Incentives to Guilds & Ideas regarding Season Rating

Season Rating, it was a system intended to create competition between guilds who would actively be rewarded for holding territories and attacking territories and would thus motivate guilds to become stronger and develop strategies in order to hold territories and sustain their claim. However, such an idea while on paper is great don't get me wrong, it is fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. As some constructive criticism, and to give some introduction to Season Rating and the purpose of this thread, here are the current issues about it:

1) Holding territories greatly rewards more long term than attacking a territory and holding it for even little amounts of time. This enables larger guilds to absolutely dominate over smaller guilds and good luck trying to keep up with guilds with territory counts as high as 62, because you would be doing hundreds/an idealistic amount of wars to even catch up.

2) Public leaderboards create severe inequalities across guilds. From experience being in a guild that was either #1 for a period of time or #2, one of the most common reasons people would join would be because the guild was high on the Season Rating. This therefore has left even medium sized guilds in the dust, despite being on the front page. Subsequently reducing the diversity of guilds on the map without additional recruitment.

3) Such an idea has simply not worked because of alliances controlling the map and destroying any opposition or effort of smaller guilds as a result of inequalities, particularly looking at the information barrier specifically this time. I.e, newer guilds have hardly any understanding or familiarity with guild economies, hence why you find small sized guilds staying in the orbit of bigger guilds and allowing for such influence in order to develop, grow stronger and have a future chance within the system, even if it costs you your autonomy.

4) Season rating has created toxic competition and greed, which has eroded the guild community more than it has replenished. This survival of the fittest aspect is simply not sustainable with the lack of incentives to join guilds.

5) Other aspects are considered along with this toxic competition and greed such as Emerald Seeking which to put it bluntly is why most guilds are on the map to this very day and has dominated negotiations between guilds since 2022.


With Fruma being pushed back again, while I do not know what the plans are for the gap opened up, I do want to shine some hope and recognition for the guild scene which could see some suggestions put forward to improve the scene just that tiny amount. I do not wish for everything I say and discuss to be put into the game, all of what I say are suggestions and hope it provides some foundation for something new. Anyways, here is my proposal for the future of season rating.

Number 1 - Incentives to guilds:​

Guilds are missing an incentive to be a part of ever since party finder has been implemented, or even before then. The original vanilla idea of guilds, was to meet up, be a part of a community, socialise and play Wynncraft together with said community in activities such as: dungeons, grinding classes, proffiing, engaging in guild events and what would be raids. While it can be argued that this has been achieved to some degree, the scope only highlights professions and wars. Everything else, has been overshadowed and outdone by Party Finder. This is not to say Party Finder should be abolished or is a plague, but rather it should be used to promote guilds even more and to improve retention of endgame players in the process. For instance:

• It makes no sense to this day why the Guild Master exclusively only talks about the option whether you want to make a guild or not, rather than helping a player discover new opportunities and horizons from a wide selection of guilds. Chiefs should be able to at any given time start up the equivalent of a Party Finder party with a preset message that any other chief can create, edit and set as the guild’s default recruitment message. This would be filtered when interacting with the Guild Master and would still appear when typing /partyfinder. This gives flexibility and easy access to guilds to advertise and also the confidence in leadership within a guild. This would present in the /partyfinder as something along the lines of: “<Guild> Is recruiting new members!”, followed by a description message.
  
  
• I would also still wish for a small bonus for joining your first guild, this wouldn’t be rewarding a player in the form of money but rather something small like maybe a Unique Wybel pet like how it has been done when referring players to Wynncraft.
  
  
• Popup messages are also a niche way to promote guild’s and would also hope to see them bolstered in promoting guilds.
  
  
• A recently posted idea suggested the notion of a Wiki page dedicated to Wynncraft Guild Economy in order to familiarise newer players with Guild Economy and perhaps reduce the divide between new guilds and more established guilds to some degree. This may be a bit out of scope now, but it also comes under the ideas of incentives to join guilds.
  
