest level. The house and plumbing can still be implemented as they gain levl 100, that process has not changed in any way shap or form.

The underlined part is why the change did nothing to help small guilds, not any sore point that made it worse. It is unchanged from a system that was bad, That is all.

The bolded part is mathematically false. There is a point that renown intake will not match/overcome decay across many sizes, without a playstyle overhaul. A size range that this change reduces but still does not allow anyone below size 10 to progress any further than before. They are still artificially paused on a treadmill detour.

[chrisdinus7]

Building a baby is an exclusive task (after the birds and bees of course), completly differnt than building a house or guild. your reasoning is skewed.

No where is the small/medium guild being penalized or held back any different than before, they still earn renoun, still get a bonus and still can level to the highest level. The house and plumbing can still be implemented as they gain levl 100, that process has not changed in any way shap or form.

Sure, and the whole it doesn't hurt you argument is technically true. But it would also be true if they left the system unchanged for small guilds, and instantly level all guilds with 50+ players to level 100 and remove decay from said guilds. Small guilds wouldn't be hurt - but the system would still be unfair and people would still complain. Flipping the group that gets treated advantageously from small guilds to large guilds doesn't help the problem. It just changes who suffers.

As I have said before, just remove the levels altogether. Then we can all play in the kind of guild we like without any of this unfairness. Remove guild levels, let people form the guilds they want without bothering with a meaningless mechanic.

[Tshober]

An ever better system though would be to only count those accounts that were online during the latest 24 hours when calculating decay as that would do all the things you mention without hugely favoring the creation of Korthos Army style guilds.

Well, not quite everything. Your sugggestion would still penalize guilds of social players. Like role-players who spend the majority of their online time doing activities that garner little renown.

That way huge guilds dont automatically level at extreme speed though still much faster than small guilds - and there is no reason to kick out casual members (except for guilds near the 1000 member ceiling but that cannot be helped).

Yes, that can and should be helped by setting a reasonable time limit after which there is no penalty for kicking inactives. Say 3 months. At that point you can be pretty sure they are unlikely to return and penalizing a guild for kicking them at that point is just silly.

[bloodwork]

more rtarded "fixes". get rid of renown decay completely already. we don't need more mindless grind in this game that make it feel like a "job" to do something even more mindless just to offset the daily renown decay.

then again "evil" turbine got to make money somehow right?
here's an idea, start selling 7 day "renown decay protection" for 1000 turbine point.

[danotmano1998]

This is a step in the right direction.

Thanks, Turbine.

[blkcat1028]

As the leader of a small guild, 14 members, I think this is a good change. Even the smallest guild has had their renown decay cut in half.

I disagree with the argument that this will promote a "go large of go home" attitude towards guilds. Large guilds will level faster but small guilds have the small guild bonus to compensate. Sounds fair to me.

I was amazed at the amount of renown we lost everyday. I had to finally look up the formula.

At level 67 we were losing over 11,000 renown daily. With this change, it's has dropped to 9,474. With the small guild bonus, that's not too hard to manage.

If you look at a level 100 guild with 14 members, the decay would have been 81,000. Now it's 67,500. That's still a bunch but it's doable. With 100 members that's 675 renown per account daily. With 14 members it's 4,821 renown per account.

Again, sounds fair to me.

EDIT: Fixed some erroneous calculations

[rygard]

I hate this change as leader of level 91 guild. this is giving unfair advantage to large guilds and destroying balance between small, medium and large guilds. Small and medium guild multipliers are not enough for set a balance between different sized guilds. You have to change "Modified Guild Size Multipliers" for set a significant balance between small and large guilds.

Also at this point, if you wanna give us good guild system, i believe you have to check some other issues about guild systems too.

A few points i want to see in game about guilds;

1. I have a problem about definition of active accounts. it's not important anymore for large guilds ofcourse, but for small guilds, visiting passive accounts are kinda problem. If a player not playing regulary log in just for check something or for say simple hi, it's end up suffer for whole guild. so we have to deal with many days long extra renown punishment for visitors or kick our friends from our guild just becouse they don't have time for game atm. This is realy disturbing me. But if you set a timer for set an acount to switch active from inactive, it'll fix that problem for good.

