Max players per guilds

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.

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Comments

Ludullu

Guilds exist outside of the game, not inside it. This would change nothing, except for making it marginally harder to not kill your outside-of-the-game mates during huge pvp.

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.

Githal

Guild exist in game, not outside. There are a lot guild specific content like castles, some guild owned nodes.
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.

Githal

And for example the PVP zone the caravans provide are not that huge as for you to flank the enemy with non guild group, You may still flank them but may turn out that you are not in the pvp zone and be flagged by the corruption. Or the other thing is you dont know when and where your caravan will be ambushed, this means that in most of the cases the other group that has to flank the enemy may be in the wrong direction, and will require a lot of time in order to flank the enemy, and in this time the enemy can just merge in the caravan defenders flanks.

Ludullu

Githal wrote: »

Guild exist in game, not outside. There are a lot guild specific content like castles, some guild owned nodes.
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.

Alliances don't own castles or nodes or anything else, and raids are limited to 40 people, so even in the current system those 1200 people would not be getting the benefits that 40 people would be.

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.

Githal wrote: »

And for example the PVP zone the caravans provide are not that huge as for you to flank the enemy with non guild group, You may still flank them but may turn out that you are not in the pvp zone and be flagged by the corruption. Or the other thing is you dont know when and where your caravan will be ambushed, this means that in most of the cases the other group that has to flank the enemy may be in the wrong direction, and will require a lot of time in order to flank the enemy, and in this time the enemy can just merge in the caravan defenders flanks.

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.

Githal

NiKr wrote: »

Alliances don't own castles or nodes or anything else.

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)

Ludullu

Githal wrote: »

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.

Your OP talks about big alliances and not just big guilds. But even if we consider guilds, the only direct benefit to guild members from a castle is its taxes. Those taxes can be distributed outside of the castle-holding guild because Ashes will have free trade, so it doesn't matter whether it's one person who owns the castle or 300.

Githal wrote: »

benefits of alliance (from the official AOC wiki):
1. Guild leaders will be able to pool resources into a guild alliance bank.

Like I said, trading stuff is free so this doesn't matter and will be done outside of any guild-alliance relationships within megaguilds.

Githal wrote: »

2. There will be alliance specific quest lines

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.

Githal wrote: »

3. Alliance members will share a common chat channel.

Discord

Githal wrote: »

4. Alliances will have affiliations and gear that can be attained.

Same as point 2

Githal wrote: »

5. Guilds may enter into trade agreements.

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.

Githal wrote: »

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.

Same as point 5. +Discord.

Githal wrote: »

7. Ashes of Creation may have specific content that revolves around Alliances.

Point 2.

Githal wrote: »

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)

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.

Nerror

One thing to note is that guilds are per character, not per account.

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.

Ludullu

Nerror wrote: »

So unless Intrepid changes course and make guilds account-based (which I very much hope for), 300 really isn't that many.

I'm all for "all chars are separate guildies" for exactly the reasons you pointed out. A 300-member that only has 100 actives should be in a much shittier place than a 300-member full active guild.

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.

Mag7spy

If you want things to feel better for smaller guilds you need to advocate for different tiers of wars/pvp and content given towards them. IT 50v50 content and 250v250 content.

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.

Tyranthraxus

The limits won't last, as-is - they can't last.

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.

Mag7spy

Tyranthraxus wrote: »

The limits won't last, as-is - they can't last.

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.

Githal

Tyranthraxus wrote: »

The limits won't last, as-is - they can't last.

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.

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.

Aszkalon

Vegeta !! How many Players should have a Guild have as Maximum ??

Over Nine Thous~AAAAAANNNNNNND !!!!!!!

Depraved

Githal wrote: »

Guild exist in game, not outside. There are a lot guild specific content like castles, some guild owned nodes.
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.

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.

Dygz

We'll have to test the original design first.

Githal

Depraved wrote: »

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?

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)

Noaani

It seems to me the OP is still missing the issue.

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.

Githal

Noaani wrote: »

It seems to me the OP is still missing the issue.

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.

daveywavey

Githal wrote: »

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).

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.

Githal

daveywavey wrote: »

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.

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