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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Max players per guilds
Githal
Member
There are a lot discussions about weather 1200 players (4 guild alliances x 300 players each) will make the gameplay experience of small guilds bad. And in each discussion the answer is: "it will affect small guilds in 1 way or another in negative way".
So why not make the max players per guild for example 100, and you can ally with 2 other guilds for a total of 300 players?
This way the already formed communities of 300 players can still play together and the difference between small guilds 3x50 vs largest guilds 3x100 wont be that big and can be neutralized in some extend with guild perks when you choose not to go for large guild.
Pros:
1. small guilds wont have negative experience coz of zergs.
2. 1200 players allied means that its possible for all zones of influence to be ruled by a single large guild and small guilds wont be able to accomplish much. With 300 players alliances you will see much more strategic non aggression pacts or conflicts, more communication between different alliances, more dynamic changes happening between the players, and a place for smaller guilds since - if a 300 vs 300 players guilds fight, a 50-150 players guild can affect the outcome and will be viable, and if its 1200 vs 1200, 100 players wont be able to change anything.
3. On node/castle sieges with 1200 players you wont require any outside help since you will have all the players you can get. And if your alliance is 300 players its highly possible that you wont get 250 players for a castle siege since some part of your players wont be on in the particular time. This means you will have to rely on some other smaller guilds that will actively change the fate of the battle. They can act as mercenaries for example where the larger guild pay them in order for them to fight for them.
4. In open world PvP 300 vs 150 seems more balanced than 1200 vs 150. Yes there are all the things like small gorilla warfare or taking their resources, but in reality they will just zerg you and if you try to attack their caravans or resources they can just siege your nodes or outnumber you. And yes the map is big and 1 large guild cant be everywhere , but you can have 1 big guild in every ZOI so small guilds still wont have place.
5. The players skill wont matter when its zerg vs zerg fight. The smaller the scales the more the skill matters.
6. players in small community are much closer to each other than large communities. For example 500 humans living in a village will know and talk with every other of the 499 players there. And in a 1 million citizens cities you dont even know the person living next door in your flat. Its very philosophical but in short in large communities the bond between humans break and you start to search for your personal isolated space there.
Cons:
There may be already formed alliances of more than 300 players (especially with streamers) and this will break their group.
But since we are PRE ALPHA 2. those groups should be pretty small amount. + 1200 group in the first place will be formed in order to dominate the ZOI/castle. They are not created by the idea of cloze relationship between the members.
So why not make the max players per guild for example 100, and you can ally with 2 other guilds for a total of 300 players?
This way the already formed communities of 300 players can still play together and the difference between small guilds 3x50 vs largest guilds 3x100 wont be that big and can be neutralized in some extend with guild perks when you choose not to go for large guild.
Pros:
1. small guilds wont have negative experience coz of zergs.
2. 1200 players allied means that its possible for all zones of influence to be ruled by a single large guild and small guilds wont be able to accomplish much. With 300 players alliances you will see much more strategic non aggression pacts or conflicts, more communication between different alliances, more dynamic changes happening between the players, and a place for smaller guilds since - if a 300 vs 300 players guilds fight, a 50-150 players guild can affect the outcome and will be viable, and if its 1200 vs 1200, 100 players wont be able to change anything.
3. On node/castle sieges with 1200 players you wont require any outside help since you will have all the players you can get. And if your alliance is 300 players its highly possible that you wont get 250 players for a castle siege since some part of your players wont be on in the particular time. This means you will have to rely on some other smaller guilds that will actively change the fate of the battle. They can act as mercenaries for example where the larger guild pay them in order for them to fight for them.
4. In open world PvP 300 vs 150 seems more balanced than 1200 vs 150. Yes there are all the things like small gorilla warfare or taking their resources, but in reality they will just zerg you and if you try to attack their caravans or resources they can just siege your nodes or outnumber you. And yes the map is big and 1 large guild cant be everywhere , but you can have 1 big guild in every ZOI so small guilds still wont have place.
5. The players skill wont matter when its zerg vs zerg fight. The smaller the scales the more the skill matters.
6. players in small community are much closer to each other than large communities. For example 500 humans living in a village will know and talk with every other of the 499 players there. And in a 1 million citizens cities you dont even know the person living next door in your flat. Its very philosophical but in short in large communities the bond between humans break and you start to search for your personal isolated space there.
