War Costs + Balances - Update: Fixed

UPDATE: This has been changed, and the entire system is completely free to use now.

back for rant round 2

The 1.20 update has made guilds into Wynncraft's new money sink. When warring out of your own emeralds, which cost 2 le per territory, there are several benefits versus warring out of your guild bank and strategically managing your resources:

1. Zero delay - short 2 minute wait-times.
2. You can war anywhere on the map, no repercussions.
3. You do not pay taxes. Your enemy does not benefit.
4. No extensive research into routes and as a result from the above.

The benefits sound great from subsidizing wars out of your own money; besides the fact you are forced to do it. That's right - In order to participate in the new war system, your members are forced to dish out their own emeralds. . as if the new 20 le guild cost wasn't bad enough.

Spoiler: New Guild Cost

Side note about my opinion on the new guild cost.

I think the new guild cost fails to recognize the guild ambition and how ordinary guilds have contributed to Wynncraft's success. Guilds were established as permanent parties, and majority of guilds are friend groups that play Wynn together and invite each other. They may not be mainstream, but they are essential. The guild experience is rad and its true ambition creating a clan even if its just to chill with your friends.

Guilds are for the purpose of community nonetheless, hence I think the cost being this high to promote community which overall contributes towards Wynncraft and the player experience is not a good move.

I feel like this decision was made with mainstream war guilds in thought, and to put larger restrictions on sub usage as a result, although it doesn't play out like that - or perhaps its just a greater money sink.

In order to participate in the new war feature, you are forced to subsidize wars at a cost to your members. This is absolutely unprecedented. In the old war system you could contribute to the war bank, but it was optional; and it did not cost money to engage in wars.



This sums it up well. Standard emerald generation on a territory is 9k an hour. After taxes, the average war is 14k. You would have to wait a long period of time just to subsidize another war with no expense to you out of your guild bank. That isn't viable, also given the fact that territories only have 10k emerald storage which has to be upgraded via wood. You have to use your money and do numerous wars just to get on your feet. That said, it is also while you are facing resistance so its a continual cycle.

Wars are a feature players have been enjoying for years as end-game guild content, and now they cannot engage in the content they have long took pleasure in without significant cost.

Also speaking regarding subsidizing wars out of your own money, it is way to overpowered. It is difficult starting out, but once set up guilds have used it as a "strategy." You can now do multiple wars at once, so if a guild is paying for wars out of their own pockets they are getting two minute wait-times, with zero delays, taxes, and benefit to the enemy. They can war anywhere they want and sweep through an entire region in a short amount of time.

In essence, it has become a competition of what guild wastes the most money. Warring out of your own pocket is too overpowered and there isn't much you can do against it except, well, war out of your own money too :/

In find it odd that in a system based so much on resource management and strategy they would have a feature that basically invalidates exactly that and makes it not necessary.



There has to be repercussions. The more it is consistently used, one of two things should happen:
1. Wait-time/delay before the attack increases
2. Cost is increased.

I don't think players should be forced to pay out of pocket every time they want to participate in the feature. Money shouldn't dictate whether or not you can be involved, also considering guild wars are probably Wynncraft's main end-game content for a lot of players, which is a never-ending battle for territories, and hence a never-ending expense. It is not viable.

This has already become a great cost to guild players, lots have already decided to step away and not participate as a result - really its absurd especially given that territories are useless.

Go find another money sink pls and thx

 

With all of these great suggestions coming out now, I really wish more people had pointed this stuff out during hero beta and made suggestions then. It saddens me that people waited until the update was released, especially due to the massive outcry to push the update sooner.

Oh, wait...

 

The 1.20 guild system was supposed to be the fix to monotonous warring and alliances (heck, why else were time delays to resources added but to prevent map wide alliances from supporting each other) but increasing the costs of guild creation and maintenance can only be seen as wynncraft's resort to the guild system to reduce inflation.

Large scale alliances have had their effectiveness reduced, but for what? To reinvent map wide alliances which traditionally reinforced allies into a map wide ceasefire or truce agreement?

In light of the update, guild mechanics certainly got more complicated, and the whole system now requires much more strategy and coordination, but the looming negatives can't be ignored either.

People talk about the quick fix proving to be more damaging than retaining the old system, but they would never consider the possibility of a awry ill-constructed plan months in the making.

 

I also mentioned this on a thread I created, but the fact that war glitches still happen with this 2 le cost is ridiculous. We do not pay two le per war (which is a lot for some people) to be faced with a glitch that has plagued us for years and SHOULD have been fixed with the removal of war servers and rework of guilds. Having a money sink is one thing, having what is essentially the Scam Merchant all because of a glitch that should've been patched is another thing

 

The system is flawed but ranting about it and calling it a money sink won't get us anywhere. Both emerald and tome seeking are near worthless which still means that guilds are a competition of ego to see who owns more territories, so why should we care that much that guilds are spending their own money just to flex a number? Anyway here are my suggestions for fixing this:

1. Heavily buff tome and emerald seeking to make guild wars worth doing.

2. Limit tax to 20 or 30% to encourage guilds to use HQ's emeralds on enemy territories and not being 3 billion emeralds for 1 war.

3. Cut timers using HQ emeralds by half to further encourage guilds to use HQ emeralds (or ad a 10 minute cap).

4. Increase the war timer using your own LE to 3 or 4 minutes to discourage guilds from yeeting a whole bank page of LE to just take over Sky Islands.

