Guilds Guild Wars Revamp Idea

Wynncraft Guild Revamp


Hello Wynncraftians! This is my first post on the forums so excuse me for my nooby-ness to speak, I joined Wynncraft truly this year so I am a relatively new player but have reached 105 and have participated in my share of guilds so I believe I have enough experience to weigh in on this topic.


Also, a lot of the numbers and names I used are simply placeholders and thought up on the fly. Actual data points would need to be tested out for balancing and gameplay design.


The Problem


So what is the problem with guilds? Well, here are the main big ones:


1. Alliances

Alliances are the biggest gate-keeper for guilds trying to enter the war scene of the community. The alliance ‘Artemis’ is the biggest alliance that determines the map of Wynncraft, allowing for only preselected guilds to lay claim to certain territories and absolutely demolishing any guilds that try to intervene. What I mean by this is that if you’re a new guild, you’re only shot of acquiring territory is to get into this alliance, otherwise, multiple guilds will work together to prevent you from acquiring territory, making it virtually impossible unless you have an extremely active, rich and lots of manpower to hold a territory and not lose it within 5 minutes.


The issue here is not the war itself, but the perpetual attacks that come from alliances. It’s either you’re in the alliance or you shouldn’t do wars.



2. Territory wars are painfully stale and anticlimactic

Now, aside from alliances, let’s talk about the wars themselves. Most guilds will place a variation of 1000 level fifty mobs as a cost-effective way to hold territories. The reason for this is that they don’t expect to actually defend a territory, but rather take it back quickly and repeatedly. This makes for guild wars being incredibly easy, taking a solo player roughly 8 minutes to clear 1000 mobs. However, because of this, they are also incredibly boring and repetitive, making what should be something exhilarating actually boring and a time drain.


The Solution


So what is the solution to making guilds a more enjoyable experience for everyone, and not simply a sink-hole to endlessly pour hours into mindlessly killing mobs to hold territories?


The answer: Actual PvP.


As far as I know, PvP on Wynncraft is exclusive to Hunted mode, which is far too risky for most players to want to participate in. Especially as a mage, I feel completely outclassed to begin to participate in PvP, so hence I probably never will.

There needs to be a form of PvP that is more entry-level for players who do not want to run the risk of losing all their items potentially, and Guild wars is the answer for this.


The Idea


1. Guild Castles

Each guild will have its own ‘castle’ (a base in other words) that will be on its own world/server (think Hypixel creative worlds or Mineplex player servers). Each Guild Castle will be the ‘hub’ for said guild, allowing for a place for guild members to meet up in-game and maybe even play some mini-games in their Castle world.


Now, how this will be accomplished will be a technical issue for sure. I would imagine it’d have to involve loading/unloading guilds depending on whether all members are offline or not.



Guild castles will be pre-generated schematics that will be loaded in depending on the level of the guild. These are some rough guidelines I have thought of:


Level 20 Guild: Tier 1 Castle


Level 40 Guild: Tier 2 Castle


Level 60 Guild: Tier 3 Castle


Level 80 Guild: Tier 4 Castle


Level 100 Guild: Tier 5 Castle


(Guilds below level 20 will not have Castles at all, just to save on how many guild worlds would be needed by not flooding it with low-level guilds)



With each new Castle Tier would come more of the following:


Critical Points / Pillars (still unsure of name):

I will explain this more in-depth in the Guild war section, but essentially, think of these as acting as the overall ‘hp’ of the Castle which will be directly used in wars.








Guild Warring slots:

I will also explain this more in-depth for Wars, but as it stands, it would be the maximum number of player allowed for Guild wars


For example, a rough estimate of this would be~


Tier 1 Castles: Maximum of 3 Warring members


Tier 2 Castles: Maximum of 6 Warring members


Tier 3 Castles: Maximum of 9 Warring members


Tier 4 Castles: Maximum of 12 Warring members


Tier 5 Castles: Maximum of 15 Warring members



Bigger Castle Schematic:

This one is what it says, it’d be a bigger Castle schematic to allow for bigger wars. (You could also sell “castle skins” in the shop which would retexture your castle)



2. Guild Wars


General Overview


Guild wars will be the center-point of this update. Every guild that is ‘loaded’ (guilds that have members online) will be eligible for warring and being warred.