Cons:
There may be already formed alliances of more than 300 players (especially with streamers) and this will break their group.
But since we are PRE ALPHA 2. those groups should be pretty small amount. + 1200 group in the first place will be formed in order to dominate the ZOI/castle. They are not created by the idea of cloze relationship between the members.
0
Comments
But even that complication is easily resolved by simply telling your sub-guilds to move around different parts of the location, rather than all in one.
When you fight a world boss when only 1 of the guilds get the loot, this will break the whole purpose of outside of game guilds that you speak of.
But the megaguilds still exist and will continue existing, because they exist outside of the game and manage all loot distribution and other benefits through non-in-game means.
Again, this has nothing to do with guilds and alliances. Caravans are their own thing and anyone and everyone can join them at whichever time. And there won't be a moment where you don't know whether you're in a caravan, because the game will ask you whether you want to join it or not.
Guilds own castles, and can have guild hall in nodes. So having 100 max players per guild as i said instead 300 will greatly affect this.
benefits of alliance (from the official AOC wiki):
1. Guild leaders will be able to pool resources into a guild alliance bank.
2. There will be alliance specific quest lines
3. Alliance members will share a common chat channel.
4. Alliances will have affiliations and gear that can be attained.
5. Guilds may enter into trade agreements.
6. Due to the lack of fast travel, guilds will need to plan to have people in the right place at the right time. Alliances with other guilds will help enable that.
7. Ashes of Creation may have specific content that revolves around Alliances.
Also there are guild wars that flag players for combat. This again will have affect from the 300 to 100 max players per guild. (since it bypasses corruption and some outside of game guild players wont be able to participate, and the wars are object oriented so any other outside of guild help wont count to the goal)
Like I said, trading stuff is free so this doesn't matter and will be done outside of any guild-alliance relationships within megaguilds.
This works just fine if instead of "4 guilds of 300" alliances it's "4 sets of 300-member alliances", because all of them would still get the quests.
Discord
Same as point 2
We got no info on what this entails, but I think this is meant to be a cross-guild thing, rather than a megaguild with subguilds thing, so this is not relevant to this discussion.
Same as point 5. +Discord.
Point 2.
We know jackshit about wars. We don't know how they'll work. We don't know what they'll cost. We don't know how the declaration will work or what it'll cost. None of that (and more) is known.
But it'd be logical to assume that a 300-member guild would have huge costs related to guild decs if they wanted to go to war with a 50-member guild. And if this is somehow not a logical thing to Intrepid - I sure as fuck will yell it at them several hundred times, until it is.
Splitting up the megaguild into smaller sub-guilds could instead lead to a situation where it's easier for them to declare war on smaller guilds, while the megaguild suffers barely any penalties for being in 12 guilds rather than 4.
We also know that picking Growth instead of Power, when it comes to Guild specialization, would mean that your members don't have some passives that give them direct combat benefits (or maybe not direct, but simply more beneficial that just "you got 300 people"). And that means that any megaguild that decides to just have zergs will have way weaker zergs than any small well-coordinated guild with full power passives.
I wish they per account, but I think Steven wants spying to be a thing, without having to buy a second account. I disagree with that whole notion, but currently that is what it is.
So since guilds are per character, we are going to end up with guilds full with 300 characters, but potentially with much fewer actual players because people will want their alts in the guild. Some guilds will probably put in place a "1 character per main guild" policy, and then make several guilds for alts, and perhaps put those alt guilds in the alliance.
So unless Intrepid changes course and make guilds account-based (which I very much hope for), 300 really isn't that many.
Any spy worth their salt will use a second account anyway. Characters on the same account don't share a guild, but they do share housing and citizenship, which defeats the whole spying thing from the same account in any convincing manner.
And yes, in my experience people always want their alts in the same guild, so only the hardcore guilds go for pure actives. And those hardcores would always go for the optimal ability builds, so 300 members would never even be a choice.
The same applies to alliances. If alliance is just full of alts - that's a shitty alliance. So, in other words, the human nature would make any zergy alliance way worse than it might seem to be, which is as huge plus for smaller guilds and just wars in general.
Generally as long as things are capped (like castle siege) you should be able to lead or do the content. If for any reason major pvp is uncappped there is nothing you can do you auto lose to zergs. And your only choice is to work with a zerg and let some other group get the objective you work for until you can have enough pull for them to give it to you.
