Uhh Salted(a Discussion On Guild Slots)

Sorry if it was that just again it sometimes feels guilds can't really communicate well to the Staff team without any method of communication getting flooded by memes or other thigns such as that.

The war reforms making it more strategic was appreciated despite the flaws. The major issue personally is the breaking up of communities and lack of any new community oriented feature for guilds.

Most guilds are communities of people. Community features like for example the possiblity to make a full on Guid Hall(not just the Cinfras one) for each guild and letting guilds have this sort of social space that they can have all sorts of people in not just from their guild but from others and even guildless people on Wynn to just have fun in for events and such (similar to player housing but on a larger scale) would be interesting and most likely highly appreciated. The ability for guilds to have sort of community alliances or just more ways to have interesting events on Wynn would be beneficial to all people even those not nessesarily in guilds. Guilds like ANO for example have quite a history for public events hosted on Wynn and other places. More freedoms to be able to have these sort of large scale events through a guild hall or something would if handled well most likely result in a lot of newer and more exiting events on the server.

Or even modified buffed raids for groups of 10-30 people to take on at once similar to those in other MMORPGs would be exiting in a way or even a great achievement to solo once someone inevitably does it.



I just feel like Wynn should have more community oriented features and not just pit guilds against each other for end game content.


(I should probably make a new discussion on this)

 

I think that's a misunderstanding since that's - atleast for Fox - totally not the case. Sure, there are a few people that can be kicked (although some of them are active within the community, just not in-game) but we would come nowhere close to 49 members.

I get that with the new level requirements some changes had to be made regarding to unlocking perks and/or member slots, but having 40 less spaces is truly a lot and something we can really only solve by moving members to a different guild. This would really not be optimal and would break up the community we've build up, so I really hope it can still be changed.

You said that on higher levels you'd get more member slots but being the number 2 guild I really don't see us getting ~40 member slots in the upcoming levels

 

The thing is Salted most small guilds rarely have the dedication as large guilds do to spend hours; often more than 10 or 17 hours to continually fight in long battles, many of those who do though become territory holding guilds once a megaalliance has collapsed. This update just making it so that small or even medium sized community guilds can hold territory mechanically and theoretically doesn't change the fact that people often become disillusioned with guilds due to the nature of politics and lack of community oriented content.

Even if they could mechanically hold territory most small guilds (and arguably a lot of big guilds) have not much in the ability to properly do politics or strategy and the only guilds that would truly be killed by this update are the small and large guilds who are strategically or politically inept. Guilds that even if there were not a megaalliance, formed a coalition of 15+ guilds would not be able to hold a bit of territory as a stable "claim".

ILQ, EDN, Nia, Shy, VMZ and others were small guilds that eventually held territory, granted some no longer do but still all these guilds remain active community wise even without it. Activity, determination, stamina and ability is what allows such guilds to survive. The ability to navigate politics and wars, the ability to organize during wars, the ability to fight for hours or to make allies to achieve goals. Most guilds do not have or even when they try to are not good enough at wars, the system is cutthroat and will be more so by next update. A lack of community features if anything will bog these smaller guilds down who won't we able to grow as well.

Heck there are a lot of promising guidls righ tnow that will just be crushed by the update, especially the more commnity focued ones. These guilds could be greta communities or even war guilds but mechanically and systematically are prevented form being able to reach this point and that is a concern that just can't really be ignored. I've had several guild leaders of medium sized guilds who are in the ILQ community(public discord is fun) go and say they might give up on wars next update due to how broken it already is in HERO beta with them having less slots to maintain their community let alone fight a war.

Just please Salted can we have a method for guilds to communicate possible issues to the Staff and them to communicate ideas to us.

Such a method of communication would allow a lot more interaction and faster feedback to be given to the staff. The current system of basically scream as loud as possible until the Staff replies or answers isnt a healthy or even effective method for any side. A lot of people in the guild community especially community oriented guilds feel neglected as we have no way of communicating any actual guild issues except by just screaming and pumping out an aggressive or begging forum post because so far there has been no other way to get change.

IE:
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/are-you-fucking-kidding-me.270995/
https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/i-dont-know-what-to-do-anymore.275270/


As a former CT and current Leader of Imperial once said "this server treats them [guilds] like an unwanted daughter they are now forced to pay child support for."

This is genuinely how most people in the community feel and honestly considering how hard it is most of the time to communicate with Staff on issues about the guild it is kind of understandable why a lot of people would feel this way.

Again apologies if it was aggressive or begging it just feels like there is no other way.

(Also i've kind of been awake for 19 hours)


(Also please Salted can we have mroe guild slots)

 

Hahahahahahahahaha

 

Hello again, I'll try my best to be as informative as possible so we can hopefully come to an understanding.

I think you're doing a fantastic job and you should not feel discouraged from doing this just because the feedback is intense right now. 1.20 is changing MANY things for guilds who have been living a static unchanging existence for years now, it is somewhat normal that we are very defensive about some of the big changes that we weren't really expecting.