 

imo the cost should scale with the amount of territories you own, making it easier to set up a claim but harder to expend it

0 territories: 8 EB
1 territory: 16 EB
2 territories: 32 EB
3 territories: 1 LE
4 territories: 2 LE
5 territories: 4 LE
6+ territories: 8 LE


Edit: I forgot subguilds exist, something would have to be changed (imagine always attacking for 8 EB and then transferring the territory to your main guild)
I guess linking subguilds to main guilds would fix that

 

guilds were literally designed as a money sink tho

whether or not its a good one is an entirely different discussion but one of the key designs of the guild system is to act as a money sink

 

Sub guilds are definitely another issue but I agree with the territory attack increase if you want to do it directly with raw emeralds. As it stands of now, for those trying to get into the guild scene, for a guild update trying to incentivize newer people on the fray, well I barely have seen any newcomers at all for mostly many valid reasons.

 

Money was never required to actually participate. The only cost was the 5 le creation cost and only the leader has to pay for that. From there, guilds were free. Banners were cosmetic and optional, and territories funded emeralds (and it wasn't like people defended high anyways . . 1k filler moment)

 

and the argument that creating guild cost 20 le to prevent many subguilds from getting created is not very effective considering pretty much all the war powers guilds already made their subs pre 1.20

 

Yeah haha
Majority of guilds cannot even use subs because guild slot issues

 

Also I would like to say, it seems that the goal of this update was to STOP map control from being possible, however as you can tell, map control is even easier than before because of the emerald cost. Now, in order for a large scale raid to happen, every guild needs one rich person who is willing to spend a lot of LE to even get the guild a small footing, while the guilds already controlling the map can easily hit 10-15 territories consecutively using their guild bank that they built up. This makes map control even easier and its baffling this wasnt found during testing

 

I have seen an interesting suggestion from Hung (AVO)

The proposal was that guilds with no land war for free, and I assume once they acquire a certain amount of terrs and meet some threshold, they then have to pay for wars as they are now expected to war from their HQ

There has been LOTS of suggestions, all with merit

 

As far as I'm aware, one of the big considerations that led us to the current system is the fact that they did not want subguilds to benefit from the "benefits" newer guilds were given. However we ended up with a system where only the first 5 wars are cheap with no exceptions. Needless to say, the current design choices are debatably even more damaging to guildwars than if subguilds were given free reign.

To solve both issues, the million dollar question in my eyes would be:
How can we offer consistent and re-usable benefits to small and 0 territory guilds that subguilds can't abuse.

While a perfect answer to this question would immediately solve a huge problem, it probably isn't that easy.
So I raise a secondary question:
By what metrics or behavior can we differentiate a "typical" subguild from a normal legitimate guild?
This side-question would at least give us key differences that can be used to restrict subguilds from benefitting while still allowing legit guilds to use them.

I think it's worth looking at solutions that don't 100% rule out subguilds abusing this, but to make it at least difficult or annoying to reap these benefits. (if wynn really wanted to, they could add an enforced new guildwars rule on top of these restrictions however some subguilds might be a gray area of semi-legittimate guilds, which complicates things further)

A basic solution to the original problem would be simple: Have 5-10 cheap wars regenerate over the course of 2-3~days.
This gives opportunity to small and 0 territory guilds several times a week to make a move on the map for far cheaper. And allows defending guilds some respite so they don't have to be on guard every hour of the week.

But how to prevent subguilds from abusing this? Honestly I don't know if a magic bullet exists for this, I think the best approach is to implement a few things that combined discourage big guilds enough as to not use subs or at least make it annoying to do so.

Some starting ideas to consider:

- Lock the cheap war regeneration behind a lvl 40-50 range guild unlock.
This definitely doesn't solve the problem on it's own but could be combined with other things to make it slightly more difficult to use subs. As for legit < lvl40 guilds, honestly if reaching lvl 40-50 is too difficult then I'm not sure if there is much for you to do in guildwars, it's not like the current system favors you any more.

- Lock the war regeneration behind having X amount of members in your guild.
Again not very fun for small friend group guilds, but consider your remaining options with the current system. This would force big guilds to put in considerable effort of filling up their guild with a bunch of likely inactive players (which may cause social issues on wynn itself due to mass inviting). Its again not waterproof but at least it would require some effort upfront if every subguild had to have 20-30 players in it for it to be a source of cheap wars.(mods could probably step in if this gets abused and becomes a problem).

- Banhammer
Not a fan of this idea, mainly because of certain gray areas which could become the victim of bias within the moderation team, but you know it's out there perhaps as a last resort.

- (Reserved for when I have another idea)

- Change taxes so you don't pay the tax of the territory you're attacking. (Alright personal pet peeve of mine, but this makes no sense!)
This is less about getting your first territory on the map but more about giving a new land-owner better options on what to do afterwards.

This is a major issue that shouldn't be overlooked, even if you managed to get a small 2-3 territory foothold. you're still nowhere near safe from having to spend large amounts of le.
As a side-effect, this also forces defending guild into a a no-brainer decision to put 80% tax on every territory to make it more difficult for attacking guilds to get a foothold, which prevents any hope for a fun and dynamic taxation network.
Defending guilds would benefit from this as well in the form of slightly cheaper long-distance ballistic attacks, but small attacking guilds absolutely need this!


- Lower the accumulated travel time when moving through territories that your own guild owns.(if this already exists then I sure as hell don't feel it)
This is also one to encourage attacking via guild emeralds, and is an interesting benefit for both attackers and defenders to play around with.




I ask people to come up with more answers as the current state of guilds is not one I get much gratification from succeeding in.

 

I think if you just prevent guild hopping you would make subs more unattractive.
a) I mean do a war cooldown for new members
b) do a guild change cooldown for members
I mean there are probably other ways these are just two suggestions if you really want to prevent subs