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Preventing mega guilds.
This discussion was created from comments split from: Official Livestream - February 9th @ 1 PM PST - Q&A thread.
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Good question; guess it all hinges on why be in this massive player dynamic world rather than a theme park MMO if you are going to stay solo?
Not sure what the "official" answer to this might be but don't these "casual masses" individually need to guild up and get organised themselves? make a choice and belong to something on the server? Pick a side?
Mega Guilds = Guild alliances, isn't that the whole point, wars will be played out between groups of allied Guilds to see who can dominate a server.
In other big MMO's I have played these Mega guilds if they do "win" or dominate the server usually break up after a while due to player boredom, (what do we do when there is no one left to conquer?) they make new alliances and start new wars.
Good question; guess it all hinges on why be in this massive player dynamic world rather than a theme park MMO if you are going to stay solo?
Not sure what the "official" answer to this might be but don't these "casual masses" individually need to Guild up and get organised themselves? make a choice and belong to something on the server? Pick a side?
Mega Guilds = Guild alliances?, isn't that the whole point, wars will be played out between groups of allied Guilds to see who can dominate a server.
In other big MMO's I have played these Mega guilds if they do "win" or dominate the server usually break up after a while due to player boredom, (what do we do when there is no one left to conquer?) they make new alliances and start new wars.
I'm going to guess there are many times more people that want to be in small 5-20 man guilds where they actually matter rather than being a nameless cog in a 1000+ person zerg collective.
Those people in the small guilds will not be happy being steamrolled by the 1000 member zerg collective, and will not play the game...and will not pay subscription fees.
If the only solution to curtail the inevitability of these mega-guilds is to cap in-game guilds to 300 people...well...yeah...it won't work. These guilds organize outside of the in-game guild mechanics/features.
That's why I asked the question. The official answer will be the determining factor as to whether or not they get $500 from me. I would be shocked if they actually answer this question in a meaningful way, honestly. So I suppose I'll continue to be a "wait and see" guy with AoC.
I agree with @nscheffel, this is an issue worthy of discussion and I guess this thread was created to explore the problem so I think we are fine posting here.
There is a cap of 300 members on the size of guilds right now, but a few of them have already reached that number and already have plans to create alt-guilds to keep growing and get around that size limit.
Two node types seem to be in danger of being affecting by majority rule, military and economy. These node types will be controlled by a restricted group that can retain its dominance in spite of any protest from the minority. Economy will be easy to manipulate if a single guild starts combining its resources. Military might be harder to control since that might be more of a skill-based thing and a smaller guild of hardcore PvP players might actually get to lead a node but if a large guild can organize a branch of itself that specializes in "training" for PvP they can also come out ahead there. We also don't have enough information on how control of the nodes will be decided; will the power in a military node be based on PvP points of an entire guild or individuals? etc. We also don't have any information on how Divine nodes will operate.
To put it simply, the danger with a single guild controlling the decision making process is that the guild in control will also benefit the most from that node. There is also a limit to the number of nodes that can grow to max level, so even if the disaffected leave and start their own node, the node controlled by the "mega" guild will remain dominant.
TL:DR
Maybe I'm giving Humanity too much credit. But I think the Node system is what will control this mega guild idea by punishing bad leadership and rewarding good city planning and leadership.
Lets Assume for a moment that this happens. There is a group of 1000 - 3000 people that coordinate and pool resources to assert their control over 2 possibly 3 metropolis nodes.
So far to this point I don't see a problem here. Why?
Because it takes a lot of resources, effort, leadership, time and determination to accomplish this. So they are most likely not doing it just for the lols and if they are, they wont maintain that high population for long, why?
Because people like actual progress in sandbox games, lols are fun for a while, but this endeavor doesn't take just a while.
B-b-b-but Trolls! well Trolls lack the coordination and leadership to take on this endeavor. Because a troll knows not to take another troll seriously. Think about it. If you are a troll you know how it is and wont let another troll lead you to crash into the ground losing all of your time and resources on a plan that will ultimately be just a waste of everything put into it.
So, since it's not 3k trolls banded together, they will make sure that their nodes thrive. So they will make sure they choose good mayors to make those nodes under their control grow or stay large and not delevel, making them livable and approachable or even desirable by players outside your alliance or horde or whatever *Imperium* you want to call your faction yes, faction. This is a community made faction. Remember how the game has no set factions and they have to be made by the players? Well this is such a case. we are being presented with the opportunity to create our own Horde or Alliance, join them or leave them, whenever we want to. Build our own Orgrimmar or Stormwind, and defend them from other factions that disagree with our views. It will be up to the community to either fight or help grow these factions. And unlike WoW where there is a set king, in this case if the king messes up and a node suddenly stops developing because of their incompetence the same 3k players that put him in power will remove him, why? because he fucked up. How?
