Let's talk about Guild Wars in AoC...

Xyls

You can find information about Guild Wars on the AoC Wiki: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_wars Please check it out as this post will be based on the information found there.

Because this feature is still in the design stage, we don’t have a ton of information. What we do have is Intrepid’s overall goal of it being objective-based with great risk for each side. I hope that this discussion will provide them with some good player feedback on the topic.

What I like with the feature:
>>Risk vs reward: It’s good to have something to fight for.
>>War declaration period: Gives guilds a chance to plan and prepare. Also adds a bit of excitement as the timer counts down to the start of the war.
>>Primetime only for objectives: Completing objectives should not be possible at 4am when the majority of people are sleeping.
>>War with multiple guilds/alliances: If a guild wants to be involved in multiple wars that is their choice. Also promotes guilds to not be toxic in the community. Toxic guilds will likely face far more guild war declarations against.
>>Guild Wars operate outside the PvP flagging system: Pretty self-explanatory.

My concerns with the feature:
>>Risk vs reward: These must be balanced in a way that doesn’t discourage guilds from declaring war.
>>War declaration period: Needs to be short. Guild Wars should be a tool to use when fighting over farm spots and world bosses.
>>War with multiple guilds/alliances: Need to find a way so that guilds can’t be spammed with too many wars at once, while also preventing a guild from being “immune” to guild wars.
>>Objective-based only could result in larger guilds always winning: Objectives tend to be dominated by the side with the most players. This could greatly discourage smaller guilds from challenging larger guilds.
>>Alliance vs Alliance war: I think guild vs guild provides a robust system by itself. It also adds risk to the guild who declares war. If they declare war on a guild who is part of an alliance, the other guilds of the alliance may declare war on the original declaration guild. Not to mention it would be really awesome to see a war between 2 guilds blossom into many involved guilds based on alliances.

My Idea:
I believe a combination of Kills, Deaths, and objective-based scoring would result in a great system while still maintaining the vision of Guild Wars laid out by Steven.
>>Guild War declaration: Guild leaders can declare war on any other guild at any time. In order to declare war, the guild leader will have to wager an amount of gold (1 gold minimum, no maximum). This gold will be held as a deposit until the end of the war. Both guilds will know the wager before the war starts.
>>Declaration period: After a guild war is declared there will be a preparation and planning period (Some amount of time between 5 minutes or 15 minutes). This period will also allow players to escape a larger force to prevent one side from gaining an early advantage.
>>Kills and Deaths: Kills and deaths will be tallied 24 hours a day for the duration of the guild war. Killing an enemy helps your guild (+3 points). Dying to an enemy costs your guild (-2 points). A player gets 0 points for kills, is worth 0 points to the enemy, and cannot cause your guild to lose points for 5 minutes after dying (to prevent kill trading). The reason for guilds losing points for deaths is to make it so guilds are only as good as their weakest players.
>>Objectives: Objectives will be presented as timed quests that become available during server prime time hours only and are started at an npc either in a certain node or guild halls/fortresses. Once a guild starts an objective, both guilds are notified and the timer starts counting down (Guilds may have 30 minutes to pass the objective). Objectives will be represented on the world map to both guilds. If a guild passes the objective, they get +5 points. If a guild fails an objective, the other guild gets +3 points. Guilds can only have one objective running at a time (each guild can have one at the same time).

Example objectives:
>>Bounty hunt: A current online player of the enemy guild will be flagged on the map. The guild must kill that player before time runs out. The flagged player will be buffed (+25% damage done, -25% damage against) vs the enemy guild. If the flagged player dies for any reason or logs out during the objective time period, the hunting guild automatically passes the objective.
>>Capture the relic: A relic will appear (either in guild hall/fortress or determined node). The guild must go to the objective, pick it up, and return it to their own guild hall/fortress or determined node.
>>Capture the point: A point will appear out in the world (near the enemy guild hall/fortress or determined node). The guild must hold the node for 60 seconds. If the node becomes contested, the timer stops counting.
>>Guild fortress siege: Guild fortresses become siege-able (Only available if the defending guild owns a guild fortress). A guild must destroy a door or wall to enter the fortress courtyard and kill an elite level npc.

>>War length: Guild wars will last a minimum of 3 days, up to a maximum of 30 days. After 3 days, either guild can surrender. At the end of the war, there will be a 10 day cool down period in which the two involved guilds cannot war with each other.
>>Win/Lose/Tie: The burden of choosing the punishment or reward will fall on the guild leader of the guild that the war was declared on. If they won the war, He can choose to accept the wager (the deposit) OR place a debuff on all enemy guild members. This debuff will result in a 1% “tax” on all earned gold for 24 hours. The gold from the tax would be paid to the winner of the guild war. If they lose the war, they can choose to pay the wager to the enemy guild OR place the debuff on all his guild members. If debuff is chosen, the deposit is returned to the declaring guild. The guild leader has one hour to make a decision. If the guild doesn’t have enough gold to pay the wager or the one hour time limit to choose is reached, then the debuff option is automatically chosen. Ties can be disappointing but could also fuel future wars.