This part below is heavy speculation and admittedly requires more testing from our end, as well as more info in general. If the below claims are anywhere near reality then the conclusion should be valid even if it's not 100% accurate.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach it does suggest that guilds who went from having 80 slots in 1.19 to 50-55 in 1.20 will be able to work away that difference in "little" time. Does this mean that leveling has become much more trivial? most of the guilds in that lvl 70-75 range I'd assume would jump to the low-mid 80s. Does this mean that they will be able to gain 20-30 more levels "relatively" easy to return back to their original slotcount?

If that is the intention then this means that leveling will become much easier, not just the road from lvl 80 to 100 but also the road from lvl 1 - 80.
What that tells me is that the years of effort many guilds have done in the past will be trivialized.
HOWEVER: this does not mean It's completely unacceptable to even out the playing field a little bit, especially since the xp you can gain as a guild is decreasing.
Also I understand that over time guilds have it easier and easier to gain levels (the addition of silent expanse increased the xp gains drastically) but this change at the moment feels beyond extreme comparatively.

Essentially, based on what we have observed so far in the HB, either the slotcount will be too low for larger guilds and won't be easy enough for it to be brought back up to speed to be trivial, or the years of effort guilds have done in the past will be reduced to an almost non-factor. These 2 things are what people are worried about and based on what we know cannot co-exist. If what I wrote is factually wrong then that needs clearing up.

At the moment there are 21 guilds who are lvl 64 and above, 17 of which are still highly active. To keep it simple let's consider these the "higher-level/bigger guilds" (keep in mind there are still anywhere between 5-10~ active guilds in the low 60s and high 50s)

I daresay with confidence that almost if not all of the top 17 do not have even 20+ members who have not played the game for 14 days. which is a common threshold for most guilds to consider someone inactive.
Speaking from personal observation: the lowest I have seen top guilds go recently dropped to 60~ with 84 slots at the time, probably due to remaining strict on removing inactive members whilst not being too active in recruiting, however they have since then gone back up to 78 members.

I asked our chief in charge of recruitment/activity to get a report on our (AVO's) current member activity and he came back with the following number:
2... 2 out of our 80 members have not played wynncraft in the last 7 days, leaving 78 people in our guild of 86 slots who all have logged on in the past week.

To summarize:
As xera has pointed out before: Most high level guilds do not have a lot of dead weight. There are even a few guilds who might feel like they are being held back by the current slotcount, these are usually the guilds who are the most diligent and professional in their management. It is those guilds who are being hurt/punished the most, is that really the right message to send?

Some final questions:

- Where did the intention to lower a guilds slot count come from and why did it gain traction?

- Why wasn't the required xp curve and associated member slots scaled more in tangent with one another?
example: a lvl 76 guilds having 80 slots currently would jump to perhaps 85~ and they would retain close to 80 slots at that new level.

- IF I'm not completely correct in my first point about the ease of gaining levels:
Can you tell HackForums(lvl 88) and Kingdom Foxes (lvl 86) that the 10's of thousands of hours they actively invested into gaining guild xp won't be trivialized and able to be reproduced in a fraction of the time they put in?
(pot calling the kettle black coming from us I know, but we did put in work on doing wars)

 

Yeah okay Salted, I'm pretty sure my guild doesnt have 30+ "deadweight people!" You can't actaully be serious here cow man, what in the seven hells does this gain for anybody??? How is a guild that loses more than half of their current player slots, who's had thousands of collective hours of work put into the guild, supposed to efficiently level? Efficiently war? effciently do anything compared to now!? And what happens to guilds without enough "dead weight" people to kick? They'll have to kick ppl out for activity reasons, they'll need to demote higher-ups to have a healthy balance of authority and general playerbase, and recruitment will completely stall!

This is an insulting change, especially since many elements of the update including raids, tougher wars, and elimination of territory Xp gain encourage active player contribution in guilds? This change is incredibly counter-intuitive, nobody asked for it, there is no existing problem that is solved and it's gonna destroy communities. Something like "Hey, Dungeon improvements but you now require multiple keys per person and the price of dungeon bombs on the store has been tripled" to even get close to how counterintuitive this guild change is. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: this is the single most braindead change to guild i have ever, EVER seen, and it reeks of absolute stupidity. It reeks of ignorance because the admins don't undertstand what it is like to lead a real guild community, nor do they understand what it is like to see a guild crumble before their eyes.

To Salted and the Wynn administration team, I assure you this will sink the hype for the renewed guild game that current and returning players have been waiting for. None of the awesome-looking revamps matter if our people aren't able to enjoy them together, not when much of our time will be deciding which very legitimate members will need to be cut off from that experience. And I'm not just talking about the guild warring. I hope you will heed the outcries and reverse course on this. This change is an attack on our wynngame families, unlike any other we've seen before.