This is how Guild wars will mechanically function:

• Warring players would need to opt in to be apart of the war, otherwise, the maximum amount of potential players ready to war would be randomly selected (3, 6, 9 etc). Attackers and defenders are teleported to the defender’s Castle, with defenders spawning inside the Castle and Attackers spawning outside the Castle in various spawn locations.
  

• Now, remember Critical points? Critical points will spawn in and around the Castle which will be some variant of a block/mob/something that the attackers will have to kill while facing off with the defenders in team deathmatch PvP. Multiple of these critical points would spawn over the course of eight minutes, and if the attackers are able to destroy all said critical points, then they win. If not, then the defenders win.
  

Prestige points

Prestige points would be the equivalent of elo. Every time a guild successfully defends or attacks they will receive prestige points. Prestige points can also be adjusted based on Elo of said wins.

For example, say if a guild wins an attack having a surplus of players to war and more prestige points to begin with, a lopsided match, then they would receive fewer prestige points for winning.


Specifics


Here are some more mechanical specifics that will occur.



1. Attacking guilds will NOT be able to choose who they attack. They CAN request to attack a guild specifically but said guild would need to accept it in order for it to actually occur. Otherwise, a random guild of the most similar tier (can be 1 tier higher) would be chosen to be attacked. This is simply to negate alliances as making the process random ensures for no targeting to occur.


2. In order to combat large numbers facing off against a few, the respawn timer for the side with more members will be longer. The base timer to respawn will be 15 seconds (arbitrarily set but let’s use it for now) and you can add 3 seconds to the timer for every difference in players between the two teams. (for example, a 3v5 would result in 21 second respawn time for the larger team versus a 15-second respawn for the team of 3)


3. After a guild loses a war defense, they will be granted a ‘war shield’ for 30-60 minutes of time that the guild is loaded. (Offline time wouldn’t count for the shield to go down)


4. A minimum of 3 players would need to be on for a guild to be considered in being attacked. This is to prevent lone players from hoping online when the rest of the guild is off, and effectively deranking their guild singlehandedly by being outmanned.



War Consumables

1. War consumables would be a way to limit the amount of consumables a player can bring for wars. As guilds level up, they will gain more slots to bring more consumables (scrolls, potions etc) and can unlock more slots individually by purchasing with emeralds.
   
   
2. Another option is to disallow consumables entirely for the purpose of balancing wars out to be more fair and not a battle of the riches
   

So what to do with territories?


Guild territories can be kept as is, as this update would provide a fun alternative. However, if you want to incorporate prestige points with territories, you can restrict guilds to only claiming a certain amount of territories depending on their points. Meaning that the more skill-based a guild has, the more territories they may claim instead of simply who has the most man-power.

This would also solve the issues of alliances as the top guilds would need to attack each other to be able to maintain their territories. You can turn this into a cyclical process, and have prestige points wipe every few months so that the territory scene does not become stale and inactive guilds wither away and won’t keep territory claimed simply because they gained elo before their inactivity.



Aside notes…


I realize this idea is very big and would require a lot of work. In no way is any part of this suggestion finalized, all of it would be up to the people actually fully designing this in an economical way. I simply wanted to get the basic idea out there. I am open to feedback, so please give me input if you have any :)

 

Thanks for the input. I agree that ELO has some downsides (toxicity, namely). I wouldn't say that the point of territories is the need for guild XP, but rather that it's the only in-game mechanical representation of guilds (not including guilds taking initiative to come up with their own activities). What's the point of leveling up a guild otherwise, if not only just to increase your player capacity then?

There are stronger monsters in the game to defend territories but as I stated, they are irrelevant because no one uses them to save on economy.

 

Maybe when wynn PvP is balanced in a way that involves skill. Currently, there's no balance at all, while the current popular fanmade alternative has an extremely low skillcap (because it's balanced in a way to make it similar to wynn PvE).