So, for example, you can chenge definations of Active account like "30 days since any character has logged at least for 6 hours long(total time for all characters) in on that account,

2. Pool table! As for many of us told, screamed that before. We need way more customization options. We still can't change location of ship amenities, we can't put simple cosmetic objects, we can't have a little details for make us feel our guilds are unique and special and bound us to game more. I know, even the years old armor skin system are so crappy and limited, most likely what i want is one of entries in list of "good things never gonna happen". but i want it and i insist about that.

3. Okay this one not exactly about guild system (please keep reading mr dev! no, hands off from pagedown button, not cool, bad dev, BAD DEV!). after 6 years of game experience, with gigantic friend list and guild list, there's no way to understand who is who in my social lists. we need to friend list and guild members list based on account name, not character name. or another method for linking characters each other. even 20 years old MUD games has options likes that, it's realy not that hard. (maybe that's a good point for mention my CV i mail you before, lol)
edit: for possible privacy problems; that can be even manual managemtn. so at least give us a way for grouping character entries under custom name/label and manage them.

[SlyMagi]

Thank you for addressing this issue with guild renown. This will directly affect Pay it forward guild sarlona as a month ago we finally gave in to pressures, dismissing nearly 200 inactive members, to help our renown move up. We (the leadership team of Pay it Forward) disliked having to "boot" anyone as these are friends and acquaintances who do check in on occasion to say hi and play a few maps. We want to play, have fun, and help others have fun playing DDO: not deal with demoralized players who time and time again, loyally put guild before personal gain, only to see their efforts taken away.
This action taken by the developers will certainly be a step in keeping our guild principles and values more to that of when Pay it forward was founded. Thank you for your action.

[Cyiwin]

Ignoring the politics aspect... More people does not always help in real life. 9 women don't produce a baby in 1 month instead of the typical 9 months for a woman soloing it. And when talking about renown, doing things with a smaller group is often more impressive. Take the 300 (it was actually somewhat more) defenders of at the Battle of Thermopylae. It is famous because they held back a much larger force for a while. If they had 100,000 troops at their disposal, no one would have been impressed. Achieving things with a smaller group is inherently more impressive than doing it with a larger group.

Ahh but if the woman had 9 active members the chance of a baby would be 9 times greater.

[Faxe]

I would rather see the renown decay kept at the old rate per active account.

Instead, reduce the "inactive" timer for members considerably, possibly to only a few days. That way the system still scales for large guilds but doesn't penalize the casual guilds as much.

This would be a simple, consistent, and very fair change. Applying a new adjustment/multiplier experiment as we go just makes no sense.

[Lord_Darquain]

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm so happy I could cry.

[SirValentine]

Even the smallest guild has had their renown decay cut in half.

How do you figure? The way I understand it, guilds of 1-10 accounts will see no change in decay, and the way I ran the figures, 11-29 accounts will see a benefit, but not to the point of half decay. Only size 30 or larger would see a rate of half or lower, with the mega-sized guilds getting a benefit of 1/50th of previous decay.

I disagree with the argument that this will promote a "go large of go home" attitude towards guilds. Large guilds will level faster but small guilds have the small guild bonus to compensate. Sounds fair to me.

Again, how do you figure? The spread of small guild bonus is tiny compared to the spread of guild sizes. Run the numbers, more is better, at every single step.

If you look at a level 100 guild with 14 members, the decay would have been 810,000. Now it's 33,750.

810,000? Where did that number come from? This change only lowers a 14-account guild decay by a factor of 5/6.

[SirValentine]

1. I have a problem about definition of active accounts.

This is spot on. This was a problem before, and remains a problem for any guilds that want to take advantage of the small guild renown bonus.

My suggestion, in two parts:

1. You only go from Inactive to Active when you enter a private instance (quest/challenge/wilderness). Running around the Market or chatting while on your guild ship or such does not mark your account as Active. So people who log on to say "Hi!" don't increase the Active account numbers for the guild.

2. You go from Active to Inactive...after 24 hours (or maybe 48). Not 1 month. So people who only play on the weekend don't count against the guild all week long, only for roughly the day(s) they are playing.

I think those changes would have helped alleviate anti-casual-player bias in a way that doesn't massively favor massive guilds.