 

As a person with decently high level level guild and an active community, the guild slot change hurts a lot. my guild recruits players at level 50 and assists them level to 100 to help them grow more used to the people in the guild and give them an easier way to make friends within the guild. In doing this a lot of the lower-level members are some of the most active in wanting to help out the guild in whatever way they can. So to have our guild slots cut nearly in half means we have to either cut a lot of our lesser-active higher levels which would greatly cripple our ability to war besides a handful of 10ish people to keep our active and friendly newer players trying to find a place in wynn or boot our current low-levels and only recruit people who are 90+. A large chunk of guilds level 60+ recruit players between 50-80 and not just 90+ players that can war. With a massive cut to guild slots the majority of these guilds will stop recruiting "low levels" entirely.

 

^^^^ Well said.

And see, I didnt even touch on the anti-mega alliance thing in my post but I guess i will now: guild member size was never really the issue here. A lot of the issues that kept map control alliances on such a high pedestal ARE being dissuaded by a lot of the new guild changes already, so the guild member slot change isn't even needed to achieve its chief objective. The ramifications of this approach are just too great, and would soil an update that I am actually looking forward to, there's some good stuff in the update. This isn't one of them, and it's kinda oof that this wasn't mentioned in the changelog and, once again, we had to repeatedly ask about this in order to get a transparent answer.

 

Definitely agree that it should be changed but this is a beta and we've so far been listened to, so getting overly upset over this doesn't seem too great for the guild community's image

 

all the guild community knows how to do is get overly upset

 

To be fair it was often warranted in the past, but since we just got a new system we might as well try

 

How is expressing that a part of a game you love or want to love has problems, saying how a part of the design makes the experience worse, and giving ideas on how to make it better, getting overly upset? Could you explain that to me?

 

New system or old system, butchering guild slots is a horrible idea. Tbh i at least saw *some* merit in other controversial approaches like the banning Discord server links on any forum content, after it was explained. If anything I think getting concerned over this change is more warranted than any other change before bcause the ramifications are so glaringly obvious. Though I agree with your statement on not getting overly upset, I disagree that we should "try it." We already know what will happen if the guild slots get butchered, we don't need a period of trying to understand the harm it'll do.

 

I completely agree. this change is absolutely uncalled for, despite how much us smaller guilds needed help. This guild game is nothing without the communities we have in our guilds, and butchering playerslots is completely destroying what we've built in these guilds, our second homes and families.

Salted, I *really* hope you see how absurd this part of the update is. If not my message, or Art's, then everyone else's on this thread and in the Discord. This is not the way to go.

 

u misunderstood me, I meant "try it" as in "try to complain calmly", obviously I want the slot thing reverted

 

I've had this idea where each location has a product, although it would probably get shut down bc it's kinda unneeded and just and more life, not QoL or features.

tbh I think we just play to much mc and we check the forums multiple times daily, while you are actually scrambling to fix bugs, responding to a ton of feedback, etc.

lmaooo

ok. many issues with this statement.

1: Even my guild, a chill community guild that isn't ultra committed to spending 100's of hrs of our life warring would be at a loss from this. Now, bc were not an ultra-active guild, it may take at most a month or 2 to slowly kick people out for inactivity. This is STILL an issue for us, although bc were not ultra-high level and also bc were community-focused, this will only be annoying, but not massive enough to cause longstanding issues. On the other hand, big guilds losing 40 members WILL cause a problem. To be clear, I don't believe you'll lose the members, but you won't be able to recruit. That means that if you a: switching people between guilds a lot (merger or smth) or b: have an opportunity to add some op ppl, you'll need to find a bunch of members to just ... kick. Thats a great segway into the next section:

2: Uhhh salted... there's not a ton of dead weight in most guilds. I can see reducing guilds slots meaning that many people will get kicked out, especially edge cases. That will lead to an influx of people wanting to join guilds that already don't have enough people. Many guilds have good methods alr to make sure ppl aren't inactive, to the point that rotation isn't untra possible.


aight this is an unedited rant I made in a few minutes, if it makes no sense/I have bad facts sry lol

 

It cannot be underestimated how many perspectives there are to viewing 1 thing. The guild community has had completely different experiences compared to the admins and developers and both of us seem baffled why 1 group sees green while the other sees blue, while we're looking at the same rubix cube from a different angle.

I'm like 90% confident this entire debate boils down to neither sides fully understanding the other sides reasoning for opposing/favoring it. Mix in some bad or miscommunication and a lack of information on both sides and you get exactly whats happening at the moment.

explain things calmly and separate facts from feelings whilst stating both. We don't fully understand why the admins think this is a good idea, they might not understand why we are so critical of this. Be patient with one another... at least as long as the beta is open..

 

I just wanna say real quick to Salted and the staff panel (if they see this one): we really do appreciate everything you guys are doing. This game wouldn't be the same without your hard work so, thank you <3