Improving the Guild Scene

[HeavyPetter]

ahh I see what you're saying, but it would make the ruling guild very easy to beat knowing what type of pokes they'll use. I'm afraid no one would want to adhere to that standard.

But the challenger would also use that same type... I do not understand how this simple concept can be so hard to grasp

 

[Tecknician]

Side note i just thought of while typing all this out, this is aimed at teck, but would there be a way to create like a PC in the Guild HQ if we do this that has a few options on it to display things like Biggest guild, Most guild points (if we do the "house points" thing), best win/loss ratio ...etc?

I would have to get in tough with thugie about this, but would be possible with xanascript additions. At the very least you should be able to see the database about your own guild and possible make changes to it.

 

[CheckeredZebra]

If we're talking quests, just note I'm really sick of relying only on luck-based ones. To be honest, I don't think guild creation should even require a quest because its more of a bureaucratic/systematic feature than a lore thing.

Also I am interested in making non-PvP guilds "competitive" in rank with PvP guilds. Just because one group is focused differently doesn't mean it isn't a great group.

As for my other opinions on guilds, they were in the guild topic Creo made a month ago and also involved a "10 points to Gryffindor" system, but I can't be darned to repost it right now. Maybe later if there is reason to. It involved using those points to customize a guild's perks (leading to more guild diversity).

 

[Stank]

Also I am interested in making non-PvP guilds "competitive" in rank with PvP guilds. Just because one group is focused differently doesn't mean it isn't a great group.

well that right there is the reason we suggested it be a quest based as opposed to wins/time/rep based because it makes it even for all types of players to make a guild...I know i couldn't do it how it is with the current system because idk if i even have 200 wins now after being here for like 4-5 years you know, but i know i could damn sure do a quest. It evens it out for all types whether it be a PVP/hunter collector/ or someone who just wants a pretty <tag> after their name. they all can do itall they have to do is show the dedication needed to Join the "union" so to speak and bam, you can make your guild.

honestly id love to see more things that are done on Pdex done in game such as editing Pokemon moves.

 

[Stank]

Side note i just thought of while typing all this out, this is aimed at teck, but would there be a way to create like a PC in the Guild HQ if we do this that has a few options on it to display things like Biggest guild, Most guild points (if we do the "house points" thing), best win/loss ratio ...etc?

I would have to get in tough with thugie about this, but would be possible with xanascript additions. At the very least you should be able to see the database about your own guild and possible make changes to it.

I figured as much, but i just think that would be an awesome way to create competitiveness among guilds by being able to see how they are ranked and all that jazz...thanks for getting back to me btw

 

[CheckeredZebra]

well that right there is the reason we suggested it be a quest based as opposed to wins/time/rep based because it makes it even for all types of players to make a guild...

Note for whoever:
There's a tl;dr at the bottom. If you skip my wall of text, read the tl;dr, and then feel like commenting in-depth after that, please read the long version before you do.

I'm more referring to after the guild is created. There's a lot of talk over battling for towns, but a really awesome collecting or social guild isn't going to focus on that area. However, their activity and dedication to what they ARE doing might be as excellent as another guild's battle abilities. I'm suggesting there be other things that buff up the "during guild" features for those types of players. A creation quest won't really do that. It would remove a money sink in favor of potential tedium; as you and I know, it is very hard to make a quest in PWO not rely on blind luck/something tedious.

I suggested in the earlier guild topic that there be tasks that involve several different types of play (social, PvP, and collection) that would give a guild "points" which they then could invest in guild perks. It'd work like an exclusive, secondary currency, and would also double as a way to rank guilds. (So the guild best at battling guild might not be the top guild overall if the social guild outdoes them in activity and upgrades its stuff more.)