So long story shot, guild cap doesn't do anything but make things a little more difficult.
You'd reach a point where your guild leader/officers are having to boot people EVERY WEEK, to make room for new members. Every MMO with member-limits I've seen so far with large guilds runs out of space, eventually. It results in regular reviews for kicking. 300 is *so* incredibly small for a guild. Active guilds will eventually be booting people for not having logged for 2 weeks.
It CAN'T last.
Depends on the guild, people will always be cycled since every game had guild limits.
Generally I will have someone make a casual guild under our name and cycle people towards that guild if they are more on the casual side, or if they will be gone for a long period of time.
2 weeks is long period to not log... Ofc they will get kicked from any normal active guild for not logging in 2 weeks. Also 300 players is not small. its big group. When you take in account that party groups are with 8 players (according to AOC is to allow group to contain 1 of each class/role). With 300 players you can have 37 groups x8. Thats not little at all
ofc I have been in guilds where you can announce to the guild leader beforehand that you will be absent for x amount of time, and usually this solves the issue with kicking.
Over Nine Thous~AAAAAANNNNNNND !!!!!!!
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
that's not an issue at all. and when you fight world bosses, you take turns looting. that's it.
anyways, why are the smaller guilds more important? is there any good reason for that?
you could even argue that small guilds of 100 will make the game less fun for other people. those people could be guilds of 20- 30 players.
big guilds cant even fight for control vs other big guilds because then smaller guilds will get bored and quit since they didn't get a slice of the cake.
creating and managing those big guilds take time an effort. years of effort. and somehow smaller guilds of people who didn't make that effort suddenly have to be more important?
also, what nikr said, guilds will just keep splitting their members into several guilds. instead of doing 300 x 4, they will do 150 x 8, etc.
I believe from nothing i said would result in favoring the small guilds over big guilds. Like i didnt say things like: "small guilds of 50 should be able to kill 300 players in a fight". All i said is that large guilds should not be that large so small guilds dont feel oppressed that much ( they still will, but in smaller degree)
NiKr correctly said that guilds exist outside of games. I know this to be true due to being in a guild, yet not currently playing any MMORPG's at all.
I also know of a number of multi-game guilds that count numbers in 5 figures.
Reducing the number of players in a guild, and number of guilds in an alliance may well prevent organic guild and alliance formation in game getting to a massive scale, but there is nothing stopping two alliances agreeing to work together, and nothing stopping a large pre-existing guild from just running 4 alliances on a server as their in game presence.
Basically, it seems to me that the OP is only looking at half of the picture.
Well you are right.... but as you said i am looking half the picture, and that is exactly the HALF YOU DONT SEE.
It doesnt matter if half the things guild/alliance does can be accomplished with outside of guild means as alliance between alliances. As long as there is at least 1 in game content, with rewards that are worth fighting for, that will put the 2 alliances to confront each other - then this alliance wont exist. I mean they may start as 4 alliances x 300 players each (100 x 3 guilds per each), but then only 100 of those people will occupy Castle,
Guild leaders will be able to pool resources into a guild alliance bank. This means that out of the 1200 players only 300 at once will benefit from this, so there will be fight within the 4 alliances that are playing together for resources (in which alliance bank the resources should go? since the resources will deplete on the map if over farmed).
We still dont know all the contents available, so what i say is that outside of game alliance can exist for pretty short time, because they will constantly be put to choose between the well of their own alliances or the 3 other they play together with.
I think I see the issue here. The rest of us are expecting these large guilds to be run well and have good organisation. I hope that helps explain the majority of answers you've had here.
It doesnt matter how well they are run. Why? Pretty simple.. The players joining such massive zerg guilds are always with the same mentality - to dominate server/area/content. They dont join to be the "third wheel" and to help someone else achieve things while they get nothing. And as long as the system allows them to dominate the server together as 1200 players - they will play together.
If they have to choose to take things themselves or to give them to their other out of game alliance - you can guess what they will choose. And this will instantly put the alliances in fight between each other, and it doesnt even matter how well they are run.
In a mobile game called LOTR: rise to war... yes yes It is mobile game, and has nothing in common with AOC.