[Shadow7375]

I personally don't like this new system.

The old system wasn't bad in my opinion ... All you had to do was to change the decay formula a bit so it wouldn't hurt guilds as much as it did in some cases. But that's just my thoughts on it.

Now probably everyone will try to invite as many players as possible to their guild, forming mega-guilds in size with 1000 in 'em as we used to have 'em on most servers, and just farm renown to gain the 2 to 3 levels per day they are allowed to. Not caring of who's really in the guild. Why should they? It's all about getting to level 100 asap.

Soon we have again a whole bunch of large (by members) guilds blacklisted that we don't want to group with ... History repeats itself ...

[Glenalth]

History repeats itself ...

I miss those days.

[ferrite]

I don't think these ideas will work. I mean they seem to have good intentions and all, but they won't work.

Without guild size taken into account, I foresee players uniting into a few, large level 100 guilds, at the cost of smaller, casual guilds which will become obsolete. Eventually with such minimal decay most large guilds will easily achieve 100 (or whatever the current guild max is), leaving only a dozen or two 'primary' guilds on a server, the rest a smattering of startup guilds that go largely unnoticed.

Whether this is a good or bad result depends on how you look at it, but one thing is clear; fewer guilds definitely translates to less guild-related sales in the DDO store, since most players would now be sharing the same guild resource. So there's that.

I still maintain that the entire system should be scrapped, and give way to 'personal renown' of sorts, or renown that you earn and keep with you, that you bestow upon a guild simply by your presence. Because a guild of famous heroes should be more well known in the land than, say, a guild of peasants fresh off the boat from Korthos. I also believe now that there should be no cap at all on guild level or renown, but there does need to be a hard cap on members, say, the cap is the current guild level plus or minus some small arbitrary number. Simple enough.

Should be interesting to see how this works out.

[Faxe]

Why can you not just give us the hard numbers? What is the formula used to calculate decay? Is it some trade secret that you are planning to leverage once you figure out how to apply it to predict stock prices or future Super Bowl winners? Is it part of an otherwise classified CIA code-breaking program?
...

I have a feeling you already know the answer and your question is just rhetorical. But I'll try to answer it as honestly as I can for everyone's benefit even though I just like to make silly posts.

The answer is that it makes too much sense to publish the formula. It's more fun to let folks waste time trying to figure it out partially and make arguments based on their agendas. It also creates interesting thread like this one.

I think the super secret formula would look something like this:

renown_decay = pre_dcay_coef^(2.73-hidden_renown_drop_mod/7)*dcay_coef*((glvl-23)/6*(glvl+83)/26)/2*(53*glvl^3)/100^3*(acc_no + 10)
+
recent_drop_mod*(artificial_acc_mod-recent_depart)^2-(recent_arrival+recent_lvl)^0.25
-
ransack_mod*100^(renown_pot_sold_per_week/renown_pot_used)*renown_per_day/pot_per_hour*(temp_renown_boost)
+
(returning_bonus/stagnant_inactive_bonus)*sqrt(unknown_renown_varia ble)*guild_event_flag
+
renown_complaints_bonus - (recent_recent_complaints2/no_post*past_secret_adj) - sqrt(no_recent_complaints3/nerf_post^(exp-
first_posts/quit_posts)) * (ingame_activity/forum_activity)*acc_activity_bonus
+
log10(update_no)*0.5251*(store_buffs_sold/(2*account_no*(buff_per_day-plat_buffs)))*pi/e;

See? There's no reason to publish something like this. Players would just optimize for renowns, thereby reducing sales.

But let's not kid ourselves. The ONLY REASON RENOWN DECAY EXISTS NOW is to help sell more store items/renown potions. The next renown system (with decay or not) is one that would increase sales. Really.

That's also why this temporary solution is on live. It allows more ships to be purchased. I hate to say it, but the system will be adjusted back and forth until all guilds can buy their ships. Mission accomplished: potions + max ships sold. Once all the guilds have their ships and high levels, players are unlikely to buy anything else. Most likely, the system will be updated so store items are indirectly required to maintain a newer class of ships. By then we could see decay go away completely making everyone happy once again.