  
• Emerald Seeking should be limited. As I highlighted, some of the guilds to this day are only on the map, and are only in specific areas of the map because of one thing: Emerald Seeking. The whole political aspect of guilds is dictated by the quantity of emerald seeking, the opportunities to utilise emerald seeking and assessing the threats that could diminish your returns leading to isolationism and individualism, rather than interventionism and helping allies/interventionism. This bonus has become the centrepiece of guilds, and has diverted all attention to the desire to foster your community and grow your guild. This has ultimately resulted in the death of a lot of guilds because of it. Limiting emerald seeking and replacing it with solutions and alternatives which I’ll go into detail later on would switch the focus onto community, war development and overall growth rather than the deathbed of almost every guild.

Number 2 - Season Rating Leaderboard​

As mentioned, Season Rating leaderboards don’t really play much purpose, apart from telling new players that this guild has the highest Season Rating, and is therefore the best guild and you can’t prove me otherwise; I will not stand for any objections. I also want to put forward what is hopefully a simple solution:

• Make Season Rating leaderboards only accessible to those within a guild. The idea is more psychological than anything. With a message instead saying “Join or create your own guild to view the Season Rating leaderboard for this season!” Is already a reason to join guilds, someone would want to find out the unknown and will seek to find out the unknown. Once in a guild and you discover the unknown and what it means, there are three things that could happen:
  

1. An individual would discover the truth, but would feel bad leaving their guild and the community they have just become a part of or have already contributed to some degree to. Therefore, they are more likely to stay in a smaller guild and help contribute.
   
   
2. What could hopefully be the least likely to happen, an individual would hop between guilds finding out who is the highest leaderboard, this would create disloyalty and guilt and would by nature be discouraged amongst the guild community.
   
   
3. An individual just stops playing the game and goes through the cycle again at some later date.

Number 3 - The Season Rating rework.​

It’s impossible to make the Season Rating system perfect, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it work or improve it. I appreciate it that you have been reading as far as now, you are 1,200 words in and have only got to the juicy part of this topic I am discussing. I am sure everyone can accept how difficult it is to come up with a solution and how divisive it will be no matter what perspective you have taken, what I am putting forward is an amalgamation of every single perspective, idea and solution even briefly talked about to me.

1) Taking your first territory gives a lot more Season Rating than usual. Taking the territories 5 out from your Headquarters gives more Season Rating than usual. Moving your headquarters and then attacking territories/taking territories that were previously queued prior to moving will no longer apply this buff. There is also a 4 hour cooldown.

2) Season rating milestones will be buffed greatly and there may be even more milestones to reach. This is to compensate for the difference in having Emerald Seeking limited and may offer the opportunity for new and unique rewards never seen before!

1. In addition, activities conducted by guild members now contribute to Season Rating - the whole system is one in which all guild members are in it together and can actively contribute towards it. Activities such as: Raids completed, XP Contributed to the guild, Gathering Materials of a certain type, dungeons completed (alongside forgery chests opened maybe?) and of course wars won all contribute to the Season Rating milestone of a guild to a certain degree under a weight system. Going even further, the amount a player has contributed in terms of season rating could be measured by going into the member’s TAB in /guild manage. However, I can acknowledge that this has it’s technical limitations and would likely require you guessed it! An API.
   
   
2. The current weekly guild objectives will remain intact.
   
   
3. Within the middle of each guild season, for two weeks a global event takes place. In this event, all players who are inside a guild are randomly assorted into one of the activities I mentioned above. Each activity has it’s own leaderboard and it’s own milestones which are exclusive to the player. In addition, this would have it’s very own leaderboard which could be viewed. During this time frame, the activity the player has been assigned also rewards roughly 1.25 to 2 times the normal amount of Season Rating under the current weight system in place (This multiplier would vary based on the activity to avoid one activity absolutely crushing it over other forms of Season Rating activities). Milestone rewards may also include rewards such as the usual tomes and emeralds (These would be rewarded directly to the player and can be claimed within the guild rewards area) and could include cosmetics until the next games take place (This could be centered around the activity and also the season banner up for grabs?).
   
