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Regarding the April 28th Livestream Q&A question "Will the meta for guilds be smaller guilds..."
Kai_Strand
Member
Normally I find Steven's responses to questions adequate. However, his response to the one summarized in the title of this post left me confused..
The question I believe was made in response to a question pulled from a YouTube comment at the beginning of the stream. Perhaps they are unrelated, but they seemed related to me so I paired them together.
The first comment: (~1:13:00 in the twitch vod)
"People camping open world dungeon areas was a huge problem in ESO. Please Intrepid prevent this."
The potentially related follow-up question in the Q&A: (~2:39:00 in the twitch vod)
"Will the meta for guilds be to just create alliances of smaller guilds with many skills rather than larger guild with less skills?"
My summarization and understanding after watching the responses a few times.
In response to the first comment, Steven lists unifying smaller groups (my assumption is smaller guilds) as one of the ways to combat large guilds holding a monopoly on a dungeon or area. My inference of the situation is that the benefits of smaller guilds are supposed to help in mitigating the advantage of overwhelming numbers. In response to the question in the Q&A, Steven seems to latch on to the phrase "alliance" and states that alliances will be limited by the amount a guild can form. He then talks about events and the implication seems to be that only a set number of groups can participate in events so you can't have, for example, 20 small guilds in an alliance all signing up for the event.
Margaret then has to steer Steven a bit and states what she (along with myself and several friends) assume to be the actual intent of the question. Quote: "I think the question is more that people feel that larger guilds will decide to go with more smaller guilds like... Lets say I have a guild of a thousand people normally. I'll spread that out into a bunch of hundred people guilds in order to get better benefits I think is what they're trying to aim for versus like... because there will be different benefits for smaller guilds versus larger guilds."
Steven acknowledges that this will happen. He then continues to frame the question around events and states that the design of those events will determine which is more effective (smaller or larger guilds). He also plainly states that a bunch of smaller guilds will not always necessarily be better (I doubt this). He also states that he believes the meta will be that larger guilds will become allied with smaller guilds to gain all benefits - this I can say with 100% certainty will not happen because larger guilds will just lop off part of themselves to form the smaller guild, its simply more convenient.
My concern.
I still believe Steven is misunderstanding the essence of the question or I am misunderstanding the intent of the system. In organized events like sieges it may very well be the case that guilds are somehow balanced so that neither one is the clear-cut answer for a given scenario. The problem arises in open world conflicts.
If we take the scenario from the first comment (camping a dungeon) and apply my current understanding of the system then there is no question that there will be large guilds which segment themselves into smaller guilds and simultaneously gain the benefits of both a small guild and the numbers advantage of a large guild. If I am understanding the system correctly (I might not be) then the system does not succeed at one of its intended purposes and, in fact, exacerbates the severity of the gap between guild sizes.
I am not saying this isn't solvable. In fact, Intrepid might have either already solved it or you don't think its a problem to begin with. What I am saying is that I have very little context through both the wiki and Steven's answer. If anything, Steven's answer has left me confused as to the intent of the system and fearful that it might not have been well thought out.
If possible, I would like some clarification as to the following:
What is the intent of the large guild/small guild benefit system?
Where can someone expect to receive the benefits of the system? (open world, sieges, etc.)
And finally,
What are Intrepid or Steven's thoughts on potential manipulation of the system? Do they see it as a potential problem, is it not a concern, or am I just misinterpreting the system?
The question I believe was made in response to a question pulled from a YouTube comment at the beginning of the stream. Perhaps they are unrelated, but they seemed related to me so I paired them together.
The first comment: (~1:13:00 in the twitch vod)
"People camping open world dungeon areas was a huge problem in ESO. Please Intrepid prevent this."
The potentially related follow-up question in the Q&A: (~2:39:00 in the twitch vod)
"Will the meta for guilds be to just create alliances of smaller guilds with many skills rather than larger guild with less skills?"
My summarization and understanding after watching the responses a few times.
In response to the first comment, Steven lists unifying smaller groups (my assumption is smaller guilds) as one of the ways to combat large guilds holding a monopoly on a dungeon or area. My inference of the situation is that the benefits of smaller guilds are supposed to help in mitigating the advantage of overwhelming numbers. In response to the question in the Q&A, Steven seems to latch on to the phrase "alliance" and states that alliances will be limited by the amount a guild can form. He then talks about events and the implication seems to be that only a set number of groups can participate in events so you can't have, for example, 20 small guilds in an alliance all signing up for the event.