Spoiler: Optional Ideas

Some of these quests could favor smaller, newer guilds over larger ones, and vice versa, in order to maintain fair gaps between new and older guilds. It'd be difficult to "Have 50% of your guild put a mareep in their first slot by the end of the day" if you're huge. It'd also be difficult to "Have your guild kill a crapton of tentacool" if there are only 4 members in the entire guild. Regardless, every task encourages socialization within each group, which hurts guilds that aren't able to interact within themselves (which probably means something isn't going right or they're a very casual guild anyway).
The kicker is this question: Is this part possible? Probably not, but until then guilds could compete in manual events that happen once a month.

Perks could include a guild base for social players, collection perks could give rare items for getting specific pokemon (novelty pokeballs or evo stones)/slight control over routes (better catch rates), etc. Battle perks I'd have to think of more but it would probably involve a boosted exp bonus and the chance to take over a town. Each member would get points individually, and could deposit points for a specific goal that would effect the entire guild. In other words, each guild would be diverse and would change based on its own members.

(Think of it as kickstarter but within your own guild. Each milestone you hit gets you a new perk, and you could choose which area to focus in. So if you and your members want access to more guild facilities, people could deposit points into a "social" perk. (Base upgrades could be done with separate maps and a warping NPC). To keep active perks from being overpowered, have them "decay" over time. So you'd have to repair a base, set out bait to retain a higher rare encounter rate, and train to keep your exp gain efficient.)

Misc stuff:
-Decaying perks keeps once-great guilds from being sold ingame or otherwise used as an easy way to get bonuses.
-It also lets old, powerful guilds lose to newer guilds if the newer ones try hard enough or the older ones get too confident.
- It also means each member needs to count if you want your guild to be competitive.
- Battling can gain a guild points through a betting/wagering system.
-Each guild could get an "active" perk once enough points are invested. Social guilds would have the ability to bypass NPCs and would have cheaper items the better their bases were. Collectors would have an increased rate to find rare items; also, rare pokedex entries. Battlers would have an easier time training through increased exp.
-THE top guild could get access to something very rare or awesome, such as its own private island or a temporary boost/UO pokemon for as long as it is in the #1 spot.

Spoiler: TooLongDidntRead

In a nutshell:
Separate "upgrade" branches for battle, collection, and social guilds. Upgrades are made through points guild has collected from doing small tasks that involve different factors of PWO gameplay. Upgrades will decay over time and need to be updated.

 

[EcoWOLFrb]

To be clear, with the quest stank and I came up with you would still have to pay to create a guild. It also can be done along side any other competitive addition outside of the preliminary screening process for possible guild creators. It would simply serve to replace the current requirements of 200 wins ect ect blah blah blah.

 

[Stank]

WALL OF TEXT

OH DEAR GOD TOO MUCH TEXT nah just kidding but anyway I am actually working on an Idea to pitch about how guilds work that would work out ways to keep guilds that are PVP orientated with guilds that are Socially orientated (hunter/collector guilds etc.) let me figure out how to make it go from brain to computer screen and ill post it up

 

[Stank]

Ok so this is an idea ive been working on for a few days now, but I wanted to get it fully worked out before i posted it...
As of right now we have way more "Social" guilds (hunters, collectors, people who just want a <tag>) than we do PVP guilds... There is absolutely no way one of these Social guilds could possible compete with a PVP guild in anything other than like a competition of size which IMO size does not determine guild strength.
SO I got to thinking, how can me make it so that the 2 types of guilds are equal? (this will use examples of a lot of suggested edits to the guild scene including house points, taking over citys, and guild "perks" which in MY post refers to things guilds do to earn house points)
My solution is simple make 2 different types of guilds one that is much more relaxed and fun but wouldn't get to engage in the battle aspects of the guild scene such as taking over citys, but would have other advantages that PVP guilds would not.
I haven't been able to come up with many details on this suggestion yet, other than separation of guilds (kind of like how we did back in the day when GM split in to GM and GE).