   
4. Extras to mention: Season Rating weight system may be flexible. I.e, If a guild hyperfocuses on XP contributed and nothing on any other activity, then the weight system may adapt by increasing the rewards yielded by activities such as dungeons completed and less on xp contributed
   
   
5. In regards to this, wars won will stay fixed and should always remain one of if not the dominant way of winning Season Rating.
   
   
6. The cooperative guilds constructive feedback in case anyone has seen it could definitely be incorporated in this suggestion!

3) Territories held and the reward for Season Rating only gives Season Rating based on the treasury milestone it reaches. This is rewarded in a lump sum and only ever starts once a guild hits medium treasury. In addition, a guild taking territories with treasury apply a very small buff to each territory until it hits low treasury. This resets once the territory is taken or the territory your Headquarters is moved to. Small example: As soon as a territory hits medium treasury, it rewards X amount of season rating once, the next dose is at High treasury and then Very High. In addition, taking territories with Medium treasury or above will reward more Season Rating.

4) Territories held at the end of the season reward a small amount of Season Rating. The idea I have behind this is mostly behind trying to turn the tides of a very tight ending to a very competitive season and influence that one last bit of competition. (This may be a very bad idea and contradicts my current thoughts of guilds, I only thought about this literally on Thursday 8pm in a cooking session trust!).

Number 4 - Small radical extra​

1) Remove #guild-community. By far one of the more radical and silly ideas of this post so far but I want you to allow me to put my reasons behind it. Firstly, the whole entire channel creates a very distorted and false representation of what the actual guild community is like which leads to number 2: It is dominated by an old and elitist group of players, a group which is dying out and consists of nothing but rubbish posts that put off people from the Wynncraft community from getting engaged in guilds because new players see this sort of behaviour and are almost always put off or spooked by it. This channel is nothing but a bad misrepresentation of guilds and the community/communities which forms into the category of ‘guild community’.


Conclusion.
My current idea for guilds therefore is to:

• Incentivise being in a guild and promote all of it’s benefits,
  
  
• Encourage community growth and alternatives to get your guild noticed,
  
  
• Making it easier to be noticed as a guild,
  
  
• Making it easier for smaller guilds to compete and gain Season Rating while not nerfing larger claims and harming big guilds too badly.

Thank you for reading through over 2000 words of ideas and suggestions for changing the current system. I have tailored the best I can to all the different perspectives and ideas and suggestions briefly talked about by players around me and turned it into something new (Go check out the cooperative guild goals constructive feedback thread, that one is also really good). In addition, I have really wanted to avoid changing the system from the ground up, but rather rework it and keep the current system in place but work around it to make it even better. Once again, I don’t expect everything I say to be implemented word for word, but rather hope that it gets acknowledged and provides the ideas to make something that is also new.

You are not getting a TLDR.

 

The gap between attacking and defending is so large that when you tell people you're preferably an attacker guild the most common reply you'll receive will be a blunt "Why?"

 

#GsWOnTop

 

just find builds to your guild and do wars without problems

 

GsW on Top

 

very well thought out, see you at the guild update in 10 years

 

#GsWOnTop

 

I dont do anything guild related (other than be in one) so idk any of the problems but this seems really in depth so i commend u for that!

When has this been said? Or are you just assuming that based on context (which is fine, im just genuinely curious)

has season rating really done this though? like yea it creates competition but what makes it toxic? Yes design-wise it may be flawed with it rewarding the time a terr was held more than like capturing more and more terrs, but how is that "toxic" competition? Seems like the same sort of competition that guilds have always had, even before the guild revamp (which is to say there has always been drama and negative interactions)

 

I assume it's in reference to Salted announcing Fruma is no longer the next major update.

SR is a contributing factor to map stagnation and greed. Take the wynn province for the past 2 seasons for example, 2 guilds held the entire province; thats over 100 territories between 2 guilds. If SR and the aformentioned emerald seeks didn't exist in the capacity they do guilds would have no reason to overextend themselves taking more and more, diminishing the hopes of any smaller guilds less than they already were. These guilds are often actively making their claims worse in regard to economy and chokepoints just for SR and em seeks and it's only allowed to continue because the guild scene is already so battered into the ground no "attackers" are gonna do anything about it.

nice post :3

 

monthly yap bout guilds dropped