*All gold amounts, times, percentages, and scoring amounts are suggestions. The proper values should be determined through testing and could change.*

What are your thoughts, concerns, suggestions?

arsnn

So first of all the link you are using doesnt work This one should do it: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_wars

I can share your concerns on the guild wars feature, but im pretty confident Intrepid will take those into account and design a decent system.
Also most of the ideas you listed under "my idea" i thought were already part of their design from what i have heard them talking about it. I was also under the impression guild wars would last like 3-6 hours maximum, not several days or weeks.

I really like your objective ideas though! Im advocate for diversity of anything that surrounds PvP scenarios. I can see those being fun. Maybe they could stagger some of those in a time frame.
>The first phase could have fortress sieges.
>After that the guilds would have to try to steal each others relics that are tied to the fortresses that were succesfully sieged before. So guilds that captured more fortresses will also have more relics to defend that are present at each fortress.
>And later bounty hunting at dusk or night will give the last points and determine who will win. The points for kills should be present at any time.

Generally i hope intrepid will give a lot of different options for guild wars, not just 1 single scenario.
Also it would be cool if the size of the war would also scale the amount/size of the objectives. Big alliance wars should be awesome.

maouw

It would be cool if your ideas had reasons behind them like:

• if the bounty objective flagged the person with the most kills so it made sense why they were a high priority target
• securing a point spawned a handful of NPC guards who would fight on your behalf
• acquiring say, three relic pieces allows you to assemble some war machine to use in the battle

Bricktop

My biggest concern is the length of the war. In Lineage 2 wars could drag out for as long as you wanted. This allowed random massive fights to happen all over the map over an extended period of time. You would get to know certain peoples habits and their favorite leveling spots. Group A would run into Group B at a dungeon farm spot, and wipe them. Group B would start calling reinforcements and go back. This process would go on for an hour or 2 before you suddenly had over 100 people fighting each other at some random dungeon on the map. Lineage 2 also had a crazy exp grind that always kept people in the best farm spots and fighting over them, so it may not work as nicely in AoC.

Longer wars allow rivalries to take root and bad blood to fester. I'm guessing alliance wars will also most likely be a thing. They could code it so that if your guild is under X people only smaller objectives could be given. This way smaller guilds have a chance to win against larger guilds. War windows should be longer than a day and not only a few hour window, I fear that it will take a lot away from the open world PvP if wars only last a couple hours.

Perhaps there could be a "Total War" option on top of the regular wars that both guild leaders have to agree to. There would be no objective based win conditions, or only ones that could take weeks to achieve (First to 2000 kills for guild wars, first to 10k for alliance wars?). For non-objective based wars the war could last for as long as it takes until 1 side can't handle all out total war and bends the knee(Weeks, months). This could allow for more options for player designed peace treaty's as well through the use of guild diplomats (And thus, more player interaction). Addtionally, this way there's a system for guilds to stay at war indefinitely if they truly hate each other.

There should be no cap on guild wars. If you want to try and go to war with the entire server for months at a time (Not smart btw) you should have that option available to you.

Tyrantor

Guild wars are important to me also, in fact it's part of the question I have for this month's Q&A. My biggest concern is some short duration based on objectives that limits open world G v G flagging for PvP w/out corruption penalty.

Here are my suggestions per OP.

• Declaring guild war: I would like to see guild leaders have the option to declare specific war types i.e. Objective based, Combat based, Resource/Quest based (religious node inner guild wars?), Arena combat based etc. This way guilds can sort of pick and choose the type of wars they have and/or guilds can specialize in specific wars.
• War Initiation period: Once war is declared the accept/deny period shall last 24 hours, if accepted the war starts a minimum of 24 hours from the next server prime time. (i.e. If accepted at 12pm (noon) on Friday the war would start at 4pm Sunday)).
• War Escrow: I really want there to be a deposit system that the initiating guild has to put up in order to declare a war, and if the receiving guild declines the war they would have to match that deposit to avoid war. However I can see how this could be exploited to transfer resources, and I like the % tax idea you have above, though 24 hour period seems too little as people could just play their alts for a day or do quest lines that don't feed gold etc. While 1% isn't that much out of principle people won't want to do this and there would be an issue I can see if weaker or smaller guilds just constantly getting tag teamed into war conditions because they can't defeat it and constantly stay in a -% of gold/resources.
• War Duration: Personally I think this should be required to last a minimum of 7 days before any sort of forfeit/surrender option become available. I would also like to see the max duration extended, think of it this way - if you're a guild in a Metro that was sieged, you defend that siege and want to declare war on the guild who initiated it the cool down period for the next siege window is 50+ days it would be nice to war them for that duration or longer, as it may be a great way to prevent a guild from constantly sieging your node and/or castle.
• War Cost: If there is a win condition or surrender met there should be a risk/reward cost for it. Not sure if Guild Halls/Fortress require leveling but a de-level could be an option if they do. If the cost and time to level these are high enough it may limit or prevent the gold/resource transfer via war declaration.
• Bounty Hunt: Members of each guild should have to opt in for this, it would be unfair to choose it at random or based on another condition outside of the player control as some players may have real life obligations after the event starts and a loss condition on logging off would be unfair for both guild and player.
• Death Penalty: Per the normal combatant having half penalty at death I would recommend adjusting waring guilds to receive 10% of the normal penalty to encourage more engagements even in the face of bad odds. This way a player could die 5x from the guild war versus just 1 death in normal combat which should encourage people to fight/engage each other more as this seems to be the primary reason to declare war.
• Objective wins: I think that the objectives should hold substantially more value on completing as they will be contended points of interest, and likely some behind enemy lines, this requires more risk for the attacking side and as a result likely more death. The objectives should having a sliding scale based on risk of death that would act as a multiplier for the points awarded on completion. (I.e. Middle ground would be 1:1, Bounty Might be 2:1, Guild Hall objective might be 10:1 etc).