 

currently there is ZERO balance to wynn pvp, so i am against any suggestion involving pvp that does not balance it, and while there have been pvp balancing suggestions, they do not provide in-depth, enjoyable pvp, they pretty much just scale damage in pvp to damage in pve, making it a very 2 dimensional, linear pvp style

because of the lack of balance, interesting or otherwise, i'm gonna have to say no

 

Fair enough. I knew Wynn's PvP isn't balanced but I felt that trying to balance it in the same post would be too much. This suggestion is under the pretense that it would eventually be balanced. An interesting thing to note though is that because it would be team deathmatch, it may not be as unbalanced as say a straight-up 1v1 where class matters very much so. In many ways, I think this actually does provide some balance. Think about it like this: you wouldn't rush into the front-lines as a healer in Overwatch, similarly to how a Mage shouldn't try to take on an Assassin one on one.

 

doesn't matter, still terribly unbalanced pvp which would ruin any pvp in wynn

 

Yeah sorry, PvP is definitely not the answer. Not only is Wynn's pvp system absolute wank, but no one in the warring community wants PvP wars. What you suggest would also make it ridiculously hard for small guilds to claim land and grow. How would leveling even work..
It sounds like you haven't been in the guilds community for very long because the revamp doesn't seem very thought out.

 

Hello there,

First off, thread really well done, great job!

And about the content.....
Artemis is not an in-game feature, it is purely made by the community. Artemis cannot stop you from warring against themselves, but PvP will. PvP stops like level 70, upcoming guild people to war, because they would be annihilated. It would also make it unbalanced, because the wealthier people would also annihilate the poorer. Both a lvl. 70 and a poor warrer can beat a 1000 filler defense though. (Also you said wars are not hard, because you can do them in like 8 minutes, try to do that for 2 hours straight lol)

The castle system would make things even more unbalanced, it would vastly favour higher level guilds, those guilds, that you were standing up against in the first paragraph. You probably don't know how hard is it to level up a guild just once over the 50s of levels. Level a hundred hasn't been reached once, despite guilds being a feature since 2014, you can only implement a castle system like this if you change the required xp for the levels, but that would be a massive "screw you" in the face for a lot of large guilds. However if you adjust these guilds' levels to their already gained xp, it would make things less balanced yet again.

It will be a no from me, the idea itself has a lot of flaws in itself, not accounting the problems it would cause on the server's side. However, I adore your enthusiasm for guilds, please do stay involved with them regardless of what happens!

Warm regards;
~BTK

 

Hello all, thanks for the input--

I'll address the major points here because I may not have initially described myself properly in OP.

Understood. I know PvP is a tricky thing to work with because of how many variations there can be. Ultimately, I'm not going to die on this hill but I think its sad that something as dynamic as PvP will be thrown out the window because it's apparently too much of a burden to rectify.

Guilds would only (or mostly, depending if you want to broaden the scope by allowing guilds to attack upwards) face off against guilds of similar sizes. This is the whole point of 'Castle tiers', so mismatches wouldn't occur between new guilds and established guilds. Leveling would stay the same. As for claiming land, that can still remain the same. I wasn't too sure how exactly to handle it, there is no perfect solution to it imo. The point is to be an alternative to territory wars, something that fun and not just a mob-grind.

I started playing Wynncraft in March and joined guilds shortly after, and have played enough to know what I know now. I know that the idea itself isn't a fully-complete idea because I wanted to see how well-received this would be to begin with. An actual game design document for this would be much longer, and I don't have the time to do that for something that may or may not be taken well at all.

First off, thanks for the warm regards! This first point does fall into the "pvp is unbalanced" which I already replied too. However, while Artemis cannot technically stop you from warring, it does in effect stop you as you are competing against not just the guild you war, but many others who help said guild.

Just because weaker players can do something, doesn't mean that it is necessarily better. There is no perfect world where every condition is met to ensure fair, equitable gameplay, you can only hope for the closest example to fairness.

There are two routes you can take with this:

1. Aim for complete fairness, thereby neglecting the hard work players who've poured thousands of hours into the game by rinsing off stats so everyone does relatively equal damage

2. Let it be as is. Making the grind of achieving better gear and stats have massive pay-off by being able to use it to the fullest extent. This personally would be what I would go with, but I wouldn't be opposed to #1 happening for the sake of equity.

