Guild Renown Changes

[djl]

Also, there seems to be a misunderstanding about active/inactive accounts--If you are booting accounts that haven't been active in a year, they haven't bee counting towards your decay anyway.

This. Once an account goes inactive, it essentially doesn't exist until the person returns. They don't hurt you, nor do they help you. They're just... there. Booting them hurts you, leaving them be does not. Everyone thinks inactive accounts contribute to decay, when that's a fallacy.

As far as what the incentive for recruiting a bunch of noobs and then booting them at level 100, it's pretty simple: Free labor. You have a hundred newbies do all the work for you and then boot all the people you don't like to have your core small guild of close friends while keeping all the nice amenities. You retain 3/4 of the work all your minions did, so this is precisely why Turbine needs to reevaluate the penalties for booting people.

[Deadlock]

Because small guilds get significantly less renown/week now than large guilds. If everyone in a large guild with 100 active players earns a measly 2k renown a day, the guild will get 200k renown. It would be a struggle for a 6-man guild to amass that much in a day.

That's irrelevant to renown decay. Trying to compare a 6 player guild and a 100 player guild's ability to earn renown seems a bit futile and I can't think of any reasoning where they should be made the same.

[Ashario]

I think removing the guild size from the decay calculations is a great way to open up the guilds to newer players.

Some servers have seen a drastic decrease in old players and with new players getting the cold shoulder from established guilds they soon will turn to either another server or just give up on the game all together.

This lack of players has made finding parties more difficult, which again will scare off new players.

I believe any steps (without dumbing the game down) that would make the game more inviting for new players to become part of the community a win for both the guilds and the players, not to mention Turbine can make some cash too.

[Tshober]

This. Once an account goes inactive, it essentially doesn't exist until the person returns. They don't hurt you, nor do they help you. They're just... there. Booting them hurts you, leaving them be does not. Everyone thinks inactive accounts contribute to decay, when that's a fallacy.

If there were no cap on guild size, then leaviing inactives in your guild forever would not be a problem. But there is a cap. My guild is almost always at or near that cap. We almost always have a waiting list of people who want to join us. We have no choice in the matter, we must kick inactive players to make room for players who want to join right now.

People leave the game. It is a fact of MMO life. Some come back after many months away. But most that have been gone that long don't return. There needs to be a time limit after which you can kick players that have not logged in at all without a huge penalty, say 3 months. Punishing a guild for kicking people who have not played at all for 3 months or more to make room for someone who is playing right now is just stupid. Any large guild that keeps inactives forever and does any recruiting will eventually run up against the membership cap. And if you don't do any recruiting, then your guild is slowly dying as people leave the game.

For small guilds, this is not an issue. Many people who have only experienced small guilds are probably not even aware that there is a membership cap.

[blkcat1028]

This. Once an account goes inactive, it essentially doesn't exist until the person returns. They don't hurt you, nor do they help you. They're just... there. Booting them hurts you, leaving them be does not. Everyone thinks inactive accounts contribute to decay, when that's a fallacy.

As far as what the incentive for recruiting a bunch of noobs and then booting them at level 100, it's pretty simple: Free labor. You have a hundred newbies do all the work for you and then boot all the people you don't like to have your core small guild of close friends while keeping all the nice amenities. You retain 3/4 of the work all your minions did, so this is precisely why Turbine needs to reevaluate the penalties for booting people.

It took a little while and some research but I figured out how the inactive accounts worked about a year and a half ago. I'm the leader of a small guild that started out as a 2 man show and over 2 (nearly 3) years it's grown to 14. Our goal has never been to be a big guild. The small guild bonus makes it pretty easy for us to advance in level, albeit slowly. The only reason we boot accounts would be if they turn out to be hats of a posterior nature or if they go inactive for an extended period of time. I understand that inactive accounts do not affect renown decay, but it makes keeping track of everyone easier.

As far as this change goes, I agree with your statement that the lack of booting penalties could result abuse, but this a good start at fixing a broken system.

[Therigar]

so if they have been rude to unknown players caught cheating renown rollback from exploiting always automatically on the attack when openly debated and kick small furry animals you would still feel they earned some kinda prestige based on guild level thank you for that humor +1 to you sir

I think you missed my point.

There are guilds that have high rankings that do not have good reputations. Just because a guild is L80 or L90 or L100 that does not mean that they automatically have a good reputation.

OTOH, those with good reputations invariably end up able to reach those levels. The presence of decay helps to maintain the constant motivation to be useful to the whole server population. Being helpful and friendly is the biggest recruiting tool.