[niehues]

My guild is small and i will have no benefit from it at this point but i am really glad to see that the devs are taking this step and trying to help what is being asked on the forums...

I dont think is solved but is something...

great work..

I also being amazed how ppl come here to complain to something that do not affect or change for them... just because it make it better to some one else..

"i worked so hard.. now they get it easy like this.." (now i am not special anymore.. everyone can have the same..)

same happen with the ion stones back in the days..

dont worry it will pass and u can work hard and try being better in something else..

[Therigar]

But let's not kid ourselves. The ONLY REASON RENOWN DECAY EXISTS NOW is to help sell more store items/renown potions. The next renown system (with decay or not) is one that would increase sales. Really.

This is pretty absurd. Without guild renown what will happen is that me and my friends (hypothetical because I have no friends, but others and their friends) would do whatever it takes to get to maximum guild level with the biggest ship and best amenities. Then we would kick out everyone but the chosen few.

We'd enjoy the benefits of success and those on the outside would be left calling us a bunch of names that won't get past the obscenity filters.

That cannot possibly be a good thing.

Renown decay is a useful tool to ensure that guilds remain healthy -- not just in the number of bragging rights that they get for having a high level guild but in the things that make DDO worth playing. It helps to encourage recruitment of new players, it helps foster a sense of friendship and camaraderie, it helps to pass on learned knowledge to less experienced players and it helps to highlight those who can be relied upon to quest with when you want to ensure success.

There are two forms of renown -- the obvious one that we are all talking about and the less obvious one that is found in each server population. On Orien there are two or three guilds -- maybe more -- that every player knows. It knows that the people are good people, competent players and helpful to the server community. The same is certainly true of every server even though the guild names will be different.

That type of renown is not gained by rushing to L100 and sitting on the benefits. It is earned respect gained by being there in the game day in and day out for the whole server community to see.

What we do not need, and I hope what nobody wants, are guilds that do not have that kind of in game respect earning unmerited Turbine guild renown because there is no form of guild renown decay. Getting rid of decay is bad for DDO.

It isn't about selling stuff through the DDO store. It is about making sure that guilds with high game renown have earned it. Those who earn that form of renown invariably earn the server wide respect that forms the other type of renown.

So, guild renown is good and guild renown decay is also good. It is a key tool in maintaining a healthy DDO community.

[niehues]

This is pretty absurd. Without guild renown what will happen is that me and my friends (hypothetical because I have no friends, but others and their friends) would do whatever it takes to get to maximum guild level with the biggest ship and best amenities. Then we would kick out everyone but the chosen few.

We'd enjoy the benefits of success and those on the outside would be left calling us a bunch of names that won't get past the obscenity filters.

That cannot possibly be a good thing.

Renown decay is a useful tool to ensure that guilds remain healthy -- not just in the number of bragging rights that they get for having a high level guild but in the things that make DDO worth playing. It helps to encourage recruitment of new players, it helps foster a sense of friendship and camaraderie, it helps to pass on learned knowledge to less experienced players and it helps to highlight those who can be relied upon to quest with when you want to ensure success.

There are two forms of renown -- the obvious one that we are all talking about and the less obvious one that is found in each server population. On Orien there are two or three guilds -- maybe more -- that every player knows. It knows that the people are good people, competent players and helpful to the server community. The same is certainly true of every server even though the guild names will be different.

That type of renown is not gained by rushing to L100 and sitting on the benefits. It is earned respect gained by being there in the game day in and day out for the whole server community to see.

What we do not need, and I hope what nobody wants, are guilds that do not have that kind of in game respect earning unmerited Turbine guild renown because there is no form of guild renown decay. Getting rid of decay is bad for DDO.

It isn't about selling stuff through the DDO store. It is about making sure that guilds with high game renown have earned it. Those who earn that form of renown invariably earn the server wide respect that forms the other type of renown.

So, guild renown is good and guild renown decay is also good. It is a key tool in maintaining a healthy DDO community.

I think what u saying is true and can happen.. but lets see the bright side of it..

u have your guild u recruit ppl to lv it up.. u kick them..

they will move on..go to another and so on..

but on this process there will be ppl not like your not friends that will actually like those guys u kick and and start new friends..

see there is always a bright side on all this...