Xyls

arsnn wrote: »

So first of all the link you are using doesnt work This one should do it: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_wars

I can share your concerns on the guild wars feature, but im pretty confident Intrepid will take those into account and design a decent system.
Also most of the ideas you listed under "my idea" i thought were already part of their design from what i have heard them talking about it. I was also under the impression guild wars would last like 3-6 hours maximum, not several days or weeks.

I really like your objective ideas though! Im advocate for diversity of anything that surrounds PvP scenarios. I can see those being fun. Maybe they could stagger some of those in a time frame.
>The first phase could have fortress sieges.
>After that the guilds would have to try to steal each others relics that are tied to the fortresses that were succesfully sieged before. So guilds that captured more fortresses will also have more relics to defend that are present at each fortress.
>And later bounty hunting at dusk or night will give the last points and determine who will win. The points for kills should be present at any time.

Generally i hope intrepid will give a lot of different options for guild wars, not just 1 single scenario.
Also it would be cool if the size of the war would also scale the amount/size of the objectives. Big alliance wars should be awesome.

Fixed the link, thank you.

I know Steven has talked about moving away from any type of K/D ratio. That is the biggest difference in what I want to see... that and the length of wars. Having a (possibly) long war with many kills is more epic IMO. Technically you could go through an entire objective based guild war without killing a single person...

I trust Intrepid already has some great ideas and I appreciate your feedback.

Xyls

maouw wrote: »

It would be cool if your ideas had reasons behind them like:

• if the bounty objective flagged the person with the most kills so it made sense why they were a high priority target
• securing a point spawned a handful of NPC guards who would fight on your behalf
• acquiring say, three relic pieces allows you to assemble some war machine to use in the battle

All fine additions.

Xyls

Bricktop wrote: »

My biggest concern is the length of the war. In Lineage 2 wars could drag out for as long as you wanted. This allowed random massive fights to happen all over the map over an extended period of time. You would get to know certain peoples habits and their favorite leveling spots. Group A would run into Group B at a dungeon farm spot, and wipe them. Group B would start calling reinforcements and go back. This process would go on for an hour or 2 before you suddenly had over 100 people fighting each other at some random dungeon on the map. Lineage 2 also had a crazy exp grind that always kept people in the best farm spots and fighting over them, so it may not work as nicely in AoC.

Longer wars allow rivalries to take root and bad blood to fester. I'm guessing alliance wars will also most likely be a thing. They could code it so that if your guild is under X people only smaller objectives could be given. This way smaller guilds have a chance to win against larger guilds. War windows should be longer than a day and not only a few hour window, I fear that it will take a lot away from the open world PvP if wars only last a couple hours.

Perhaps there could be a "Total War" option on top of the regular wars that both guild leaders have to agree to. There would be no objective based win conditions, or only ones that could take weeks to achieve (First to 2000 kills for guild wars, first to 10k for alliance wars?). For non-objective based wars the war could last for as long as it takes until 1 side can't handle all out total war and bends the knee(Weeks, months). This could allow for more options for player designed peace treaty's as well through the use of guild diplomats (And thus, more player interaction). Addtionally, this way there's a system for guilds to stay at war indefinitely if they truly hate each other.

There should be no cap on guild wars. If you want to try and go to war with the entire server for months at a time (Not smart btw) you should have that option available to you.

I share the sentiment for long drawn out wars between guilds. The reason for the length cap, again the cap itself is negotiable, is because I know Intrepid wants stats from guild wars to factor into PvP seasons and inter-guild ladders. I really hope we have the option to have wars that last for more than a few hours.

Xyls

Tyrantor wrote: »

Guild wars are important to me also, in fact it's part of the question I have for this month's Q&A. My biggest concern is some short duration based on objectives that limits open world G v G flagging for PvP w/out corruption penalty.

Here are my suggestions per OP.

