Cost of creating a guild

[MrJeanDoudou]

Hi,

Is there any reason why the cost of creating a guild is so high? After putting just over a hundred hours into the game, I'm still far from being able to pay the required 25k essence. I did pay to unlock the greed option for mastermind though, but even then, I wouldn't expect that creating a guild would be so pricey. And if you were to create a guild thanks to premium essence, the cost would amount to a few dollars below 35. That sounds way too expensive.

What's your reasoning behind this? Did you want players to regroup into fewer, larger guilds instead of creating a lot of tiny ones? Is the cost of creating a guild expected to drop with full release?

Love the game by the way, I'm excited to see it hopefully blow up in popularity later this year!

[AutoAttackGames]

Thanks for the feedback, and glad you're enjoying the game.

The price is intentionally expensive to encourage players to join existing guilds. We really want to avoid having tons of low member guilds and encourage a smaller number of powerhouse guilds. There are a lot of guilds out there looking for new members.

We're also continuing to evaluate prices (especially during early access) and are open to feedback.

-Jules

[Hal]

As it stands now we already have way too many guilds and nothing to do with them. I have 12 members in my guild (no new members in sight) with 2 members playing their games (at least partially) for the guild war last weekend. I think we ended on the 20th place. With a group of 4 players regularly playing on saturday you would end up in the Top 10 every single week. But I think nobody really bothers. To get this going guilds would need to get cooler rewards than simply "advanced guild progress".

[AutoAttackGames]

Originally posted by Hal:

As it stands now we already have way too many guilds and nothing to do with them. I have 12 members in my guild (no new members in sight) with 2 members playing their games (at least partially) for the guild war last weekend. I think we ended on the 20th place. With a group of 4 players regularly playing on saturday you would end up in the Top 10 every single week. But I think nobody really bothers. To get this going guilds would need to get cooler rewards than simply "advanced guild progress".

There are 30-person guilds with 10+ players playing during Guild Wars, so it's going to be hard for a 12-person guild be in the top 10. That's intended.

I see players write every day in Global Chat asking for guilds to join. The problem right now is that it's hard to pair players and guilds.

In an upcoming patch, we plan to reduce the price of joining a guild, reduce/remove the limit on applying to guilds, and make it easier for players to find guilds. That should help a lot.

Also, once we full launch the game this year, there will be a big influx of new players looking for guilds.

The reward for advancing your guild progress is getting (1) a Guild Emblem at level 9, and (2) Premium Essence at levels 10, 11, etc. This gets you and your guild mates skins for free. Some players (mostly in larger guilds) have used guilds to get many skins.

We have some upcoming improvements to guilds that should help :)

[Hal]

Originally posted by AutoAttackGames:

There are 30-person guilds with 10+ players playing during Guild Wars, so it's going to be hard for a 12-person guild be in the top 10. That's intended.

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Last Guild War you could have been top 10 with 110 VP. That means you need either 4 players playing separately or 3 players playing together to end up in top 10. Pretty much any guild interested in climbing top 10 could get there. Personally I can't seem to motivate anyone to do so, which led me to ignore this event more and more.

[AutoAttackGames]

Originally posted by Hal:

Originally posted by AutoAttackGames:

There are 30-person guilds with 10+ players playing during Guild Wars, so it's going to be hard for a 12-person guild be in the top 10. That's intended.

Please correct me if I'm wrong:
Last Guild War you could have been top 10 with 110 VP. That means you need either 4 players playing separately or 3 players playing together to end up in top 10. Pretty much any guild interested in climbing top 10 could get there. Personally I can't seem to motivate anyone to do so, which led me to ignore this event more and more.

Point taken. We're planning to do the following, which will help make Guild Wars more appealing:

1. Make guilds level faster up to 9.
2. Increase the % essence bonus you get from Guild Contribution. This way the bonus +10 Guild Contribution per win you get during Guilds Wars (for +20 in total) will be worth more.

Is there anything else you would suggest to make playing during Guild Wars more attractive / easier to motivate guild members to play? Open to ideas.

[Hal]

To answer the question we should first ask a question:
Are guilds the correct tool?