If we go with the quest idea Eco and I suggested, then we we could have you go through the quest and once you arrive at the Guild HQ to turn the quest in you are given a choice of 2 types PVP or Social, if you pick PVP, its a higher flat out fee, and will give you the PVP var. If you pick Social, its a lower fee and gives you the Social var. when you go to playerdex to set up the guild, it will instead of checking for wins, rep, and time played, it will just search for either the PVP or Social variable.

Now as far as the actual "perks" that separate the 2 types of guilds, well I haven't quite worked that out yet.

while I work that out please feel free to toss out some ideas of things that should be exclusive to each type of guild.

 

[CynicalChoco]

Why does there have to be requirements to make a guild? The game should encourage people to want to play together because that is what keeps people playing in the long run. Over the last few days I've been thinking of a number of areas in the game that really need a complete overhaul and one of the areas in it was guilds, these ideas I'll post here are ones some here will have heard me say before as they are not new but I still think that they are worth looking at.

First, the current requirements (even Lee's altereed ones) are waaaay absurd, for a multiplayer game they are extremely disouraging for players and leave it so only the elite can ever hope to make one. Now I cannot say I have experience in many MMOs but the one I do has very simple guild creation requirements - the name must be unique and you ahve to pay a fee of ~2 silver. That is all. What I have suggested is a tiered system for guilds based on size (reading some of the posts here then this could also factor in types of guild which I may talk about more later) where you have:

- Small guild (max 5 players) - 100 pokedollars / 100 pokedollars per week upkeep

- Medium guild (max 10 players) - 1000 pokedollars / 1000 pokedollars per week upkeep

- Large guild (max 20 players) - 10,000 pokedollars / 10,000 pokedollars per week upkeep

- Huge guild (max 50 players) - 20,000 pokedollars / 20,000 pokedollars per week upkeep

- World guild (max 100 players) - 50,000 pokedollars / 50,000 pokedollars per week upkeep

From what I can see the only reason for the current costs is that it is one of the few large money sinks in the game which is a fair enough reason but the execution is flawed, the scale limits it to few people and it is an uncommon removal of money due to this. Having tiered guilds means that you can have a consistant flow of money leaving the game that is useful in balancing the economy while also not alienating the newwer or less hardcore players that maybe just want to play with friends, it also allows bigger, more serious guilds to exist which could be factored into the talk people have been having with battles and what not.

I had thought over 2 ways of bringing in things such as this - one was that this would be decided when you create a guild (so you would specify what type of guild it was PvP, collecting, etc) and the other is similar to what Zeb was talking about with 'upgrades' for guilds, something that is actually similar to how Guild Wars 2 does it. On a simple level a guild could build up money and use that to purchase a guild house (1 mil pokedollars) and then they would pay upkeep on the house added to what the guild upkeep was already, so:

Large Guild (10k upkeep) + Guild House (50k upkeep) = 60k upkeep per week.

This could be expanded into other areas such as purchasing a guild 'Battle Contract' that allows guilds to PvP other guilds for control of areas, 'Guild Outfits' which would be guild specific skins, etc, etc for whatever is feasable for PWO. You could have one time purchases such as 'Sugar Cubes' that give increased chances to find rare pokemon for 24 hours or 'Repellent' that woudl reduce the chances of seeing common pokemon for 24 hours. I'm not going to more into other areas as people have already covered them more than I could, but I will mention a few ideas that I do like:

- Guilds with control over a city get cheaper travel from there (so Saffron could give 10% off train tickets in that station)
- Bases can be upgraded with item sellers, Pokecentres, storage PCs and more
- Upkeep costs would come from the guild bank which all members can contribute to
- Benefits to individual players that do NOT effect PvP, no one should gain combat bonuses from being in a guild otherwise things like that can snowball and put one guild in an unbeatable position.
- Guild 'Home' Regions which leads on to
- Guild Rankings - and this is just something I'm thinking of as I write this - but there is currenlty nothing at the Elite 4 so we add a PvP arena for guilsd (this would not replace the elite 4 area but be an extention to it) where there are regional rankings and worldwide rankings. Guilds based in Kanto have a leaderboard as do ones from Johto and then one with everyone, a guild leader can challenge another guild leader for a guild fight, say 5v5 all kill format. The winners would gain points, the losers would lose them as standard and other players could bet on he outcome of the fights while being able to access an area of the same map to watch the fight and chat.