Margaret then has to steer Steven a bit and states what she (along with myself and several friends) assume to be the actual intent of the question. Quote: "I think the question is more that people feel that larger guilds will decide to go with more smaller guilds like... Lets say I have a guild of a thousand people normally. I'll spread that out into a bunch of hundred people guilds in order to get better benefits I think is what they're trying to aim for versus like... because there will be different benefits for smaller guilds versus larger guilds."
Steven acknowledges that this will happen. He then continues to frame the question around events and states that the design of those events will determine which is more effective (smaller or larger guilds). He also plainly states that a bunch of smaller guilds will not always necessarily be better (I doubt this). He also states that he believes the meta will be that larger guilds will become allied with smaller guilds to gain all benefits - this I can say with 100% certainty will not happen because larger guilds will just lop off part of themselves to form the smaller guild, its simply more convenient.
My concern.
I still believe Steven is misunderstanding the essence of the question or I am misunderstanding the intent of the system. In organized events like sieges it may very well be the case that guilds are somehow balanced so that neither one is the clear-cut answer for a given scenario. The problem arises in open world conflicts.
If we take the scenario from the first comment (camping a dungeon) and apply my current understanding of the system then there is no question that there will be large guilds which segment themselves into smaller guilds and simultaneously gain the benefits of both a small guild and the numbers advantage of a large guild. If I am understanding the system correctly (I might not be) then the system does not succeed at one of its intended purposes and, in fact, exacerbates the severity of the gap between guild sizes.
I am not saying this isn't solvable. In fact, Intrepid might have either already solved it or you don't think its a problem to begin with. What I am saying is that I have very little context through both the wiki and Steven's answer. If anything, Steven's answer has left me confused as to the intent of the system and fearful that it might not have been well thought out.
If possible, I would like some clarification as to the following:
What is the intent of the large guild/small guild benefit system?
Where can someone expect to receive the benefits of the system? (open world, sieges, etc.)
And finally,
What are Intrepid or Steven's thoughts on potential manipulation of the system? Do they see it as a potential problem, is it not a concern, or am I just misinterpreting the system?
4
Comments
Another, smaller, deterrent is guild politics. Huge guilds will most likely already have some form of hierarchy within their ranks, so people at lower lvls will be getting way less resources/gear/etc. Leveling up guilds and getting skills (or bonuses or whatever) will most likely require quite a lot of work. And those at the top of the hierarchy will most likely be the ones who work the most (which is why they're at the top). So the overall guild leadership will prioritize the sub-guilds with highest lvls of progress, which will create an even bigger disparity between the members.
So in the end you'll have a snowball that turns into an avalanche, where only the ones at the top reap the biggest rewards (or even any). And the remaining hundreds of people are barely getting by. This, in turn, lets any opposing small guild pretty much destroy all those sub-guilds in pvp, because they'd have a much better power distribution and concentration per member. The elite sub-guilds can't be in all places at all times, so the overall huge guild will lose out in more places if they go down the "several small guilds" route.
Imo those are the biggest counters to the potential meta. And they don't even consider any design decisions in terms of guild bonuses and their differences between small and big guilds.
Also, if castles give other bonuses outside of just money and a flying mount - all those hundreds of people would miss out on those bonuses, because only one 40-man guild would be benefiting. Which goes back to the political deterrent.
Now none of this means that no one can succeed with a bunch of small guilds in an alliance, but I do think Intrepid can counter that meta through some good and balanced design, on top of the default reasons I laid out.
You are right in assuming Margaret had the right idea of what my intent was. Basically we know guild size is a max of 300, and if a guild chooses to not go down the upgrade path of size and instead choose skills, that the guild size then will be a maximum of 30-50. I don't believe all skills will be useful to take, some like health regeneration will likely exist so let's assume guild size of 40. I personally think a guild size maximum of 300 is far too high considering a concurrent server size of 8-10k players.
That means if an alliance can be at most 4 guilds that means a minimum and maximum player count of 120 and 1200. If we assume 10k concurrent players that means one alliance can bring 12% of the concurrent server population to bear at any time (assuming all are online of course which is very unlikely). But what can they actually do with these numbers?
We know the PvP maximum is estimated to be sieges of 250 vs 250 players, and hopefully in the future 500 vs 500. As someone who has played Lineage 2 sieges let me tell you 250 vs 250 is very large and most likely enough for any scenario, 500 vs 500 will not be something I personally consider desirable but let's give it the benefit of doubt.
Let's assume we're talking about hardccore guilds here since they are the one who will really drive the servers and compete in the high tier contents. What is the actual usefulness of a hardcore guild of 300 people? I would argue there isn't any with a max side size of 500. You aren't bringing 300 people to bear in one side of a siege, you might have allies, or alternate guilds with you to bring to fill out the remaining 200 slots, there might be a citizen node siege in which case I assume you are not allowed to pick participants, it's probably automated and based on levels. We also know raids won't require anywhere near 300 players on any side. At this point the usefulness of a 300 guild is very hard to justify.
