The devastating impact public Ability Tree API will have on guilds.

Guilds since 1.20 have been characterised by their strategy, diplomacy and the ability for each guild to go beyond it's limits of Wynncraft and achieve the impossible. And with that, comes great power which no guild wants to distribute to the public because of it's great potential. However, the 2.0.4 Ability Tree API introduction, will put great stress on the crisis within the guild scene, which has already seen huge losses, limited choice of guilds and a lack of attention both from CT, Admins and the public. I want to take the time to give some constructive criticism, by focusing on the varying degrees of damage the 2.0.4 feature will do to the guild community, and perhaps it's solutions.

Firstly, guilds compete with one-another not just for territories, the amount of players who could war, but rather the potential in each guild to do better than each other in a war, i.e, defeating the strongest tower possible at the time. However, no guild is willing to just actively tell you what they do as:

a. This is nothing but a thorn in their (the guild's) side, as people could use what you developed to defeat very strong towers against you.
b. What a guild develops is symbolic to their strength, power, and research they put in, and is ultimately rewarding.

Therefore, a lot of your builds, trees and strategies are kept behind closed doors and other guilds strive to discover the unknown and challenge what is actually happening, what is it that guild could possibly be doing to achieve high results and conduct hypothesis testing to develop on a similar level that is higher or lower than the original guild. This is how smaller guilds (in player actively and size) that can be seen on the map are able to get one step further than your biggest guilds on the map, and prevents them from being disadvantaged solely because of the quantity of players who can war, because quality also plays a huge part.

If you were to remove this element of competition, this element of striving for unknown and prevent guilds active in a dying period for guilds, it will do nothing but accelerate the severe decline. Firstly, the whole element of competing with each other is destroyed, I can just read the ability tree now, as well as the skillpoints and I have almost the complete picture I need to mimic exactly what my rival does. In other words, what you developed, what you put your effort and creativity into is now mine for safekeeping with little effort, and will be used against you accordingly. This whole scenario is demoralising, because innovation and creativity cannot be protected, cannot be rewarded and is now punished as this is "nothing but a thorn in their (the guild's side",) a key issue as to why no guild would just willingly tell you what they do. As a result, innovation and creativity will inevitably decline and stay stale as even resetting your tree after you war is impossible, especially with the ability to /friend and check your rival guild's players when they war exclusively; it is simply unavoidable and thus easier to stick with the status quo that is present when the API is first opened.

To cover some arguments I have heard. Firstly, it can be argued that publicising the ability tree removes some of that toxic competition within guilds. While the definition of toxic competition is very broad, one big question I'd ask is, doesn't the Season Rating count as toxic competition? It allows for guilds at the top to be witch-hunted, solely because of their position on said leaderboard, and things said and done. Secondly, it can also be argued that it allows some opening for your newest guilds to begin warring. However, you can't expect to give a random civilian a rifle, and tell them to go immediately on the front lines and save the day, because you got to learn how to hold it, how to fire, how to reload. You get the jist, there are a million things you got to know, learn and develop before you have any understanding what you are doing. In the situation of guilds, you got to know different spell combinations, different ways of dodging tower aura based on class (it's still not perfect to this day), queuing territories, gathering consumables and what ingredients and materials. For your middle tier guilds, the idea, understanding and knowledge already exists, it's a matter of connecting the dots with crafted recipes (something that is possible, but practically impossible for any regular new guild starting out). In the end, it hardly benefits your new guilds, and can in some situations distance themselves from other guilds.

So, whats the solution? Well it seems that the decision is absolute on the notion of public API Ability Trees, but that is not where it ends. What the best compromise is, involves an opt-in/opt-out feature that is seen in games such as Hypixel Skyblock when looking at player stats. This would enable for the idea of an API to remain intact, but to allow the privacy that the guild community and perhaps for those who are on the raid leaderboards deserve and require to keep moving at their own free will. Additional features I would suggest is a long-awaited war count API, which has failed to come to fruition for years now.

Guilds are a complex area, but they have the potential to be great, not to be called 'side content' and shifted to one side, because really they are some if not THE reason why some of your very late-game players still play Wynncraft, it offers amazing opportunities and challenges, leadership, diplomacy and what was once creativity, competition and innovation with each other. The 2.0.4 changes will create detrimental impacts by destroying the competition and determination to discover the unknown as to how amazing 5 players in a war can possibly perform, the innovation and creativity in developing builds, strategies and being able to hypothesis test and being able to use such results to achieve higher than what other guilds holding territories can achieve and being able to be recognised for your (the guild and it's member's ) achievement.

To those in the guild scene, I am calling for your support in this thread getting the recognition it deserves, you make up the community, only you are in touch with the community, your voice (even a like) means a lot when helping the fate of guilds.

 

Surely it'll be listned to if we use the forums :D, right?

 

bump char10

 

shrug, this is the best possible way of getting heard in contrast to constructive feedback discord thread.

 

this guy is spitting something for sure

 

whateva go ahead ion care

 

make guilds great again

 

he cooked..