After loosing my train of thought with that last point I'll leave it with a summation. The idea comes down to not restricting guilds to the elite and offering real benefits to players based on effort (something that I may explore more in later posts on topics such as Character Progression, Hunting and RNG and Discouraging Botters).

 

[CynicalChoco]

SO I got to thinking, how can me make it so that the 2 types of guilds are equal? (this will use examples of a lot of suggested edits to the guild scene including house points, taking over citys, and guild "perks" which in MY post refers to things guilds do to earn house points)
My solution is simple make 2 different types of guilds one that is much more relaxed and fun but wouldn't get to engage in the battle aspects of the guild scene such as taking over citys, but would have other advantages that PVP guilds would not.
I haven't been able to come up with many details on this suggestion yet, other than separation of guilds (kind of like how we did back in the day when GM split in to GM and GE).

Just don't make them complete, have upgrades that are open to all guilds but are not mandatory so they can choose what they want to do. If you have every option 'off' on creation and they can unlock each thing they want when they have the requisits. Also neutral upgrades, such as guild houses, that every type may want would ahve to not be tied to anything PvP or collection specific, so guild houses could not be only open to only the guild that controls the town (or have both types of house, area houses and open-to-unlock ones).

I'll use the Guild Wars example, every guild has the same unlocks - big, small, PvP, PvE, solo, etc - all have the same and each is unlocked by points that are earned by doing things ingame. The upgrades are split into Politics, Art of War, Economy and Architecture and each area unlocks things in that area but they do not conflict with ones in other areas, you only have to focus on the parts you prefer.

EDIT - it still feels wierd browsing and posting on this forum style.

 

[Stank]

that's not quite what I meant I was referring to the House points suggestion things that can be done to accumulate points

Examples:
Defeating a member of a rival Guild
completing your Pokedex
etc

I didn't mean like unlockable objects.

 

[CynicalChoco]

I quoted too much, I was talking about keeping them equal, my bad.

 

[CheckeredZebra]

In my vision, each guild can choose perks, these perks need upkeep, guilds maintain upkeep through points through tasks/quests. All guilds can compete with eachother in all areas (though obviously some will be better than others at certain things), the best guild gets an ultimate prize of some sort which keeps competition at the top tight. All guild creation requirements are the same; however, the more you upgrade the more costly the guild is and the more active its members will have to be. (to keep up with the costs.)

This lets casual guilds remain casual/low maintenance, and yet allows active "other" guilds to compete with active "battling" guilds. Aside from the fact that it would take forever to implement, I don't see any downsides to this and personally would have a blast with it.

Spoiler: @choco

Big, non-hardcore guilds, imo, should not have a higher fee just because they have more people. However, they -will- get less perks than a medium-sized active guild, so it would balance out. You would still have highly competitive guilds who want the guild achievements or even a possible "ultimate boost" you could get from being #1. However, if some guys want to have a spammy, low-requirement guild, why not let them? It won't hurt anything, especially with more competitive guilds running around. I feel "more players = more cost" is an unnecessary layer that complicates things, especially if you want upgrades to need maintenance. I say let the casual get nothing extra and let the mighty get glory if that's what they want with their guild.

20 people might just want to hang out and have no urge to take over saffron, but in your system they would go broke quickly because they don't fit into the "competitive guild only" environment such a system would create.

It'd be easier to have a flat fee for guild creation with 0 perks costing $0 in maintenance. More perks = more cost and THEN those costs would be based on size.

Spoiler: @Stank

Now as far as the actual "perks" that separate the 2 types of guilds, well I haven't quite worked that out yet.

