Guild Monopolies In 1.20

With everyone talking about champion, I thought I’d start a thread on the new guild system in 1.20, specifically about how guild monopolies and mega alliances are being combated.

As many of us are aware, the current state of guild politics is that there is a huge mega alliance that means bigger guilds don’t attack each other much and have a bunch of territory which they defend from the smaller guilds. (I’m not too invested in guilds so idk if that’s completely correct, but I figure it’s close enough)

In his most recent leaks on discord, Salted talked about how they’re planning on combating this giant alliance and monopoly of territories. They’re not adding too many more territories, but they are making it harder to keep a huge guild or alliance alive.

So far what we know is that resources (similar to professions but not related) will be used by the guilds to make defenses and maintain their guild. Different territories have different resources, and those resources (at least the largest quantities of them) are going to be spread out rather far.



So you’ll need a lot of resources to maintain a mega guild, and you won’t be able to get those resources easily since they’re so far apart.



Rather than getting a lot of all four resources, most guilds won’t be able to cover enough territory to get a lot of all four resource types, and they’ll end up with a lot of 1-2, and only some of the other types. However, mega alliances won’t work either, because there’s a limit to the number of alliances you can have. (This could be a misinterpretation of what Salted said though)



The taxing part is about how resource trade routes work. Since you can’t have infinite allies, if you want to maintain enough resources as a mega guild, then you’ll have to have your trade routes go through territories that don’t belong to your allies. That’ll result in some fun tax shenanigans, and hopefully make it harder to maintain that mega guild.

All in all, the new guild system seems like it’ll be able to prevent monopolies, especially so after it gets some feedback and rebalancing in the beta.

Edit: After some talk about how smaller guilds will be left out, I’ll offer a counterpoint. When a guild has at least one territory, they’ll have an HQ (headquarters) on a territory of their choosing (not sure if it can be moved). These territories with HQs are really hard to take over because their defenses are really high and can be raised even higher. So when a small guild without any territory takes over a territory from a bigger guild that maybe doesn’t have great defenses on that territory, that smaller guild’s HQ will be placed on that territory. The bigger guild wants to retake that territory, but since an HQ is so hard to take over, it’ll take at least some effort (unlike guild wars right now). This is a really great way to give smaller guilds a lot of power when they don’t have any territories and want to attack a big guild.

Edit 2: Missed this when making the post:



Edit 3: The whole alliance situation and whether Artemis (the mega alliance) continues to exist after 1.20 drops depends a lot (almost entirely actually) on how hard it is to take over HQs where the guild that owns it only has a couple (or even 1) territories. It’s a fine line though. If the small guild’s HQ is too easy to take over, it’ll mean that the mega alliance will continue to exist because the big guilds will be able to take over everything and maintain control of it without much hassle. But at the same time, if it’s too hard to take over a small guild’s HQ then it’ll result in hundreds of guilds all having HQs on basically every territory because no one will be able to take them all over and then maintain non-HQ territories.

Now, I’m not sure what measures have been taken to avoid either of these scenarios, but one solution might be that a guild’s HQ doesn’t regain all its health and defense after a guild war. The HQ might be too hard to beat on a single war, but you can whittle down its health and take it over by attacking and dying in multiple wars. The only way to prevent this would be to repair your HQ after it’s attacked. However, this measure isn’t perfect and I’d be interested in hearing what other people think about giving small guilds more power and how difficult HQs should be to take over.

 

If this is true then some of my biggest worries disappeared Although I still think little guilds won't have that much space (if any, like now)

 

I personally think that Artemis (the Mega Alliance) might have a hard time once the update gets released, but I see a rather small chance that new mega alliances wont form over time. There are two ways this could happen:
1) Artemis stays together and works around the ingame limitations.
2) There will be a lot of chaos first (a few guilds wont survive that) and then the stronger guilds who got territories and resources form smaller alliances. After a few months of fighting against the enemy alliance the whole war will either be won by a single big alliance (unlikely because of the limitations) or the alliances will form a new alliance (not in Wynncraft itself -> the alliance feature but in the discord). They will try to avoid fighting each other and try to have secure and stable territories. There might be a alliance of alliances. One alliance controls Corkus, another controls the ocean, another alliance controls half of Wynn, two alliances control Gavel....

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Small guilds will never have "space" on the territories map because there is not enough territories. If every guild got a single territorie we would still have hundrets of smaller guilds without one. So its impossible, but thats not something bad. It gives guilds a reason to grow stronger.

 

I am not saying every guild should have their own territory, but even for active war guild with ~5 active members the chance is practically zero. If you aren't really big, you can't really get anything. The bigger ones can always claim it back.

 

One thing I’m hoping will happen in the update (and it’s actually looking like it’ll come true) is that the territories where the defenses are weakest in the big guilds can be attacked fairly easily and taken over by smaller guilds. However, once that happens, the smaller guild’s headquarters will be on that new territory because they didn’t have any territory before. Those headquarters can be upgraded pretty easily and are really hard to take over. So those smaller guilds actually will have a chance at staying relevant in the update.

Edit: added to main post

 

sure. Thats the way wars work. But 5 ppl is really really really small...

 

Then expand it to 10 or 15.

 

Guys, refer back to my edit on the main post. Small guilds will still have power.

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Counter points:
1) Bigger guilds will almost surely have better defenses
2) defense of HQs good enough to deter ANO size guilds will either not be available for lower levels or cost massive amounts of resources (now depends how they will be gained)

but yeah, there will be propably more oppoturnites. (depends on the settings though)

 

Those are all good counterpoints, but salted really does want to make guilds better, so it’ll all get rebalanced in the beta and hopefully mean that small guilds have enough power

 

I have no doubts on that. I am just a bit skeptical on this. We will see.

 

If guilds still give no benefit to the game around them (anything not having to do with guilds) I’m still calling them useless

 

I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the exact quote, but I’m fairly sure salted said that guilds will give some in game advantage, though I’m not sure what exactly that’ll be. I’ll try and look for the quote tho

Edit: couldn’t find anything, so I might be wrong about that.

 

i want to have a guild HQ building but my guild isnt active enough to hold territory, I hope its possible to at least have one without warring

 

elect Roosevelt to bust the monopolies

 

Oh poggers new forum

 

Hi Artemis person here, I think most of us would be totally fine splitting up if the new system reduces territory turnover rates.
The whole reason people built mega alliances to begin with was cause it ended up being the only "enjoyable" way to play the game. Since every single territory was equally vulnerable and even extreme defences could be soloed with ease, something had to be done to reduce attacks to a bearable level. Now if the new update actually makes it impossible to just brute force take over a highly upgraded territory, which I very much hope for, then it'd also make the political landscape a lot more interesting since guilds wouldn't have to form mega alliances anymore to avoid total burnout.

 

6 month beta :feelsbad:

 

Guilds have essentially been holding an arms race with the wynncraft admins when it comes to gaining any advantage they can get in guildwars or leveling guilds for years now illustrated by several additions to the wynncraft rules aimed specifically at stopping certain guild practises.

overhauling how guilds interact with and against eachother is undoubtly going to leave a lot of loopholes in the system to bypass the limitations the wynncraft team put on mega-alliances. So all eyes will be on the beta to process as much feedback as possible, as guilds will naturally continue to gravitate towards unstopable mega-alliances if the disadvantages of doing so aren't severe enough (or if there are loopholes to get around them entirely).