Curse

Loomy · May 15, 2006, 11:59 PM // 23:59

Assume the few top alliances are close to 10 guilds with close to 100 people per guild.

If this is true, then the rest of us in smaller unaffiliated guilds have literally no chance of ever impacting town ownership in Factions. We would have to leave our small guilds and join large conglomerates to have a chance.

As such, do you think guild alliances should be changed? Changed to contain any number of guilds, with the limit on players in the alliance being 1000?

With such a change there may be more competition for town control as more alliances become competitive.

Discuss.

Side topic to consider.

There is another fatal flaw with the alliance system. The only rewards for having a successful alliance are PVE rewards. Elite mission control, cheaper merchants, fireworks. As such, PVP players and guilds largely do not care about town control.

Thus the goal of having PVP and PVE players compete side by side for town control fails, as only the PVE players care to compete in the numbers required to control towns. As such, it is the PVE game types that are used to generate the faction which is used to control towns.

Solutions? The impact of the "alliance" battles on town control could be increased, making PVP play more important for town control. But this on its own would not draw PVP players to alliance battle more, as the rewards for doing so would not have changed.

Jagflame · May 16, 2006, 01:00 AM // 01:00

This is actually a pretty good idea. But there would definitly be bugs to work out. For one, if twenty guilds allied then it would make sense for each to have a 50 person limit, correct? But what if some had over 50 and some had under 50? Who would say who got the last few people? It would hardly be fair for some guilds to have more members than others in this kind of situation, but at the same time it would hardly be fair to force them to kick some of their members in order to stay in the alliance.

B§x¿44¶»1@$ · May 16, 2006, 01:09 AM // 01:09

Quite frankly, I think ANet saw it coming.

The know that there are huge groups of players that have like 10 guilds (XoO for instance) and that alliance would only make it easier for these to absorb everything around them.

I personally would be in favor of a challenge system, where you challenge the controlling guild to a game, and after 1 hour, everyone who has challenged the guild will fight in like, one huge arena with a guild team, and the winning team takes the town. Thusly, basing it on skill, and not on who has the most goobs faction farming.

jsockel · May 16, 2006, 04:22 AM // 04:22

As a member of a small, tightly-knit PvE guild that is quite proud of its identity, I completely agree. I do wish that alliances could be any number of guilds, with a cap of 1000 ppl. There are plenty of guilds that consist of 1-3 ppl, simply because ppl like the individuality of their own guild.

The trouble with guilds like this is that an alliance composed of these types of guilds would likely be smaller than a single guild in a giant town-controlling alliance.

As to distributing 'slots,' I see that there would be a technical issue to work out. E.g., GUILDS are capped at 100, and Alliances capped at 10 guilds, so it's easy to see that the max number of members in an alliance is 1000. For guilds that are growing, it's tougher to see how to disallow them to add members. However, just like the guild ceiling, the alliance could have a ceiling of 1000. My guild is not one to recruit all over the place. Our invitations are few and far between, and I'm willing to be that there are plenty of other guilds of a similar mindset. That said, it would definitely be nice to have a larger common pool of people to draw from for missions and PvP teams (right now it's the Friends list, which is a bit haphhazard).

We have asked Anet for quite a bit of changes lately, and while I'm all for this, we need to think about how highly this ranks on the list of changes. Another consideration is whether alliances will persist into other chapters, which makes it more of an ongoing concern rather than simply a 'Factions' issue.

Aeon221 · May 16, 2006, 05:09 AM // 05:09

Guild storage. Hello? Add this, and watch me buy myself a guild just so that I can have a nice big storage box all to me onesies. Then I can join my alliance and talk to my guildies on alliance chat with no repercussions.

Maybe a tad unbalancing?

Loomy · May 16, 2006, 09:29 PM // 21:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by jsockel

I see that there would be a technical issue to work out.

One thing at a time, lets talk about the concept rather than the implementation

Quote:

Guild storage. Hello? Add this, and watch me buy myself a guild just so that I can have a nice big storage box

My reply to that is "so what?". I don't care if you do that or not. It'll cost everyone who does this another sigil, some gold, and however many hundreds of thousands of gold it'll cost just to buy the storage IF and WHEN it's added. If you want to do that on an individual basis, go ahead, enjoy yourself

dansamy · May 16, 2006, 11:33 PM // 23:33

I think Arenanet may be trying to nudge players into their vision of what guilds should be: a large group of like-minded individuals. Is that fair or right of them to encourage (not-so-subtly either) merging your small guild into a large powerhouse in order to reap the benefits? *shrugs* Personally, I think there are far too many 3 person guilds. At the same time, I felt quite lost going from a guild of 15 into the very large atmosphere of XoO. Quite a bit of culture shock for me.

I'd like a happy medium somewhere in there, but I don't know what that happy medium can or should be.