So in this game at first the guilds were x 100 players each, but you join a server choosing faction and each faction at first had 500 players max. So you would see massive 5 x guilds joining same faction in same server to dominate everything. But then the devs reduced the faction cap to around 170 (was floating so not exact number) (and this was maybe the only good update they made - everything other was money grab updates so i dont recommend the game
And the funny part was that those 500 players were spamming all chats after the update that reduce players per faction - that "They have made 499 friends and now have to split and for the devs to reconsider the update so they can keep domination servers". So dont take everything people say at heart, usually they are just driven by their own interests.
I think you're underestimating the teamwork that goes into being a part of one of these large guilds. The organisation for this is already underway, and the game is years from release. Players from the same external-guild that are in different in-game guilds/alliances will still be playing as if they're in the same external-guild, cos as NiKr said, it's all going to be arranged in the full group, rather than the individual sections.
And sure, there will probably be a fair bit of friendly light-hearted rivalry between the different sections, but ultimately they're all going to be pushing the same goal. And sometimes, that goal involves someone else getting something good, and you have to wait your turn. You accept that when you join the large guild, as the price of success.
And this all depends on the way AOC make the game, If they make it as you say - today Alliance 1 get this reward, tomorrow Alliance 2 take it and ect. then yes it will be same as you say.
When 1 guild occupies a castle infinity amount of time (until sieged), or have guild hall in metropolis. Or have to fight for some guild reward that will be once per 6 months reward for example ( so for alliance 2 to take it will have to wait 6 months, alliance 4 will have to wait 2 years). Or there can be many more examples. In this case you will see fights between those alliances, not rivalry. You will also see backstabbing, bad blood and ect
Again, this goes back to the "being run well with good organisation" thing.
If I'm in Guild 2, and I've just spent the last few weeks helping Guild 1 to siege and take a Castle, then you can be damn sure that I'm going to do my very best to keep Guild 1 in that Castle. Even though I'm in Guild 2, and it's Guild 1 with the Castle, it's still my Castle.
Will there be large guilds that break apart due to in-fighting? Sure, of course there will be. But, there will also be large guilds that stick together and thrive by working as a team. It's these ones that have the better organisation with reward structures in place to encourage teamwork.
Because... This is also incorrect.
You are only looking at this from the perspective of people joining the guild in game - you are ignoring the fact that these guilds already exist today and are already playing games together.
A guild is essentially a concept, a state of mind between people. The in game guild sctructures are designed to facilitate that - they do not and can not control it.
An out of game alliance can exist for decades, and span multiple games.
My guild has 30 core members, with about that many again as periphery members.
I'm not arguing against you because I have anything to gain, I'm arguing against you because you are wrong.
And this is the reason why you talk like this. Because you are part of small 30 players core members group. In 1200 players groups things dont stand the same way. 30 players may become close enough to help eachother even if this means you yourself will get less.
With 1200 players for how many of the players you will be ready to sacrifice your own well being? 30?50?200?. The point is that 80%+ of the players wont care about you. They will be with the guild because they have interest in being with thw guild. And the moment this interest is gone, they will split
You keep talking about organisation, but you cant organise people who dont care about the group, no matter how good the leader is.
And yes they will care about the group as long as being with the group is bringing them benefits
It for sure wont be "your castle", because when all the players from guild 1 rip the benefits of being the owner of the castle, while you dont, you will see what i mean.
And yes if you play together like guild 1 + guild 2 doing same content together, then yes, you can claim in such situations that "its your castle as well"
BUT... How many of the game content will be for 600 players on 1 side? The answer is NONE. This means when guild 1 form a group of 8 players they all will have the benefits of the castle. And when guild 2 form group of 8...then none will have the benefits
And before you start talking about merged groups of 4 players from guild 1 +4 from guild 2...this wont be a thing because in big groups you wont see friendship ideals. And strong players will form group with other strong players only
Even in my small guild, while our members all care about each other to differing degrees, the expectation is still that every member of the guild is better off in the guild than out of it. I don't expect anyone to be sacrificing anything - we are a guild, not a cult.
With a larger guild, this becomes even more true. If you are in a guild of 1000 players, if you decide to leave, the first thing that happens is you lose access to that 1000 players to participate in content with - or at least most of them.
The second thing that happens (often, though not always), is that you have that 1000 player guild now quite happy to attack and kill you on sight.
Your final statement that people will stay as long as it brings them benefit is the key thing here - there is rarely ever a point where there is more benefit to leaving than staying.