As for your allegations concerning how some of the high level guilds operate I don't have a lot of heart-burn over most of it. IMO if Turbine's developers do a poor job and players benefit from "exploits" that is Turbine's fault and players just doing what people naturally do -- try to get the most out of every opportunity. As an example, I did not have any angst over those who made lots of plat from the first Pirate's Cove even though I didn't log into the event until after Turbine recognized its mistake.

I also don't have a lot of problem with people vigorously defending their perspectives here in the forums. I have been on the receiving end from time to time and sometimes it feels like being bullied into submission. But, mostly I blame Turbine for that as well. If they didn't have the stupid forum reputation system where people could neg rep you into oblivion and if they were more proactive in moderating the forums (a huge task made easier in a business sense by the supposedly self-moderating influence of the rep system) then we'd have less of a problem and a lot more locked threads.

I really don't mind people who kick furry animals, especially small ones. But since this falls into the category of inane accusations without any evidence I'll treat it with the humor it deserves.

As for rudeness. I have not experienced that from any member in any of the large guilds on Orien -- and I don't care which one a person would like to point to. Each and every one of them has been friendly to me at some point over the years. While I know that people often have different experiences, I think it likely that bad experiences fall into one of two categories. Either a player happened to catch a guild or one of its members on a bad day (and face it, we all have bad days) or the player was doing something to encourage a negative reaction.

There are a number of people on Orien who have managed to make my ignore list because they are just hard to group with. They are either intentionally grief focused or they don't work towards group goals and objectives or they refuse to accept others as group leaders and run off to do their own thing -- often to the detriment of the rest of the group.

I don't particularly fault people for being rude to players like that.

So, to answer your statement directly -- guild prestige among the server's players isn't earned by the guild's level. But, the high level guilds have the respect of the server's players because most of us don't have issues with the things that seem to bother you and aren't affected by the innuendo.

[Therigar]

If there were no cap on guild size, then leaviing inactives in your guild forever would not be a problem. But there is a cap.

Well put and a cogent counter argument to the idea that I tossed out about raising the % penalty for kicking characters.

AFAIK the limit is 100 accounts. That is not 100 characters, it is 100 accounts. And, guild size is tied to accounts -- not to characters.

I could be entirely wrong in that. But, it is how I understand the system to work.

And, you are right in that guilds that want to be active and involved will also want to recruit new, active, talented players. That is good for the guild and it is good for the new players. This is hand-in-hand with the point I've tried to make about how decay serves to motivate guilds to remain active and helpful to the server's population.

So, maybe the way to handle the "recruit and kick" guilds that posters seem to worry about is to have a huge penalty for active accounts and the way to help guilds that are up against the account cap is to have a reduced penalty.

That seems to be a little bit of work but not too much. Maybe something like an initial 100% penalty minus 5% per month of inactivity. An account that has had no activity in 12 months would give a 40% penalty for kicking it. At 20 months there would be no penalty.

But, better, IMO would be to let inactive accounts not count against the 100 cap.

As has been rightly pointed out, most of the time when an account goes inactive the player is done with the MMO and has moved on to other things. Because games don't know how to identify those as different from people who are forced by work or circumstances to take a prolonged break the MMO's just leave the accounts but let them become inactive.

At some point guilds should not be penalized for those inactive accounts. And, if the people all magically reappeared -- something that is unlikely, but not necessarily impossible -- would it really matter? Would it really hurt the game if reactivated accounts took the guild above the 100 account limit?

What I'd suggest is that after 3 months of inactivity an account no longer count against a guild's account limit. Having run a guild other than the Council of Village Idiots, at which time we did have people other than just my immediate family as part of the guild, my experience is that if the player is gone more than 3 months they most likely are not coming back. So, IMO, that is a fair cut point to allow a guild to recruit new people without being faced with the choice of kicking out inactive players.

[Zargarx]

Further suggestions/comments:

- Booting inactives. Suggest if inactive over 6 months this be dropped to 10% (considered as voluntary)

- Renown decay, should scale somewhat for size of guild. However much less than what is was (and obviously more than no scaling as it is now).

- The calculation should remove the MAX(10,guild size). A guild size of 2 faces a huge mountain to climb versus medium and large guilds. It is ridiculous to have to cover the identical amount of renown if the guild was 5 times larger (so each member has to gain 5 times as much renown!). So the modified guild size would be 10 + actives using the current formula.
Keep in mind the bonus for guild sizes below 6 drops off very quickly where a guild size of 10 has much more of a bonus than a guild size of 2

[Captain_Wizbang]

Remove decay.

It's original design no longer applies in today's game.

[moiinwar]

Graphs are calculated using current renown bonuses.