• Declaring guild war: I would like to see guild leaders have the option to declare specific war types i.e. Objective based, Combat based, Resource/Quest based (religious node inner guild wars?), Arena combat based etc. This way guilds can sort of pick and choose the type of wars they have and/or guilds can specialize in specific wars.
• War Initiation period: Once war is declared the accept/deny period shall last 24 hours, if accepted the war starts a minimum of 24 hours from the next server prime time. (i.e. If accepted at 12pm (noon) on Friday the war would start at 4pm Sunday)).
• War Escrow: I really want there to be a deposit system that the initiating guild has to put up in order to declare a war, and if the receiving guild declines the war they would have to match that deposit to avoid war. However I can see how this could be exploited to transfer resources, and I like the % tax idea you have above, though 24 hour period seems too little as people could just play their alts for a day or do quest lines that don't feed gold etc. While 1% isn't that much out of principle people won't want to do this and there would be an issue I can see if weaker or smaller guilds just constantly getting tag teamed into war conditions because they can't defeat it and constantly stay in a -% of gold/resources.
• War Duration: Personally I think this should be required to last a minimum of 7 days before any sort of forfeit/surrender option become available. I would also like to see the max duration extended, think of it this way - if you're a guild in a Metro that was sieged, you defend that siege and want to declare war on the guild who initiated it the cool down period for the next siege window is 50+ days it would be nice to war them for that duration or longer, as it may be a great way to prevent a guild from constantly sieging your node and/or castle.
• War Cost: If there is a win condition or surrender met there should be a risk/reward cost for it. Not sure if Guild Halls/Fortress require leveling but a de-level could be an option if they do. If the cost and time to level these are high enough it may limit or prevent the gold/resource transfer via war declaration.
• Bounty Hunt: Members of each guild should have to opt in for this, it would be unfair to choose it at random or based on another condition outside of the player control as some players may have real life obligations after the event starts and a loss condition on logging off would be unfair for both guild and player.
• Death Penalty: Per the normal combatant having half penalty at death I would recommend adjusting waring guilds to receive 10% of the normal penalty to encourage more engagements even in the face of bad odds. This way a player could die 5x from the guild war versus just 1 death in normal combat which should encourage people to fight/engage each other more as this seems to be the primary reason to declare war.
• Objective wins: I think that the objectives should hold substantially more value on completing as they will be contended points of interest, and likely some behind enemy lines, this requires more risk for the attacking side and as a result likely more death. The objectives should having a sliding scale based on risk of death that would act as a multiplier for the points awarded on completion. (I.e. Middle ground would be 1:1, Bounty Might be 2:1, Guild Hall objective might be 10:1 etc).

• Absolutely could work. I still like combining them all so that people can play their preferred way during every guild war.
• 24 hours is a bit long for an iniation period. I mentioned that guild wars could be used as a means to take a farm spot or world boss from another guild. That can't happen if it is too long. Just a matter of opinion there.
• I don't think a guild should have the choice to decline a guild war. That's very immersion breaking to me. Guilds could avoid guild wars at all times which will make guild wars much more rare (maybe that would be a good thing in your eyes). Say another guild really pisses your guild off and everyone on your side is extremely pumped for pay back. You declare war and then a few minutes later.... they decline. Lame. Of course this could create some issues that would have to be addressed.
• Having guilds put their money where their mouth is I think is a must. I like the idea of the guild able to match the deposit in order to avoid the war. Some could say this is unfair as larger guilds would always be able to put up a price to steep for smaller guilds to pay, likewise larger guilds could always pay to avoid war. All the amounts of gold and time periods for different aspects were made up on the top of my head. Intrepid would have to come up with the final versions based on how they design the economy and game.
• I used the gold wager and debuff as the war cost. But if those are used just for iniation, then yes something else would be added at the end. I really like the idea of guild halls being affected. My concern was that not every guild will have a guild hall at all times. That's the only reason I went the other direction. In my idea, the win condition is surrender or max duration reached with the team with highest point total winning.
• A opt in could definitely work for the bounty objective. But if no one accepts, it would either have to default to another objective or have the opt in guild forfeit the points to the other guild. How I envision objectives is that guilds can do one right after another and the objectives would be choosen at random. So if an objective is completed or failed, its not a big deal other than points as another one can be started immediately after.
• I hadn't considered death penalties. I guess I assumed that death penalties would be excluded during guild wars but that may not be a good idea or even possible. You are right, at the least death penalties should be reduced during wars.
• Yes it would have to be balanced in some way. Objectives favor the larger guild because they can just zerg the objectives down easily against small guilds. Because of that I was using objectives as more of a means to put a spot on the map where the two guilds can come together and fight over it. Objectives still give some score which is good for the larger guilds, but also alerts the other guild where they can go to get some kills on them. I could absolutely support a system with grand style objectives that take time to complete... as long as larger guilds don't have an obvious advantage over smaller guilds.

Thanks for your reply Tyrantor... all good points made.

Tyrantor

There might be a fix for the zerg aspect of it by capping the active participants in the war to a ratio minimum of 1:1 or max of 2:1 or something that guild members have to opt in/out before war is declared. 2x1 odds seems fairly reasonable to me, though I might even be ok with greater odds once I see how the combat plays out.

Xyls

Tyrantor wrote: »

There might be a fix for the zerg aspect of it by capping the active participants in the war to a ratio minimum of 1:1 or max of 2:1 or something that guild members have to opt in/out before war is declared. 2x1 odds seems fairly reasonable to me, though I might even be ok with greater odds once I see how the combat plays out.

I personally don't think limiting participants for guild wars (even just for objectives) is a good idea. What if only a few people opt in? then the other guild is extremely limited for participation. This also gives people the option to completely avoid guild wars all together which isn't healthy for the feature.

Tyrantor

If only a few people opt in then the risks aren't high enough to justify the objective based guild wars.

arsnn

So i read a lot that people think the duration should be several days up to a week.
Don´t you guys think that collides a bit with the object based aspect of guild wars?
Guilds would need to spend an insane amount on those in order to win over a week. I´d personally rather use that time to grind or just do other things. Also it might feel a bit tiring and less relevant if the guild is not 100% invested into the war over such a long time frame. I´d rather have it short and intense where everyone is commited to participating.

I can see the argument of initiating a guild war on a rivaling guild in order to not get corrupted when fighting them over bosses and so on. A longer duration would help with this certainly.