Therefore the question was asked "How do you plan to balance small guilds vs large guilds? Won't the meta be an alliance of smaller guilds with lots of skills?". If the maximum amount of players you would need in any given conflict never exceeds 500 (again I very much doubt the 500v500) what's to stop you from having say, 40-50 players in each guild with maxed out skills ending up as an elite force of 160-200 players? How often would they need outside assistance? The only time I can think of would be during castle sieges, in which cause they would need at least 250 players or at most 500. I doubt castle sieges will be locked to only defending alliance being able to sign up as defenders, which means alliances can work together to defend eachothers castle, at which point the size problem eliminates itself.
My point being that 300 man guilds seem to serve no purpose at all except being a large home for casual players and their alt characters. In fact, it seems the most efficient way will be to do what I implied, make smaller guilds with more skills to min-max the game.
I was hoping to spark a discussion on guild sizes, 300 being far too much in my opinion and therefore hopefully come to some sort of balance between small elite guilds and larger guilds. Because at this time it seems smaller elite size guilds don't really carry any downsides to them, unless there are things I have not accounted for or mechanics not yet discussed.
His thoughts - at least at the time - were that managing multiple smaller guilds was significantly harder than managing one larger guild. If your guilds leaderahipnhas the ability to manage 4 smaller guilds instead of one larger guild, then the guild deserves the added benefit.
@Hartassen thank you very much for asking the question because I feel like the topic is rather important.
I generally agree that, at least on paper right now, larger guilds seem to serve no purpose if you possess the logistical means to operate a group of smaller guilds.
As to NiKr's responses: I had not considered friendly fire being a potential deterrent. That in itself might go a long way. As for gear, I have seen pretty organized groups of players before despite reaching relatively large sizes. I would also expect members within those guilds to effectively equip themselves which doesn't necessarily lead to gear disparity, though it could depending on how difficult gear acquisition is. Ashes is more focused on long-term goals and that probably extends to gear acquisition in some regard. Eventually, however, you could probably assume all players within most guilds would have top-end gear.
Guild politics will certainly play a role in the longevity and stability of guilds. Its likely no guild will rule forever just purely based on that. I also doubt the benefits derived from owning a castle would deter any guild from making a splinter guild if they are PvP focused (which would likely be the case if they owned one of the castles).
Assuming Steven's thoughts on the subject are the same as Noaani's recollection, I suppose that's fair enough. My initial thought at that point would be that the bonuses in general were kind of silly and redundant, but if you factor in friendly fire as an actual danger you are always running an inherent risk at breaking up the group into smaller segments. Do I think its enough to make people think twice? Probably not, but it is at least a tangible downside.
There's only so many mobs in the world that provide you with the proper materials for crafting. You'd need to hold down a location 24/7 for, probably, several weeks just to ensure that you have enough of those particular mats for your entire huge guild. And doing that requires a ton of resources and time. And if you spend too much in one place - other guilds will farm up other mats that you might need for smth else.
In other words, just as you said, you'd gotta be very good at logistics to execute the scheme correctly. And Intrepid could always just distribute the required mats across the world in such a way that a single huge guild just can't logistic their way out of spreading themselves super thin. And at that point and small local guild can put up a fight against them, so for the huge guild it'd become a slow death by a thousand cuts.
It's quite easy nowadays to do google docs with full spreadsheets and tabs for each guild in an alliance. It takes some time to manage it of course but it's not difficult at all. I would even argue that it's easier to maintain and manage multiple smaller guilds with it's own leadership of guild leaders and officers turned into a larger council than to sit with 1 leader a few officers and 290 members below them.
If we're allowed to have some kind of guild icon next to our name or the actual name pop up when targeting friendly fire becomes much less of an issue.
Sieges will show icons for who's a defender or attacker, same should be said for any organized event. As for maintaining clarity in open world pvp there's also guild wars which should show relevant tags for any guild you're at war with making it easier to distinguish between friend/foe.
This is also a good point which further reinforces the idea that small hardcore guilds will operate with much larger hitting power than a larger unorganized guild. Most people who make up a zerg guild or alliance are not hardcore people and they do not possess good gear most of the time
Before this last dev stream, I thought the guild passives were going to be things like extra stats (health, damage, etc), but it seems this won't be the case.