Here is my view of what will make sure this happens. The same atrophy subsystems within the node system which are driven by community activity which in turn is driven by how competent is the leader of a node or the direction the node is headed.
If the economic node under control of this faction is not seeing a constant influx of money and XP because of bad management it will atrophy and delevel. Or it will stagnate allowing a neighboring node controlled by a different faction to outgrow it and block its future growth. Yes you may be part of a node controlled by an empire of 3k players, but if the leadership is weak or the faction is stretched too thin. Other maybe smaller factions will take this opportunity to grow themselves and their own nodes. or maybe the members inside your own faction see other nodes doing better because other faction is a better city planner and they will abandon you and join this other faction.
And again, the problem with one guild having control is that the players outside of that guild will not be able to participate in the decision making process. There is also the possibility that the guild that controls the node will most likely reward its guild members (crazy, right?).
You are right about factions, but in this case the factions will consist of individual guilds. And you are also right to point out that weak or incompetently run guilds/factions will fail, but then they will most likely be supplanted by other guilds. Anyone watch Game of Thrones? The lesson we learned from that show is that you always need either a few dragons, gold, or men to win battles. But I can also use real world examples haha
Basically the potential problem is that the minority of players that choose not to be part of a "mega" guild will most likely not receive the bonuses provided by military and economic nodes and the guilds that control them. At least this is the risk as I see it, but right now we still don't have enough info to figure out exactly how these nodes will be governed and if there will be any kind of checks and balance system in place to prevent abuse.
The Divine nodes will be ruled based on who contributes the most to the community. Well guess what that means? The mega-guild will simply maximize their completion of those tasks, and gain control of the node. Further, since they control the node, they will benefit from the completion of those tasks.
If these guilds are left unchecked, I expect most AoC servers will break down as follows after being live for 2-3 months:
- A well organized mega-guild will be the first to get one or more nodes to each progression state.
- They will control things like who gets the non-instanced housing and the prime freeholds externally from the game based on a DKP-style system.
- Each guild will have a team of PKers (most likely ranged DPS classes) who are permanently corrupt and supported by the guild. They will handle anyone who doesn't fall in line.
- Once their presence is cemented, they will begin systematically wiping out any node that progresses enough to possibly threaten them.
At that point there is nothing anyone can do. Nobody will be allowed to build the power required to topple the mega-guild's metro. Folks leaving the metro will have no effect because the guild supports itself with its own membership.
I don't know how to combat this reality. The game is literally set up at its foundation to allow these types of guilds to thrive.
The only thing I can suggest is to only allow very generic defensive/offensive capabilities. For example, to siege a city a group needs to build 5 (and only 5) catapults, and then they can siege. This will stop the mega-guilds from building and bringing 500 catapults to a siege and being unbeatable. Another example, a city can have only 5 defense towers, which would stop the mega-guilds from having an impenetrable fortress with 500 defense towers.
Further, there probably needs to be ways people can contribute to a node without coordination among them. There needs to be a way that 2k-3k casuals can out resource 1k well organized hard core players without the hard core players being able to hinder them. How? No idea, but those are the kinds of systems that need to be in place.
If left unchecked, AoC is going to be nothing but an alpha guild running each server, and everyone else playing by their rules and to their benefit.
The only nodes that will be allowed to level are the ones these guilds CAN control by themselves. All others will be wiped as soon as they start to gain power.
Again, I don't have a great idea to stop it. That's why I asked the question in the Q&A. If the answer is, "we limit guild size to 300", well...that isn't going to help. As you (or someone) already pointed out, guilds of more than 300 people are already forming a year before the game goes live.
One easily foreseeable tactic of large guilds will be to set up a simple keyboard macro to control characters while offline to make them do trivial tasks like fishing, chopping wood, mining stone, gathering straw, or any other mundane task that is simple to macro. There will likely be hundreds of these characters running around 24/7 constantly pumping resources and experience to the guild's node.
The throttle mechanism could be something aloing the lines of:
Hour 1 - node gains 100% of the experience for the player's actions
Hour 2 - node gains 75% of the experience for the player's actions
Hour 3 - node gains 50% of the experience for the player's actions
Hour 4 - node gains 25% of the experience for the player's actions
Hour 5+ - node gains 0% of the experience for the player's actions
It is important that at some point these contributions zero out. If these macro'd characters can contribute ANY amount of ANY resource to a node, there will be armies of them 24/7.
I am also not sure what a good solution would be, other than to say that Greeks chose democracy after a period of trial and error hah I am also willing to bet that military, economic, and divine nodes will do better than scientific ones simply because they will be much better organized and guided by a single vision.