Bricktop

arsnn wrote: »

So i read a lot that people think the duration should be several days up to a week.
Don´t you guys think that collides a bit with the object based aspect of guild wars?
Guilds would need to spend an insane amount on those in order to win over a week. I´d personally rather use that time to grind or just do other things. Also it might feel a bit tiring and less relevant if the guild is not 100% invested into the war over such a long time frame. I´d rather have it short and intense where everyone is commited to participating.

I can see the argument of initiating a guild war on a rivaling guild in order to not get corrupted when fighting them over bosses and so on. A longer duration would help with this certainly.

I would be happy if they added an option to have an indefinitely lasting guild war then as well as smaller few hour window ones.

Mojottv

i think it would be cool, to have option if guild that declares war would need to pit gd and or mats to declare war, and the other guild if they win they get that, if they are loosing and want to surrender they need to pay ransom.

Xyls

arsnn wrote: »

So i read a lot that people think the duration should be several days up to a week.
Don´t you guys think that collides a bit with the object based aspect of guild wars?
Guilds would need to spend an insane amount on those in order to win over a week. I´d personally rather use that time to grind or just do other things. Also it might feel a bit tiring and less relevant if the guild is not 100% invested into the war over such a long time frame. I´d rather have it short and intense where everyone is commited to participating.

I can see the argument of initiating a guild war on a rivaling guild in order to not get corrupted when fighting them over bosses and so on. A longer duration would help with this certainly.

Arguing for more player choice in a game is never a bad thing. I would absolutely be okay if there was some kind of an option to choose the length of the war, as long as there is an option to have long wars as well. To me, a long war can be just as intense as those short wars... only the epicness is multiplied by how long it lasts.

In my idea, I included an option for a guild to surrender so that guilds do not get stuck in long wars they don't want to be a part of. There is then a "peace" period where those two guilds can't war again until the period ends.

Xyls

Mojottv wrote: »

i think it would be cool, to have option if guild that declares war would need to pit gd and or mats to declare war, and the other guild if they win they get that, if they are loosing and want to surrender they need to pay ransom.

Yep, something to fight over besides bragging rights is a fun idea. Just have to make sure guilds have options in case they don't have the gold or resources to pay. I suggested the debuff, which still provides the winning guild with some gold.

Blrrgh

I have a desire to see persistent relations between guilds, which open up different options for guild wars. For example if 2 guilds, from day 1 of launch develop an intense rivalry or animosity and consistently fight, there could be a mechanic that opens up more options for the resolution or escalation of conflict. If 2 guilds or alliances have a high enough conflict level it could unlock events during castle sieges that have a morale effect or buffs against hated targets, for example.

Also lacking in many if not all previous MMO's I have played is a tiered system of conflict which plays out over time. The system could be something like that highly decreased corruption at "Friction" level, adding additional risks and rewards at "Skirmish" level, and finally escalating into a "War" phase. As time went on and guilds/alliances clashed repeatedly there could be lower requirements for escalation and perhaps decreasing lockout duration for periods of total war.

An attack on a trade guild or Economic node could have different options which limit the scale/duration of the war or a negotiation mechanic ( a bribe via the mayor of a node? gratitude minor buff? etc.) that encourages the attacker to seek other targets, and performs the function of allowing a faction of players to attempt to improve guild relations and influence the PvX environment via a non combat path.

Noaani

I'm not keen on any guild being able to force another in to a particular playstyle for an extended period, so to me, if guild wars last more than 6 hours, they should be something both sides agree on. Assuming guilds get to accept wars, I'd like to see them last a week or longer - though I don't necessarily expect to see that.

I'm also not overly sure if I want to see guilds able to just use guild wars as a means to circumvent the corruption system at a specific piece of content - to me, if a guild wants to contend a piece of open world content, they should have to do so under the corruption rules. That said, I do expect to see a good amount of top end open world content have corruption turned off anyway - so I don't think this point is overly important.

Other than that, my main concern with guild wars is that they are somewhat different to node wars. I wouldn't want to see the same systems apply to both other than the fact that one is node and one is guild based - to me, they should be substantially different.

Xyls

Blrrgh wrote: »

I have a desire to see persistent relations between guilds, which open up different options for guild wars. For example if 2 guilds, from day 1 of launch develop an intense rivalry or animosity and consistently fight, there could be a mechanic that opens up more options for the resolution or escalation of conflict. If 2 guilds or alliances have a high enough conflict level it could unlock events during castle sieges that have a morale effect or buffs against hated targets, for example.

Also lacking in many if not all previous MMO's I have played is a tiered system of conflict which plays out over time. The system could be something like that highly decreased corruption at "Friction" level, adding additional risks and rewards at "Skirmish" level, and finally escalating into a "War" phase. As time went on and guilds/alliances clashed repeatedly there could be lower requirements for escalation and perhaps decreasing lockout duration for periods of total war.

An attack on a trade guild or Economic node could have different options which limit the scale/duration of the war or a negotiation mechanic ( a bribe via the mayor of a node? gratitude minor buff? etc.) that encourages the attacker to seek other targets, and performs the function of allowing a faction of players to attempt to improve guild relations and influence the PvX environment via a non combat path.

The first part seems pretty complicated to pull off... in my expert video game development opinion. The rest sounds pretty good. I just want actually killing enemy guild players to be a big part of the war itself.