Now that decay is no longer a practical issue for large guilds I suggest that smaller guilds get larger renown bonuses.
Also it doesn't make sense to me that decay exists at all anymore.

[Furbitor]

Anything to stop a guild from kicking its friends is good. anything else meh.

My guild is made of members that got booted over this stupid guild renown formula

[chance2000]

As a guild leader.
I hope they make and keep these changes.
My guild has around 30 active accounts and level 73.
We have been inching forward without changes.
Problem we have been having is we gain a level during the night and after decay hits we have to gain it again.
A good number of our members are in the US some are in Europe.
I like the ideal of loosing only around 14k per day at level 73 more than almost 30k each day.
If they do not keep the change we will hit a wall before level 85 and not advance.
At the wall we will have a choice to kick the non earning casual players for the players that have time to earn.
I had already told our members I am not kicking members over this so if we hit the wall we just will not advance.
We have all three crafting alters and the major resist shrines.
We have come across a few we would like to join our gaming family.
We have been unable to let them join due to the decay of 30k.
We know most of our members by our first names.
Well I give them all my 1st name they still like to call me Smig, Tam or Xap.
+1 to Turbine for looking in to an issue that has been effecting a lot of us.

[Cyr]

Remove decay.

It's original design no longer applies in today's game.

I agree.

With no guild size criteria being applied decay only serves as a game mechanic to add incentive to max size guilds as opposed to very active mid sized guilds (the previous system).

That said the change implemented is preferable to no change. It was not a good thing to have people worried about logging into the game because they were not playing enough, leaving their guilds so they did not hurt them, or being booted due to inactivity.

Turbine should be addressing guild size from the side of renown gain, not loss, and make guild size effect renown drops dynamically all the way upto the cap. With no decay every guild should be able to hit 100 eventually. At the same time the benefits of mass recruiting would not extend beyond the social aspects of doing so into game mechanics.

[Cryohazard]

Greetings! We are putting forth modifications currently trying out some temporary adjustments to the Guild Renown system and monitoring the outcome and feedback this week. The intent is to address concerns from guilds and guild leaders regarding the impact of optimizing guild size in order to gain or maintain guild levels. We’ll be making additional balance changes that we think you and your guildmates will appreciate, but for now we have applied the changes without downtime. As of today, you will notice two changes to your renown rates:

1. Renown decay no longer takes guild size into account. This should ease the pressure for guild leaders to “kick” members from the guild to offset daily renown decay rates. Renown decay now only takes a guild’s level into consideration rather than its size.
2. Renown ransack has been increased. Previously when a guild earned levels in a day, it would gradually reduce the renown drop rates. We’ve increased the rate so that a guild can only earn roughly 3 levels in a single day. This should prevent large guilds from completely dominating the field in terms of levels per-day.

There are some balance Pros and Cons to this method, but we’d like guilds to give us feedback about their experiences using the new settings this week. If players like the settings, or feel it is workable with minor tweaks, then we are ready to keep them! If players find the changes make matters worse, then we are scheduled to revert them. So this week, we encourage guild leaders/members to use this thread to give us feedback about how the changes are impacting your guild leveling dynamics. Important feedback for us is points where frustration has eased (or increased). Thanks for your participation as we work to improve our guild leveling system!

Hey devs, I'm overjoyed to see that you guys are finally addressing this. I talked to some of my officers last night and slept on it, so I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts. (I've read up to pg 14, so mea culpa if I'm repeating something )

In summation: I think its a step in the right direction, but it might be a few steps too far. There needs to be some sort of challenge for every guild in reaching Lvl 100, and at first glance it seems like these changes pretty much eliminated the challenge. The Mega guilds will be able to level very quickly with minimal decay, but the smaller guilds won't be able to keep up because they don't have as many members as the mega guilds.

To a point, it makes sense: More people, the faster you level. At the same time, I really, really, REALLY, don't want to see "Korthos Army" style guilds on the rise again. Its a very bad environment for new incoming players that need to learn a vastly complex MMO. I think the 3 levels/day limit is a good antidote for that, but I'm not sure its enough. I would almost drop it to 1 Level/day. There needs to be some sort of "brake" that will slow a guild's progression, and a corresponding strategy that a guild will have to develop in order to overcome the "brake". As of the old system, the brake was crippling decay at high levels, and the strategy was kicking casuals/innactives. Now, there doesn't appear to be much of a brake at all. Find something in between, and I think we're good.