A lot of folks, including the devs, need to open their eyes and realize what's going to happen...because it always happens in large scale PvP games.
And how do you test it? How do you get 1000 organized players to come in and spend time building up a node when they know it's going to be wiped at release?
The answer is: you can't test it. You MUST be able to foresee what's going to happen based on past experiences. What past experiences in large scale PvP do these devs have? I don't see a lot (or any), so hopefully they lean on the players who have years of experience in these games AND aren't looking to exploit the game mechanics for their benefit.
Players who like how PvP games work are not going to tell the devs how to prevent them from having an advantage haha!
A drought, flood or plague that de-levels the node.
An eruption, earthquake or meteor that wipes a node completely.
Events like that could level the playing field between the mega guilds and the casual masses.
It seems that player-run entities in other games usually fail, but there are exceptions like Eve Online. The thing with that game is that it has a single type of player-run organization called corporation. These corporations are all the same in nature, so the "bonuses" they provide to their members don't wary. In this game, military, economic, divine, and scientific nodes will each provide different bonuses to their inhabitants. Plus Eve is a space sim so a corporation can start off in isolation without having to encounter competition right from the start. In this game, distance won't help.
I will just wait till Beta before I make my decision to buy a game package.
For example, if these mega guilds can accumulate 500 defense towers and become "un-siegable", they will. Then after they get 500, they will go for 5000, at which point nobody will be able to contest their node.
If all nodes are limited to 5 defense towers, that helps cap the overall power a single group of players can accumulate. The same applies to siege weaponry.
I'd like to point out one thing. Server size. If megaguilds are 1000+, but the server size is 10000, then while that guild controls 10% of the total population, 90% is unaffiliated with the guild. A smart guild leader would understand the population and guild size limitations and exploit that, things such as guild alliances for favors or favorable accommodations. In this way, it's possible for large guilds to produce results once the majority rule is met amongst the population, 51% of the population under one umbrella as it were.
On the other hand, what if the server population is 50000? What if it's 100000? The discrepancies start to show the higher the population limit goes. a guild of 1000 players with an alliance with another guild of 1000 is formidable yes, but on the scale of the server population, it's a small portion. Even casual players have a part to play in this system.
When confronted with the numbers, it does seem daunting at first glance. But I highly doubt it'll be accomplished as easy as people are afraid of. The resources, time, effort, and trust needed to control a server like is being suggested is immense. Not to mention the innate knowledge of mechanics of the game and sociology needed to remain in power.
The TL;DR, the humans playing the game are the primary deterrent for this thing happening. Although if this does end up happening, I'll gladly eat my own words. hah!
Problem is, these mega guilds will have hundreds of no-lifers playing 100+ hours per week. A typical casual player will play 5-10 hours per week. These no-lifers are literally contributing 10x-20x the amount of resources of every casual player.
In addition to sheer amount of play time, members of these guilds will be well coordinated and will have the backing of the large guild. Casual players will be doing whatever they want like kids in a toy store.
Quite simply put, 5k casual players will be no match for a 1000 member mega guild with a core consisting of a few hundred no-lifers.
There probably has to be mechanics in the game that throttle how much a single player can contribute to a node, and also a limit to how much power assets a single node can accumulate.
The node cycle is a natural one of building and destruction. You might start a few nodes by accident, but to stay and actually develop one there will be a need for a reason. Those might be not as strong in the beginning but the lack of it might accelerate the fall dramatically.
A reson might be rare ressources. Knowledge of dungeons in the region. Strategical position. Story. Aesthetics.
Nodes will be created for various reasons that grab players attention, but over time those reasons naturally dimish and get lost entirely.
You have seen all the story it has to offer over the last half year. You have conquered the dragon that descends on the metropolis. You have raided all dungeons associated with your region until you are sick of it and the next one is to far away to comfortably reach. Not to mention its in a rivaled region. Ressources are long gone and it gets harder and harder to support the metropolis as well as player attention.
At some point every node will fight the fight of decay. What now? You will have to move on and start from scratch.
The wealth of the metropolis is the wealth of the city itself. A player can only direct that wealth into the city. They cant take it out of the system to use it somewhere else or reward players as is claimed here.
Also it's likely that they will have to establish themselves in a region already under influence of a capital of some sort and or metropolis. It's an uphill battle from the start.
Distance doesn't matter? Time doesn't matter? That's not what is envisioned here. It goes agaimst core principles of the game. Imagining all those worst case scenarios that are based on wrong assumptions lead nowhere. They arent applicable.
I suggest to read up on the game and it's nature. There have been tremendous efforts put in to compile what we know so far.
They literally just said in the latest live stream less than an hour ago that there will be many incentives to make players value maintaining a node.