Already brought up several similar ideas for 3 separate types of guilds.
EDIT: forgot to put them here.
Social: Ability to bypass battle-ready NPCs. Upgrades affect guild base (bigger base, more discounts within their own base).
Collector: Ability to find rare items easier/rare pdex data or legend battle opportunities. Upgrades affect catch rate/rewards can be rare evo items.
Battle: More exp. Upgrades include town control bonuses (more money extortion/discounts) or slight boosts in guild defenses (so a loss would make them "lose control" slightly less than normal, though not enough to be OP.)

 

[Stank]

Now as far as the actual "perks" that separate the 2 types of guilds, well I haven't quite worked that out yet.

Already brought up several similar ideas for 3 separate types of guilds.
EDIT: forgot to put them here.
Social: Ability to bypass battle-ready NPCs. Upgrades affect guild base (bigger base, more discounts within their own base).
Collector: Ability to find rare items easier/rare pdex data or legend battle opportunities. Upgrades affect catch rate/rewards can be rare evo items.
Battle: More exp. Upgrades include town control bonuses (more money extortion/discounts) or slight boosts in guild defenses (so a loss would make them "lose control" slightly less than normal, though not enough to be OP.)

I know, thats why i decided to post up the idea i was working on since you had already touched base on it. but i dont like the idea of like a big top guild prize idea because saying I have the best guild in the game is prize enough, thats all the points thing in my example really amounts up to its simply a way to say we are the best

 

[JD001]

So many good ideas *_*

I can't even come up with anything to say! I'm glad to see that the idea of Guild Controlled towns has a lot of support as well as the Guild HQ portion of it as well. Just one thing though, since not all towns have gyms and not all guilds are battle based, the cities like New Bark Town, Cherrygrove, Silver, etc can be controlled by the social based guilds. It's probably been mentioned or thought of before but in my brief skimming of this topic I didn't see it so I thought I might as well mention it. The whole point system is something I am all for, it's implementation might be difficult (I have no idea about scripting and whatnot) but I think it'd definitely be worth it if the Guild Control was added to PWO. The Rivals idea, holy crap! I had thought about having rivals but that idea of requesting/accepting a personal rival guild and having the points to go with it, THAT'S AWESOME! You guys are such good idea thinkers c:

 

[mad30]

when i first join, guilds couldnt be created because it was broken. this allowed the good guilds have really high standards on who to join while lesser guilds had to build there way up. people wanted to be in the good guilds because of the stigma associated, one such guild i eventually joined, ego killers had all the gms for example, few other guilds, eleets and legendary masters had the good battlers. joining these guilds had a very strong meaning to them, if you joined ek you was seen as being a good community member where as eleets u was seen as being a good battler, ect.

about the time guilds were fixed was about the same time many of these older guilds started to decline in activity. new people started joining not caring about the previous guilds and what they stood for and created their own and simply wanted a lot of members, damage goods was among the first of these successful "friend guilds" followed by the s.exy people and so on.

point to this is a part of why the high cost of making a guild was implemented, to stop just anyone from being able to make a guild but rather to make sure guilds had a following first. this didnt help the cometitive guilds however because then people wanting to make guilds cared even less about standards and more about obtaining pokemoney to get a guild

anything that makes it harder to create a guild i do not believe is the way, what i think that needs to be the foucs is maintaining a guild. i remember one of crenels idea was for a guild tax, a tax determined by the number of members in the guild, so inactive players would hurt a guild while larger guilds could afford these inactive players as long as they recruited richer players.

while i have been away from the guild scene for awhile, that is something i noticed went missing for awhile, recruitment. people got butthurt about stealing guild members and what not everyone decided to play nicey nice and stop doing it. stealing guild members brought about a lot of emotion towards other guilds and something that i think would actually start achieving some competition between guilds, through a community asspect and not via a game asspect. then add in features like my town control suggestion and crenels guild tax to make stealing members have a benefit. with something like crenels tax suggestion it affects all guilds the same regardless of if they are a competitive guild or one of those other guilds.