Xyls

Noaani wrote: »

I'm not keen on any guild being able to force another in to a particular playstyle for an extended period, so to me, if guild wars last more than 6 hours, they should be something both sides agree on. Assuming guilds get to accept wars, I'd like to see them last a week or longer - though I don't necessarily expect to see that.

I'm also not overly sure if I want to see guilds able to just use guild wars as a means to circumvent the corruption system at a specific piece of content - to me, if a guild wants to contend a piece of open world content, they should have to do so under the corruption rules. That said, I do expect to see a good amount of top end open world content have corruption turned off anyway - so I don't think this point is overly important.

Other than that, my main concern with guild wars is that they are somewhat different to node wars. I wouldn't want to see the same systems apply to both other than the fact that one is node and one is guild based - to me, they should be substantially different.

I agree with your first point to an extent. There needs to be protections for guilds who don't want guild wars as much or at all. However, being able to reject guild wars is pretty immersion breaking. I think guild wars could be used against guilds that allow toxic behavior from their members. That can't happen if they can just easily reject a guild war. I think having a minimum number of days, even as low as 1 or 2 before guilds can opt to surrender and the guild war is over. Then there is a peace period so you can't just continually spam guilds with a guild war.

To your second point, IMO the more amount of pvp outside the corruption system the better. The corruption system is there to protect lowbies and people who are afk. This is an open world game and going out in the world has risk (pvp risk). With that said, the guild wars system needs to have risk and reward. If a guild uses a guild war to take a farm spot (and not take corruption for it), they better be careful with who they choose to do that against. If they lose the guild war, they need to lose something fairly substantial that outweighs gaining a small amount of corruption.

Agreed on the third point. It's another reason i'm against an objective only based system... along with that type of system favoring larger guilds with more people willing to fight. I want fighting the enemy guild and killing as many as possible to be the main focal point of the guild war, with objectives being a close secondary focal point.

Kneczhevo

Some really good ideas here. You guys are good! I really can't add anything, except for my concerns.

I can see Guild Wars as exploitable to grief tactics, unfortunately. As it's a means to a possibility circumvent the Corruption System.

Unless there is a cost and loss involved, I can see guilds flagging, just because they can. "What guild are those gatherers in?"

There needs to be a cost and cooldown, imho.

And, what about consentual wars? 2 guilds willingly participating? Do they have to "declair" every six hours? That doesn't sound right, especially if there is a cooldown.

I am Foreign to Guild Wars, so I really can't offer much, and my opinion is all speculation. But, I'm trying to understand, so I can give valid arguments. ☺️

Noaani

Xyls wrote: »

Agreed on the third point. It's another reason i'm against an objective only based system...

So, I hadn't put much thought in to what I wanted or expected from the guild and node war systems - I had assumed they would be slightly expanded upon version of the guild war system from Archeage - which is to say something that is more a piece of occasional side content rather than a key aspect of the game.

Thinking about it a bit more, I've come up with what I doubt anyone else would agree with.

I look at nodes as being almost like cities, and node clusters (a node with it's vassal tree) as being like a nation - and guilds as being more akin to organizations within that nation structure.

Based on that, I think it makes more sense that node wars take on the role of the longer duration, all out war, and guilds take on the role of shorter duration, objective based wars.

For guilds, it could be like the current Apple vs Epic thing going on, but rather than using a court system, the guilds involved may have the objective of taking a value of materials from players of the opposing guild, sacking a number of freeholds of members of the guild in question, or some other similar objective. The thing to remember about guild based wars is that there is more of a chance that you will end up working with an opposing guild (Apple and Epic will work together again soon enough) than there is that opposing nodes will work together.

For nodes, they could have the all out, seek long wars that only track player kills as an indication of success. It is just straight up war.

With this as the general scheme, I wouldn't even necessarily say that either of them would need the target of a war declaration to accept, as the guild based war would be short term enough to not really be an issue (though I still wouldn't want it to be used to circumvent the corruption system), and the node based war can see people not interested in it simply stick to the middle of their node cluster.

This kind of system would mean that rather than influencing a guild, players wanting a long term war need to influence a node. Since a metropolis level node is likely to be at least 1.5k people, that is a lot of player interaction that needs to happen to make a long term war happen - and that kind of social interaction is what the game is about.

Littlekenny21

I have a couple if things to add.

I think corruption should be tracked for members of guilds Vs other guilds so if members of guild A keep gaining corruption from killing players of guild B, this would in some way impact guild B declaring war on guild A. This could be something like lower costs to declare war or a higher cost for guild A to decline war.

Also the same for guilds participating in a siege against a node. Guild who are part of that node, with a freehold or whatever, would have these advantages when declaring war on a guild that attacked their node.

Mojottv

Xyls wrote: »

Mojottv wrote: »

i think it would be cool, to have option if guild that declares war would need to pit gd and or mats to declare war, and the other guild if they win they get that, if they are loosing and want to surrender they need to pay ransom.

Yep, something to fight over besides bragging rights is a fun idea. Just have to make sure guilds have options in case they don't have the gold or resources to pay. I suggested the debuff, which still provides the winning guild with some gold.

Dont really understand your last sentence, debuff which provides winning guild with some gold? Please explain. Or do you mean, surrendering guild could chose a payment type to surrender? Like either pay gold, pay materials or debuff? I think this could be interesting idea to guilds being able to negotiate terms of surrender. If there would be system for loosing guild to send offer to winning guild, so if they accept, guild war ends.