I'm thinking about a passive that will give your guild/alliance the ability to take a castle (so you must have a small guild with that passive in your big alliance and the small guild needs a big guild, since they won't be able to take a castle on their own).
the passives could also be pve related. things like "ignore x% of the boss defense". so a big guild without this passive won't do a lot of damage to the boss, so they might take hours to kill it and they will need a small guild with the passives to dps the boss, while the big guild defends them in PVP.
so basically, the big guilds will focus on fighting players, while the small guilds In the same alliance will focus on pve or the event's mechanics.
I can think of a few ideas to prevent dungeon camping, but it seems to me that camping/controlling specific areas, dungeons, monuments, etc. is intended, so that's why they aren't currently trying to find solutions. Ashes is reminding me a lot of Rust, which makes me excited, but zergs ruined that game for a lot of people.
Since this issue can be tied with zergs using their numbers to control areas of interest, why not make the Guild passive skills' power inversely proportional to Guild size? That would also would create an interesting meta of smaller Guilds having the best buffs. Maybe it would even discourage people from playing in giant Guilds due to the impact passive skills would have in small scale PvP/PvE when zerg members don't have their numbers.
Searching for "friendly fire" in the wiki yields no results, so another idea to try to discourage zergs from splitting into smaller Guilds on the same Alliance to get better passive skills is to enable friendly fire during open world PvP and Caravans against anyone who is not in the same Guild. In other words, Alliances won't prevent players in different Guilds from accidentally damaging each other during open world PvP and Caravans.
Even harsher would be to enable friendly fire during open world PvP and Caravans against anyone who is not in the same 40-man Raid Group. In other words, being in the same Guild won't prevent people in different Raid Groups from accidentally damaging each other during open world PvP and Caravans.
These ideas still don't solve the issue though, zergs can simply create 8 smaller guilds (or another arbitrary number) and make Raid Groups with the best 5 players from each guild and still use their numbers and strong Guild passive skills, but hey, at least you're making it a nuisance to split zergs into smaller Guilds.
These ideas would only apply to open world PvP and Caravans, therefore Castle Sieges, Node Sieges, Node Wars, Guilds Wars, Alliance Wars (?), etc. wouldn't be affected, so zergs would still be able to use their numbers in those activities.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to how much Steven cares about zergs potentially ruining the game. It seems to me that he doesn't worry too much about zergs, but after playing a few sandbox games, they worry me a lot. If I can't beat them, I'll just join them; the issue is that many people will just quit the server (or the game altogether) if zergs are the meta in every activity, so that's why finding ways to nerf zergs to hell in some activities might be necessary and good enough.
it will be hard, if not impossible to camp dungeon entrances 24/7 because of how corruption works. what might happen is people camping access to a rare resource that doesn't spawn very often...and in that case, half of the server will go to that spot to try and get that resource and corruption rules still apply.
This is the aspect that makes it harder. If you are running the over all guild and you need 4 guild leaders for the sub guilds, that means you need to find 4 people that are good enough as leaders, respected by the members of their guild, yet are more than willing to fall in line at all times behind the larger guild.
That isn't easy. Finding just one such person would be a near impossible task.
I did not ask this question. But as for how to "fix" dungeon camping. The simple answer is; we don't need to.
If you don't like a guild camping a dungeon entrance and stopping anyone else from coming in by going red on them you can try to kill their reds to get rewards. Or more realistically, you and all the other guilds who are refused access to this dungeon group together into the "anti-zerg" and so player friction has driven the server into good and evil, the powerful versus the weak, and created a player driven storyline, a drama to play out for all to participate in or spectate.
It's actually quite easy to find 3 other players to lead the subguilds, you simply take them from your officers you would normally have in the main guild. If you can't, then there was no reason for you to be a guild of 300 players anyway if you're going to be leading it solo.
Cool, if you do this, you will fairly quickly (well, a few months later) realize why it is quite hard to run multiple smaller guilds in comparison to one larger guild.
The skills an officer needs and the skills a guild leader needs are actually quite different.
I mean, exactly this kind of thing was the main source of early drama in Archeage.
Having played in multiple large alliances of several hundred people in Lineage 2 consisting of large guilds split into several and some other smaller guilds I do know what it's like. Yes it can create drama and cause fractures and splits, but that's part of the player driven content.
I also know that the vast majority of players who are in these large guilds are people nobody remembers. Just like Nikr said, there exists a few individuals in each large guild that make up the elite force. They're always the highest level, with the best possible gear and they form the core of any guild.
Yeah, all of that stuff you are talking about here, that's my point.
That is the thing that balances people running larger guilds vs setting up many smaller guilds. Sure, there are some in game benefits to be had with smaller guilds, but there are some larger picture things that make it really hard.
Some people will pull it off, without a doubt. Those people and their guild deserve that bonus.