I think there should be multiple strategies for guilds to progress. The multiple strategies should balance out so casual guilds and powergamers guilds have about the same chance of getting to lvl 100 in a reasonable amount of time. As of these new changes, Mega guilds have the sheer number of players pulling in renown, and small guilds have their small guild renown bonuses. At initial glance, it seems that Mega guilds have a significant advantage over the smaller guilds. The small guilds are left in the dust, and could use a bit of love, imo.

Speaking of multiple strategies...It would be nice to have other ways to gather renown to help level a guild. (Chest farming gets really old after a while). A Couple ideas:

• Guildies should be rewarded more for grouping up with other guildies. I liked how "Build Your Guild" promoted that. Granted, it was an short-term extreme powerleveling event, but something similar on a smaller scale would be healthy for guilds, I think.
• I'd like to see some sort of an Alliance system where guilds that become allies and run together recieve extra renown bonuses. It would encourage guilds to reach out and find other guilds to run with.
• I'd also like to see more renown rewards on difficult content (raids, epic quests, etc); They're quite an achievement and should be rewarded accordingly.

[Renvar]

Reasons I like the change:

Large guilds get an equalizer to the very high small guild bonuses. A guild of 6-10 vs. a guild of 60. The small guild gets 200-300% boost on renown and 1/3rd the decay. Large guilds, unless they were insanely active, were at a huge disadvantage. Most of your 85+ guilds have no more than 20 accounts.

No need to boot casual players that have been in the guild a long time. If something changes IRL and someone can only log on 4-5 hours a week for a while, they aren't hurting you.

No penalty for having toons in multiple guilds. In the past, I knew players with toons in 3-4 guilds. That became less viable with the decay based on number of toons in guild. This will disappear and allow for multi-guild relationships.

Reasons I don't like the change:
It devalues guild level as a measure of player activity/commitment. It is possible in the current system to get a high guild level with lower quality players, but it is unlikely. The amount of time commitment required results in some growth in skills and knowledge by the time a guild gets ove 85. Now, there is no benefit to not adding as many renown earners as you can, regardless of quality (assuming guild level is your primary goal). And no negative to kicking them to the curb once they get you there. (That was always the case, but only very dedicated earners would help in the past. Now 200 casual earners can do more than 5-6 dedicated earners).

Given the small guild bonus caps at 300%(ish) a guild of 300 earning 500 renown per day each makes 150k. A guild of 6 would need to earn 25k each (8333 renown without the bonus) each. Today Qualty > Quantity. With these changes Quantity > Quality.

All in all, I like the direction it's going. It just means that guild level cannot be used as a measure of player quality. (Not that it ever really was).

[memloch]

As a guild leader of a mid size guild I like the change. I am hoping that they still remove the penalty for removing inactive players at some point during their inactive period. For me 2 months is a good bench mark.

I also do not understand the mentality of booting everyone once you reach 100. They are not affecting your decay. They allow more choices for grouping. If they are questing then they are helping to maintain the level. Truly perplexed here.

So I hope they keep this change and continue to work on improving the guild system.

[dagger2b]

This is a really good step in the right direction. I am second in a large guild with 130ish modified account size. Just a few weeks ago we made a very difficult decision to boot inactives between 2-4 weeks to slowly clean up the guild without taking a huge hit for booting the over 1 month inactives that don't hurt us.

We are a semi casual guild and some of us are very active while others are not. We like having a large guild and many guild mates to run with at all hours of the day, but it was impossible to stop our renown bleeding without taking drastic measures.

With this change we are finally able to move in the right direction again without having to kick people who went on vacation or took a small break. Not everyone who does so stays away forever. Look at the forums to see all the people who say they are leaving and come back a few weeks later. It's a shame to have to kick someone you know and like who will most likely play again soon because you want to keep your guild gaining in levels.

[MysticElaine]

1) I wanted to say this is a good step. I am a sm guild so am not affected, still getting over 4k decay. I am glad that we can't now say "I have to boot this casual player because they aren't pulling their weight"

2) I wished the guild decay would be done away with totally as others have stated it is a chore more than a reward. We are very casual players and can't even get to 60. We get so discouraged to see us fall so much renown when we haven't played for a few days and can only play a few hours.

3) To those who are worried about booting inactives...I got rid of a player's toons who said he was leaving the game and moving on. I started from the 4mo mark and onwards and noticed no renown was lost and no recent departures was added.

[dagger2b]

1) ...3) To those who are worried about booting inactives...I got rid of a player's toons who said he was leaving the game and moving on. I started from the 4mo mark and onwards and noticed no renown was lost and no recent departures was added.

So are you saying that any inactives booted this week won't count against our renown or our recent departures?

[Seikojin]

I am glad to see the decay being smaller than before. much more simple of a decay and it seems easier to handle.