Mojottv

Couple of things also I noticed on the thread, that i would like to adress.

Guild war length, i think it should be indefinite, guild war should end if both parties agree, one surrender or some objectives are met. not sure about meeting objectives though, quite immersion breaking, if you can win guild war by killing them x amount or doing some stupide quest like stuff.

One sided guild wars, i think they should still be a thing, so that guilds wouldnt want a declared war from stronger guilds. couple of possibilities to implement this would be having Guild who declares war still get Corruption but in a lot lower numbers and if they die from other guild that didnt accept war, they get lower penalties, the other guild gets full penalties in death and corruption.

Jubilum

I agree with a lot of the suggestions made. Particularly with the idea of some kind of objective to end the war.

I do however have some major concerns with the mechanic of guild wars. I do not want to see anything like the mess Eve online war dec system has become.

Their needs to be a limit on the number of war dec's one corp can have active at one time. I would suggest less than 3. In Eve their is no limit and there are corporations that simply declare war on every corporation they find simply for a target rich environment, I have seen these corps with hundreds of active war dec's. These corp's use war dec's simply as a way around the high security space penalties for killing someone. In AoC case it will be abused as a way around the corruption and flagging mechanics.

And as usual in my advocacy against open world/non-consensual pvp their needs to be some way for guilds to possibly opt out either thru a religious guild quest line where they can earn a one time exemption that once used will have to be earned again. This should be a difficult quest line that a large percentage of the guild must participate and would take several weeks to complete. Another idea is for guilds to have a corruption meter that is an aggregate of all members corruption level. If this meter is say less than 1% the guild is declared neutral and cannot be war dec'ed.

There also needs to be an opt out for individual guild members who do not want to participate in two guild leaders having a who has the biggest Epeen contest. A guild member can leave the guild between war dec and when the fighting starts, without any penalty or waiting period and will not be a war target. If he remains in the guild then he has consented to the pvp. No one should be forced to not log in or sit in his freehold for a week or two because his guild is at war. Which I have seen happen in Eve on numerous occasions, including myself when I was a young player and before I learned other ways to avoid unwanted corp wars.

Mojottv

jubilum wrote: »

I agree with a lot of the suggestions made. Particularly with the idea of some kind of objective to end the war.

I do however have some major concerns with the mechanic of guild wars. I do not want to see anything like the mess Eve online war dec system has become.

Their needs to be a limit on the number of war dec's one corp can have active at one time. I would suggest less than 3. In Eve their is no limit and there are corporations that simply declare war on every corporation they find simply for a target rich environment, I have seen these corps with hundreds of active war dec's. These corp's use war dec's simply as a way around the high security space penalties for killing someone. In AoC case it will be abused as a way around the corruption and flagging mechanics.

And as usual in my advocacy against open world/non-consensual pvp their needs to be some way for guilds to possibly opt out either thru a religious guild quest line where they can earn a one time exemption that once used will have to be earned again. This should be a difficult quest line that a large percentage of the guild must participate and would take several weeks to complete. Another idea is for guilds to have a corruption meter that is an aggregate of all members corruption level. If this meter is say less than 1% the guild is declared neutral and cannot be war dec'ed.

There also needs to be an opt out for individual guild members who do not want to participate in two guild leaders having a who has the biggest Epeen contest. A guild member can leave the guild between war dec and when the fighting starts, without any penalty or waiting period and will not be a war target. If he remains in the guild then he has consented to the pvp. No one should be forced to not log in or sit in his freehold for a week or two because his guild is at war. Which I have seen happen in Eve on numerous occasions, including myself when I was a young player and before I learned other ways to avoid unwanted corp wars.

Dont think its in game like Aoc should be guild war limit, as one big guild might piss off whole server, so everyone should be allowed to declare war.

For guild members to opt out, again kind of makes the guild war pointless, as whole idea of guild war is to kill oposing guild as much as possible, so that they either surrender, or people leave that guild.

I think guild wars should have meaning, not just be an aditional pvp activity.

I think, guild leaders should have something to thing about before declaring or accepting guild war.

Xyls

Mojottv wrote: »

Xyls wrote: »

Mojottv wrote: »

i think it would be cool, to have option if guild that declares war would need to pit gd and or mats to declare war, and the other guild if they win they get that, if they are loosing and want to surrender they need to pay ransom.

Yep, something to fight over besides bragging rights is a fun idea. Just have to make sure guilds have options in case they don't have the gold or resources to pay. I suggested the debuff, which still provides the winning guild with some gold.

Dont really understand your last sentence, debuff which provides winning guild with some gold? Please explain. Or do you mean, surrendering guild could chose a payment type to surrender? Like either pay gold, pay materials or debuff? I think this could be interesting idea to guilds being able to negotiate terms of surrender. If there would be system for loosing guild to send offer to winning guild, so if they accept, guild war ends.

Just something I had thought of when I made this thread. Basically it's a way for the losing side to pay their debt if they don't have enough gold to pay the "wager" the declaring guild made.