Guilds are successfully used in MMORPGs where some of the content is traditionally locked behind powerful bosses. If you want a well managed raid group you more or less end up with a guild. I think Guild Wars in those games are a concept to ensure end game content and with rivalries with other guilds some motivation for more grind.

Let's look at other games, as I am pretty sure it is a game most of your team and I share some insight in I will take League of Legends as example. In League we started out some years ago with the concept of ranked teams. This was later dropped, I guess this was because it was hard to bring the same members together regularly and teams were regularly disbanded and build newly in low ELO if some losses were racked up. It was replaced by a Flex Queue. Another community building tool were clubs. Those too were scrapped last year, mainly because we have much better community building tools in third party applications like Discord. The LTD2 chat isn't too great for that either, specially for guilds and their 2 to 4 members per guild online at the same time. Discussing build patterns for the weekly challenge with pictures, voice chat etc., this is all done better within third party tools. So when it comes to community building, I think it is better done outside the game.

Right now I feel like it leaves us with few fun parts of the guilds like the customizable titles and guild icons. I don't know if it justifies the amount of work you had to put and likely have to put in this in the future (all code needs maintenance after all).

Another point in the guild wars is that they simply feel lackluster. We have a 4 hour event in which we can contribute with up to 4 wins. With about 30 minutes per game and ideally a 50% win rate this becomes an attendancy check. It is likely even worse if people get online to play the event. If you get 4 wins in a row the game practically tells you "congratulations, you can log off now". Nobody will stay in queue to deny other guilds their wins. Now we might get into top 10. We earn some guild contribution for this, which means the GXP bar fills up a bit quicker. Yes, we get some premium essence over time this way, but overall it doesn't feel like we really got something out of this. Again, look at LoL. The Clash tournaments give capsules filled with the most useless ♥♥♥♥, the 150th emote and the 200th icon. It still feels better.
For guild wars you could try to scrap the guild xp gain and give contributing players of the top 10 guilds a card drop, rarity increasing with contribution. Maybe also scrap the contribution limit.
I just don't think the proposed changes make a difference. Salzbergwerk is a level 4 guild with 12 of 15 members and when it comes to activity I could comfortably kick another 3 to 4 members out. We won't run out of space anytime soon.

[AutoAttackGames]

Appreciate the honestly and agree with a lot of your feedback. We have a larger vision for how Guilds can be really fun; however, as you said, there are more important things to work on (agree with you there). Given that, we can only make smaller scale number adjustments. While those won't fix all the problems, they will help some, and we believe that's much better than abandoning the feature.

For now, just think of Guilds as:
1. An extra name tag
2. An in-game emblem
3. Free essence via Guild Contribution
4. Eventually, free Premium Essence for skins

A better guild chat system and a significant overhaul to Guild Wars could come a lot further in the future.

[Hartschteiler]

tl/dr
A system to fix issues created by the issue to create issues that are created by the issue.

Edit : *Cat

[Auregon]

Originally posted by MrJeanDoudou:

Hi,

Is there any reason why the cost of creating a guild is so high? After putting just over a hundred hours into the game, I'm still far from being able to pay the required 25k essence. I did pay to unlock the greed option for mastermind though, but even then, I wouldn't expect that creating a guild would be so pricey. And if you were to create a guild thanks to premium essence, the cost would amount to a few dollars below 35. That sounds way too expensive.

What's your reasoning behind this? Did you want players to regroup into fewer, larger guilds instead of creating a lot of tiny ones? Is the cost of creating a guild expected to drop with full release?

Love the game by the way, I'm excited to see it hopefully blow up in popularity later this year!

As someone who's stuck with the game since alpha I personally like that it's so expensive. I believe the goal is for more experienced players to create and maintain the guilds as they are dedicated to the game, it's also a plus for newer players as guild members can help new players and to form a guild you need TONS of playtime. Theres a sense of pride for making your own guild and there's not an over abundance of guilds with inactive players.

If there's a mod reading this my recommendation would be to have a feature allowing guild leaders a recruiting feature along with having something for new players to open themselves up for recruitment. Along with that A feature to go head to head with other guilds in like a tournament style would also be awesome.