Also, when I said wars aren't hard, I meant the wars themselves. The relentless back-and-forth with territory wars is what makes it a dull, tedious process with little pay-off for newer guilds due to alliances.

I only picked those numbers because they were nice numbers. I was by no means trying to overhaul the guild leveling system, I think that is good as is.

----

It seems that this idea won't happen, which is fair, I went into this suggestion knowing it probably will not get close to reality, but thought I might as well try. Thanks for everyone who chimed in!

 

i'm not against suggestions using pvp, i'm against people making suggestions that have pvp just assuming that pvp will be fine for the suggestion

please either make a pvp suggestion beforehand or include a pvp suggestion in this suggestion

 

I agree with the Aliances, however the castle idea sounds like housing. Instead make castles accessible only during wars.

Great thread, especially if you are new with posting!

Btw I think you are going to piss off few people, but keep going!

 

I wouldn't consider myself knowledgeable enough to make such a thread but I don't think that this entire suggestion is invalid because of that.

Making it accessible only during wars is a good idea if scaling is a problem for sure. I was thinking that it could also be a fun place just to hangout, but obviously priority goes towards server resources.

Thanks, and yes, people might get pissed off but so be it :)

 

i guess we can agree to disagree

 

My only problem is with this. In my honestly personal opinion, the main reason why people war is to gain control of a certain territory and thus to gain xp from it. By making it entirely random, you remove this freedom from the users, so unless your idea drastically reduces the difficulty of wars, it will just make it more time consuming in order to "cycle" through all the random wars they have to go through (that they possibly don't even care about). You do propose a different way to combat this, but the fact that the defending guild could just deny requests of attack from anyone they deem even comparable to their level isn't much better than just having no solution.
Also, for a small guild of perhaps just friends looking to war casually, how would you war against them when it's 5 am for them? (i.e when none of them are online)

Castles might also be a pain for the builders in say, Detlas, not to mention the changes in the "spawning in" mechanics for the players.

 

I think you're confused about the suggestion. When I mention guild wars, I mean the PvP between guilds. Territory wars will stay as is, I mentioned a possible idea to tie it into the Castle idea, but it's simply an alternative.

Castles themselves would be on separate world instances of their own, having their own physical Castle and some landscape around it.

 

While I believe your solution I believe could be better than current it still gatekeeps in its own way. A high level guild currently like fox or hax would have a t4 castle meaning they have 12 members. Being realistic it is almost impossible for a t2 castle guild with 3 people to win. Outnumbered so heavily seems like it causes its own problems.

 

Please read the full post before posting... wars will prioritize between the same tier, and if no wars are found (aka no other guilds of that tier are on) then it will attack upwards by 1.

 

Yes, please make this more obvious in the suggestion. Based on the problem you presented, it is very easy to believe that your suggestion is meant to replace territory wars as a whole. As you said yourself,

Finally, this suggestion very well can increase the toxicity that comes with Guild Wars. A majority of time a casual guild member will spend in Wynn will be leveling their characters or professions, and it would become very annoying to suddenly be pulled into a war by even just an RNG war declaration. Your proposal for opt-ing in or out is fair, but if a member is prepped for warring/pvp, it makes very little sense for them to wait around for someone to declare war on them, unless being a defender grants infinitely more elo. Instead, as you might have previously noted from guild culture, they will instead attack as much and as often as possible because that's simply the best use of their time, not to mention it grants them capability of sniping lower level guilds, for a higher chance to earn elo. Proposing that guilds can only attack their elo level or higher would drastically limit the options for the most highly skilled guilds, possibly even preventing the highest level guild to even participate in wars. Again, you seem to make the perpetual attacks that come from alliances to be the major problem. However, with Alliances being Alliances, it makes sense that they would have the capability of game throwing to center elo around a single guild, while having other guilds "smurf" for elo farming. Unless I "missed" something again, I don't see how pvp would solve this problem.

Other guild events could be cool.

 

It has a kinda WoW BG vibe to it. I like it.

And unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like alliances would be "IMP"ossible to exist.

 

As someone who has done over 5000 wars, and has been a prominent member of the guild community for nearly a year and a half, I don't believe this would change wars in a positive way, all it would do is change the system, it wouldn't make it any more fun than wars currently are, just change the way they work