>>Win/Lose/Tie: The burden of choosing the punishment or reward will fall on the guild leader of the guild that the war was declared on. If they won the war, He can choose to accept the wager (the deposit) OR place a debuff on all enemy guild members. This debuff will result in a 1% “tax” on all earned gold for 24 hours. If they lose the war, they can choose to pay the wager to the enemy guild OR place the debuff on all his guild members. If debuff is chosen, the deposit is returned to the declaring guild. The guild leader has one hour to make a decision. If the guild doesn’t have enough gold to pay the wager or the one hour time limit to choose is reached, then the debuff option is automatically chosen. Ties can be disappointing but could also fuel future wars.

And I should clarify... The gold from the debuff goes to the winning guild for the duration. So let's say over the course of 24 hours, the cumulative amount of gold made from all guild members totals 5000 gold... If the debuff "tax" is 1%, 50 of that gold would go to the winning guild. Its kinda like the node taxation system except it is placed on an entire guild and is paid to the guild wars victor.

This is all from my vision of guild wars though. This isn't anything that Intrepid has said they would do. The only real info we know is found in the Wiki which is in the original post.

Xyls

Noaani wrote: »

Xyls wrote: »

Agreed on the third point. It's another reason i'm against an objective only based system...

So, I hadn't put much thought in to what I wanted or expected from the guild and node war systems - I had assumed they would be slightly expanded upon version of the guild war system from Archeage - which is to say something that is more a piece of occasional side content rather than a key aspect of the game.

Thinking about it a bit more, I've come up with what I doubt anyone else would agree with.

I look at nodes as being almost like cities, and node clusters (a node with it's vassal tree) as being like a nation - and guilds as being more akin to organizations within that nation structure.

Based on that, I think it makes more sense that node wars take on the role of the longer duration, all out war, and guilds take on the role of shorter duration, objective based wars.

For guilds, it could be like the current Apple vs Epic thing going on, but rather than using a court system, the guilds involved may have the objective of taking a value of materials from players of the opposing guild, sacking a number of freeholds of members of the guild in question, or some other similar objective. The thing to remember about guild based wars is that there is more of a chance that you will end up working with an opposing guild (Apple and Epic will work together again soon enough) than there is that opposing nodes will work together.

For nodes, they could have the all out, seek long wars that only track player kills as an indication of success. It is just straight up war.

With this as the general scheme, I wouldn't even necessarily say that either of them would need the target of a war declaration to accept, as the guild based war would be short term enough to not really be an issue (though I still wouldn't want it to be used to circumvent the corruption system), and the node based war can see people not interested in it simply stick to the middle of their node cluster.

This kind of system would mean that rather than influencing a guild, players wanting a long term war need to influence a node. Since a metropolis level node is likely to be at least 1.5k people, that is a lot of player interaction that needs to happen to make a long term war happen - and that kind of social interaction is what the game is about.

Yeah I'm not a fan of that personally. Guild wars should start a lot of the time because a member of another guild disrespected your guild or the community... and the other guild didn't take appropriate action to solve the situation. In which case you want payback with (imaginary) blood.

Xyls

jubilum wrote: »

I agree with a lot of the suggestions made. Particularly with the idea of some kind of objective to end the war.

I do however have some major concerns with the mechanic of guild wars. I do not want to see anything like the mess Eve online war dec system has become.

Their needs to be a limit on the number of war dec's one corp can have active at one time. I would suggest less than 3. In Eve their is no limit and there are corporations that simply declare war on every corporation they find simply for a target rich environment, I have seen these corps with hundreds of active war dec's. These corp's use war dec's simply as a way around the high security space penalties for killing someone. In AoC case it will be abused as a way around the corruption and flagging mechanics.

And as usual in my advocacy against open world/non-consensual pvp their needs to be some way for guilds to possibly opt out either thru a religious guild quest line where they can earn a one time exemption that once used will have to be earned again. This should be a difficult quest line that a large percentage of the guild must participate and would take several weeks to complete. Another idea is for guilds to have a corruption meter that is an aggregate of all members corruption level. If this meter is say less than 1% the guild is declared neutral and cannot be war dec'ed.

There also needs to be an opt out for individual guild members who do not want to participate in two guild leaders having a who has the biggest Epeen contest. A guild member can leave the guild between war dec and when the fighting starts, without any penalty or waiting period and will not be a war target. If he remains in the guild then he has consented to the pvp. No one should be forced to not log in or sit in his freehold for a week or two because his guild is at war. Which I have seen happen in Eve on numerous occasions, including myself when I was a young player and before I learned other ways to avoid unwanted corp wars.

I think mojo hit the nail on the head with his reply to you.

With that said, I would be okay with a limit on the number of wars... but it wouldn't be low. I'd say around 10. I don't know what Eve is like... but AoC will have risk and reward tied into the guild war system. In my suggestion in OP, a guild is putting their gold on the line to declare guild wars. If guilds want to take on the whole server, that is their choice... but if they lose a bunch of those wars, they could cripple their guild gold wise for a long time.

Allowing guilds to "opt-out" is completely immersion breaking. Tying a opt-opt out to religion is also kind of ridiculous since we all know most wars are fought over religion. I do agree that we would need to come up with some fair "protections" for guilds who don't want to pvp as much... but those protections should not make them immune from guild wars. I disagree with the ideas you presented for that reason.

Absolutely people can leave a guild if they don't want to participate... but not without penalty. Not sure what that penalty might be, but there needs to be something.