These large guilds will get established and then pour effort into maintaining their seat of power. If they are allowed to grow that power unbounded, they will become unbeatable. As soon as they are unbeatable, they will pour effort into stamping out any possible challengers before those challengers can rise up to contend with them.
If you haven't played a persistent PvP game like Ark or similar before, you have no idea how these guilds operate. Continuing to talk as if you're an expert on how these guilds will operate and how things will play out is coming from a place of complete and utter ignorance about the topic.
If they maintain the position they wont be able to interfere in others busines farther away. It's going to be a choice.
In fact that statement that makes me "wrong" as you said cements the nature of the game. It will split those megaguilds naturally. Some will want to move on. See new lands. See other legendary questlines and gear options. See new content while others will want to maintain it.
Can you honestly say you have seen a game that offers this? Can you honestly compare Ark to this?
Yes, Ark is a good comparison for this because it is a persistent PvP game. Guilds on official Ark servers are allowed to grow in power completely unbounded. Once they are established they stamp out all competition. They own the server. They don't move their seat of power, they simply build another one somewhere else.
Then the Ark devs decided to allow server transfers, so a single guild controls a dozen servers at once. Most guilds have servers set aside just to crash over and over so they can exploit duplication bugs.
The only reason Ark survives is because the devs were smart enough to design it so players could host their own servers and enforce their own rules. The vast majority of players play single player on their own PC, play on dumbed down PvE official servers, or play on a private server with rules they like.
We won't have that option in AoC, and this naivete about what these guilds are planning is troublesome, especially when folks think guild size caps and xp loss is going to slow them down for even a second.
So again, what persistent PvP games have you played, and what have you accomplished in them? What is your base of experience other than what you've read about AoC?
But let me try to settle your fear mongering. I've never played Ark. No interest in games like minecraft but from what you described right here in your post the Devs don't care about their game.
They apparently let players exploit their game with bugs, apparently don't fix these game breaking bugs and have no way to balance their game. This is not the fault of these "Mega" guilds and more a fault with the developers not caring about their game.
The Ashes team has shown just how much they care about this game and they have plenty of time to test and balance the game before release. While there will be large guilds and these power houses may ally with each other there will be plenty of room on the server for you to do your own thing. So before we go spamming 3 different topics about the coming of the "Mega" guilds lets take a step back have faith in a team that loves their game and see what happens.
@Grisu: The nodes will persist for some period of time, I don't know if it will be 6 months or longer, but the top tier nodes might remain in place for a while.
And here again I will quote the devs: ""The City Hall allows you to reward your citizens or attract even more. You can line the streets with festivities, giving your citizens buffs to things like experience gain, crafting, unique services, among many other benefits. The leaders in City Hall can also generate quests for everyone to enjoy. The rewards depend on Node level, Node type and the sort of improvements they’ve made. A Node isn’t just done when it becomes populated, a whole new game begins for players with a planning-oriented mind. Overcoming variables like location, warring guilds, and dynamic resource spawns aren’t the end of it, you also have to compete with competent leaders of another Node! The leaders of Nodes have to take the good with the bad, and are constantly battling within City Hall to make sure the citizens within the Node’s walls are safe, productive and happy."
Notice the parts that say "allows you to reward your citizens or attract even more," "the rewards," "planning," "leaders," etc. I don't want to sound like an ass, but that means that those leaders will be able to reward their "citizens."
Here is the link: https://www.ashesofcreation.com/city-hall/
How large is the map?
How much activity does your base need to maintain it. Just maintain not defend.
There is so much wrong in your previous posts and you keep piling on to them.
<shrug> i just tried to help you see that there is more involved than you make it out to be.
Tell me tho, expert, what's your experience with managing 500+people and it's whishes. Comparing that to managing enough people to dominate a 126 person (non deidcated) server cap isn't all to promising. Your scale in itself is wrongly attuned.
Anyway iwrote what i had on my mind, feel free to disregard it without my awesome epeeen list of non-applicaple makebelieve experience and achievments.
I'm not saying it's impossible to stop these guilds. I'm not saying the AoC devs can't do it. I'm not saying they don't already have good plans ready to go.
What I am saying is the 2 solutions I've seen presented so far (guild size caps and corruption) will not be sufficient. I'm asking what other plans are being made, and offering the solutions I can come up with based on my experience with these types of players in these types of games. These players will be coming to AoC in force, and burying your head in the sand and acting like it won't happen isn't going to change that fact.
Some moderator thought the topic was serious enough to warrant splitting it from the Q&A thread into it's own discussion, so I'm going to take that as a sign it needs to be hashed out some more.
You can keep getting upset, I don't really care. I will, however, restrict my comments on the topic to this thread. You're right when you imply I shouldn't be blabbering about the same point in multiple discussions.