Curse

Bast · Jan 01, 2006, 04:00 AM // 04:00

I am fully unlocked and have been at the faction cap for months now, but a lot of guys in my guild aren't unlocked, which really limits what builds we can play. I would like to be able to kick them the useless faction I earn to get them unlocked faster so we can play more varied strategies, so I suggest that Faction be tradeable much like currency is now.

Manic Smile · Jan 01, 2006, 04:55 AM // 04:55

screams abuse

awesome sauce · Jan 01, 2006, 06:18 AM // 06:18

Trading faction=even more noobs in organized groups.

Amok · Jan 01, 2006, 07:19 AM // 07:19

so your friends would be able to unlock skills/items with faction that you earned and they didn't, this is a terrible idea and would bring so many more inexperienced players into groups. i hope they don't make it easier to unlock things because PvP is overpopulated with retards already.

007Bistromath · Jan 11, 2006, 01:33 PM // 13:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amok

i hope they don't make it easier to unlock things because PvP is overpopulated with retards already.

Right, and restricting them to stuff which sucks by making it harder for them to advance will solve the problem. (Caution: contains traces of sarcasm!)

I think this idea is great, but I agree that it needs tweaking. I would not want faction to be just another type of currency. For one thing, we've already got enough types of that, and for another, adding something as universally available as faction to the list would wind up further devaluing all the types of currency in the game. Personally, I don't care about player economies in this game, because I think it'd be better off if the PvE portion were totally optional and not given any bennies, but I know that most of the people who threw their money at this thing don't feel the same way. Making faction a part of the regular economy would screw things way up.

I think a better way of handling it would be to make it only transferrable between guildies. Obviously, it needs to be tougher to swap in and out of guilds first. The 100g currently required clearly wouldn't cut it. I don't know exactly how to curb this, but it definitely needs to be some kind of hard stop/delay rather than any kind of money transfer. Furthermore, I don't think a straight p2p transfer would suit the needs of either the guilds or the devs for this purpose. The core of my ideas about faction exchange is that each guild would have a faction bank maintained by its senior members, and I have several other mechanics in mind which build off that premise.

The most common use of such a thing would probably be providing signing bonuses to new members. But what to do about leeches? With a bank, this isn't so much of an issue. If somebody cuts and runs, or just doesn't contribute enough to the organization, authorized officers (after a vote, I hope) would be able to retroactively revoke this bonus, as well as any other withdrawals from the bank that person has made. To make sure this carries a sting, if a player's lifetime earned/spent faction don't match after this punishment, the most recent thing(s) they bought with it are also revoked, and if they run out, their "wages" get garnished. It sounds harsh, but remeber that I'm suggesting a guild only be able to take back as much as the person has withdrawn from the bank. Fair is fair. A similar mechanic, in reverse, could be used by guilds who choose to keep up the bank with membership dues rather than donation, though this obviously wouldn't affect anybody's skills or items.

Many guilds will want to reward their valuable players (or maybe just their friends) with free stuff above and beyond the signing bonus. This will particularly be the case in Guild Wars, since it allows the players who have demonstrated themselves to be the most adept to grow faster. It can be a little tough to know how important a person really is to your team in other games, so such rewards require guesswork, and guilds end up just giving stuff away. Not the case here; there are obviously winners and losers, and ways to rate people over time. Rather than a direct withdrawal system which introduces risk to the guild when it takes any form useful to its members, regular rewards from the bank would match the faction a player earns on their own. Each victory/flawless/consecutive reward the player earns would be increased from the bank by an amount commensurate with their status as dictated by the officers. By the option of the officers this bonus would be restricted to and/or increased in team matches; I think a good way of accomplishing this is applying a multiplier to this bonus for each other member of your guild on your team in a given round.

There are many reasons why a guild might want to unlock specific things for their members. Maybe they'd like to try a QZ team, but nobody currently in the guild likes being a ranger very much. Maybe they've got a shortage of monks. Maybe they've got a particularly efficient necro build that they want their members to use in some kind of life steal spike team. Maybe they just want their members to be uniformed in some sense, 'cuz uniforms are cool. Guild banks could include an option to make certain skills or equipment available freely or at discount to their members. This would be particularly useful if Anet ever implements any kind of guild rewards. (i.e. superior and/or better-looking equipment, special and/or unique skills) If a guild's trademark is that all their members wear this funky green hat that Anet let them design because they were #X in Y tournament, and that their senior members wear a funkier blue hat they got in some kind of holiday event, said hats (or whatever) could be bought by donation to, or given by withdrawal from, these banks.

Hell Marauder · Jan 11, 2006, 02:47 PM // 14:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by awesome sauce

Trading faction=even more noobs in organized groups.

Well, every game needs noobs. If there were no noobs coming, the game will die and so will all of your uber elite guilds in GW.

Instead of transferring among guildies, I would much prefer it tradable to fame, at the ratio of 1000:1. This is in consideration that most pvers and small guilds play casual pvp only, mostly in RA and TA. And factions are useless to them as they already unlock everything by playing the game. At very high ratio of conversion, you also avoid devaluing fames earned in large organized pvp. I'm sure someone must have suggested this before, but I bring up just to make it heard again.

007Bistromath · Jan 11, 2006, 02:52 PM // 14:52

Well, at the very least, that would make it so fame means something other than "I waste my life grinding IWAY!" But eventually even that would become crap you're accumulating for no reason at all. In fact, if you ask me, it starts off as that, since the only reason fame could ever conceivably matter to me is if I were trying to get into one of those idiotic guilds that requires you to have a certain rank to enter, and why on earth would I want to do that anyway? I don't want to be in a club with a bunch of people who wasted their lives grinding IWAY. In the end, the only way to make any of these numbers useful in any respect to a more experienced player is to allow them to make other peoples' numbers bigger, too.